What’s this? White suburban women have switched from Dem to Repub by over 20 points? PJMedia quotes poll results from The Wall Street Journal:
The new survey shows that white women living in suburban areas, who make up 20% of the electorate, now favor Republicans for Congress by 15 percentage points, moving 27 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal’s August poll.
Wat? A twenty-seven point shift? In one month? Why would that be? It’s simple.
Women expect to be protected.
And if you don’t protect them, they’ll go find a new protector.
Why is this? I’ve been working on this question for years, starting in 2008 when I read about George Simmel and women in the public square. How did that square with the notion, advanced by James Bowman, that honor for men is courage, and honor for women is chastity? In other words, don’t call a man a coward, or a woman a whore, if you know what is good for you.
Clearly, more research was needed.
Then in 2014 I read about a German woman’s experience in Berlin in April 1945 when the Russians came in. After being raped a few times she says to herself “Damn it to hell,” and goes and finds the highest-ranking Russian officer commensurate with her God-given talents. She found her a new protector.
Then in 2017 I finally came out and said it, in a piece about sexual harassment. Yeah, women instinctively strut their stuff, I wrote. But “women expect to be protected.” Note that German woman above that discovered in the crucible of war how to save her life with a combination of strutting and protection.
Since that time I have come to believe that the maxim “women expect to be protected” is something that every man and every politician should recite five times before breakfast.
But whatabout the Midterms?
I believe that the abortion issue is related to “women expect to be protected.” If society expects well-born educated women to have “relationships” all through their twenties until they finally execute that merger marriage with a well-born educated man, well, those women expect to be protected from an unwanted child.
That’s the Democrat line on protecting women. And I respect it.
But your average suburban married woman is not worrying about abortion this year. She is worrying about paying $100 for a tank of gasoline; she is worrying about paying for groceries and making the house payments. She is worrying about the kids’ education, what with the COVID school shutdown and the transgender groomers.
I think that most of us can agree that when we say “women expect to be protected” in 2022, it is pretty obvious that inflation and prices trump abortion and Roe v. Wade. By 27 points.
But the lingering question for me is whether white suburban women back in 2020 “expected to be protected” from Trump’s mean tweets.