MAY THE BEST WOMAN WIN
The February before the 2016 election, Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and some of his colleagues tried to measure how threats to traditional masculinity affected male voting behavior.
They polled 694 registered voters in New Jersey about their support for various candidates. Half the respondents were first told that in an increasing number of households, women out-earn men, and they were asked whether that was true in theirs. The researchers expected many men to lie; the point of the question was to get them thinking about shifting gender roles.
Presented with a hypothetical matchup between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, men who weren’t asked about women’s earning power favored Clinton by 16 points, close to Barack Obama’s 2012 margin of victory in the state. Men who got the question about gender and money, however, favored Trump by 8 points. There was no difference between the two groups in the margin of their support for Bernie Sanders versus Trump.
“In essence, the threat of losing the traditional norm of men as breadwinners led men to abandon support for the first major-party female candidate in American history and come out in support of her opponent,” Cassino wrote in an article titled “Emasculation, Conservatism and the 2016 Election.”
There are many explanations for Clinton’s loss, including her campaign’s mistakes, Russian hacking and James Comey’s blundering investigation of her email server. But sexism pretty clearly played a role.
A fair amount of academic research shows that women who seek power on their own behalf — as presidential candidates necessarily do — evoke what one study called “moral outrage.” When Cassino and his colleagues asked another group of voters to describe the candidates in a single word, the one most often attached to Clinton was “b—-h.”
Plenty of women understood intuitively that a misogynist backlash helped Trump win his Electoral College victory. It’s why they poured into the streets the day after he was inaugurated, and why they’ve led the Resistance ever since. It’s why there’s a record gender divide in voting patterns and a record number of Democratic women in the new Congress. And it’s why it’s both thrilling and slightly terrifying that the Democratic presidential field is going to have at least three strong, viable female contenders.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California announced that she’s running, joining Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
America has never before seen a presidential primary in which this many women compete against one another. It could help to normalize female political ambition, allowing the candidates to be individuals rather than archetypes. Real progress is not just being able to vote for a woman, but being able to vote for the best woman.
But if and when the best woman wins, she is going to face off against Trump in yet another battle royal over patriarchy. The Trump presidency has been a brutal, boot-on-the-neck insult to many women, a daily reminder of how far away gender equality remains. There’s an awful possibility to consider: If sexism helped elect him, might it help re-elect him, too?
“I’m actually concerned that the same dynamics of gender-role threat we saw playing out in 2016 could easily repeat themselves in 2020,” Cassino told me. “For one thing, men’s perception that they’re being discriminated against hasn’t decreased. If anything, it’s increased.”
Yet if male resentment has grown in the last two years, so has female anger.
And Trump, though dangerous, is also weak. In a recent survey, 57 percent of registered voters said they planned to vote against him. There’s a phenomenon in business called the “glass cliff,” in which companies in crisis promote women to clean up disasters caused by men. “Only if male leaders have maneuvered an organization into trouble is a switch to a female leader preferred,” said an article in the Harvard Business Review.
We could soon find out if the same is true in politics. Trump could be the man to wreck the country so badly that Americans will be willing to let a woman save it.