4 years later, it’s onerous to not really feel an unnerving sense of déjà vu. As soon as once more, the polls present a doubtlessly historic gender hole within the presidential election. Journalists are reporting on all the ladies Trump has turned off. Final I checked, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 13 p.c likelihood of victory, nearly precisely the identical odds he had three weeks earlier than the election in 2016. For America to outlive as a liberal democracy, this time needs to be totally different. Is it?
Longwell, who has carried out round 50 focus teams during the last three years, most of them with girls, believes it’s. “I’ve seen these folks transferring away in actual time,” she says of the members’ relationship to Trump. And “it dropped off a cliff proper round Covid, plus financial downturn, plus George Floyd.”
As Longwell tells it, there have been some Trump voters who turned on him nearly instantly after the election, however many others who continued to assist him regardless of disliking him personally. “They mentioned he was a narcissist, mentioned he was a bully, however in addition they don’t like Democrats, don’t just like the media, don’t belief something, they usually have been hanging in,” she mentioned.
Then Trump’s incompetence got here residence. “As soon as the pandemic hit, as soon as there have been private penalties for his or her lives, there was an absolute shift in how folks talked about Donald Trump,” mentioned Longwell.
She began listening to “a ton of ache” within the focus teams. Most cancers survivors with suppressed immune techniques feared leaving the home as a result of folks of their neighborhood wouldn’t put on masks. “Or they’ve bought younger youngsters that aren’t in class, or any person of their household is furloughed, or they couldn’t go see their father or mother who died,” she mentioned.
Ladies’s job losses because of Covid have been enormously disproportionate; in September alone, round 617,000 girls 16 and over left the work force, almost eight occasions the variety of males. They’ve borne the brunt of closed colleges. As Jessica Grose recently reported in The New York Occasions, the Pandemic Parenting Research, which is monitoring over 100 Indiana moms, has discovered rising marital strife over youngster care.
“Moms blame themselves for these conflicts and really feel liable for decreasing them, together with by leaving the work drive, starting use of antidepressants, or ignoring their very own issues about Covid-19,” mentioned a recent paper drawing on the research’s information. None of this may be separated from the collapse in girls’s assist for Trump.
