The News
Defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris held onto her party’s historic advantage among women in the recent US presidential election, winning 53% to Donald Trump’s 46%, according to a survey of 120,000 voters by The Associated Press.
But Trump nevertheless made gains among female voters, and the prospect of his return to the White House in January is — perhaps inevitably — dividing US women.
SIGNALS
Women have never spoken with one voice
Left-leaning women are struggling to understand how other women could possibly vote for Trump, given his role in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and oftentimes misogynistic rhetoric on the campaign trail. But different women have different ideas about what constitutes “progress” for their gender: Women don’t speak with one voice… They never have, they never will,” a gender studies expert told The New York Times — for example Conservative women’s groups like Moms for Liberty hailed Trump’s reelection as the “liberation of women from the dark days of so-called feminism.” Still, disagreements over the meaning of feminism were not the key dividing line among women: Other issues like cost-of-living pressures mattered much more, NBC News noted.
Split-ticket voters may not be able to have their cake and eat it
Harris sought to make reproductive rights the defining issue of the election, but individual states’ ballot measures to protect abortion won greater support than she did, indicating that people who voted for those protections also voted for Donald Trump, NPR reported. But split-ticket voters can’t have their cake and eat it, a columnist argued in Time: Even if Trump keeps his word on allowing states to set their own policies, the federal government could still restrict abortion in other ways, and state-level bans have a domino effect on health care nationwide. Republicans have moved away from the language of “bans” anyway, and started to describe new restrictions using “chillingly imprecise euphemisms,” meaning Trump could still sign such legislation into law, another columnist noted in The Guardian.