Yes, the "S" word is relevant in this presidential campaign
by digby
I wish this surprised me but it doesn't:
Sexism is weighing down the women running for the Democratic presidential nomination, a new public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos for The Daily Beast reveals.
A full 20 percent of Democratic and independent men who responded to the survey said they agreed with the sentiment that women are “less effective in politics than men.” And while 74 percent of respondents claimed they were personally comfortable with a female president, only 33 percent believed their neighbors would be comfortable with a woman in the Oval Office.
That latter number, explained Mallory Newall, research director at Ipsos, was a strong tell about how gender dynamics were souring voters on certain candidates. Asking respondents how they believe their neighbors feel about an issue is “a classic method to get around people being reluctant to admit to less popular views.”
Other candidates have used this polling technique before. During his 2006 Senate run in Maryland, former RNC chair Michael Steele had his team ask voters if they felt comfortable electing a black man to the post and if they believed their neighbors did as well. While personal comfort measured in the low 70s, only 40 or so percent of voters said they believed their neighbors would be fine with it.
Steele lost his 2006 race. And he sees parallels between what happened to him then and what’s happening to some of the women running for the Democratic nomination now.
“People will lie to you when you ask them about gender and race,” said Steele. “They will not tell you what they really feel about those things.”
The discomfort that voters have with female candidates helps explain one of the persistent undercurrents of the current election. In various hypothetical general election matchups, the male Democratic candidates have consistently done better against President Trump than their female counterparts.
This was largely true in the Ipsos poll as well. Former Vice President Joe Biden bested Trump by a 46-35 percent margin in a hypothetical matchup, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) beat Trump by a margin of 47-35 percent. By contrast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) beat Trump by a 42-36 percent margin and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) beat him by a margin of 41-35 percent.
“I believe that it takes longer for voters to buy into a woman’s candidacy then it does a man’s,” said Jen Palmieri, who served as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “That’s one of the reasons you’ve seen men pop early. The women take longer to rise.”
But the gender-related hurdles may go deeper than that. The female candidates running for the Democratic nomination also face a steep hurdle in winning over voters due to fears that their gender will pose significant problems in a general election.
Nearly two out of every five Democratic and independent voters (39 percent) said they believed a female candidate would have a harder time running against Trump than a male candidate would. A chunk of that sentiment appears to be drawn from lingering fear and stress from the 2016 election outcome. A full 76 percent of Democrats, and 53 percent of independents, said they believe gender and sexism played a role in Clinton's defeat.
The findings provide one of the clearest illustrations to date of the difficulties that Warren, Harris, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and others have faced in trying to break through a field led, so far, by white male candidates. At a time when the vast majority of Democratic primary voters say they value a candidate’s ability to beat Trump above all else—and 82 percent of respondents said this was an important attribute to them in the Ipsos poll—female candidates are having to deal with concerns that their sex makes them less electable.
“Talk about learning the wrong lessons,” said Palmieri. “We’ve had two elections since Trump has been either on the ballot or been in office. In one, a woman got 2 million more votes than he did, and in the midterms, women candidates won in historic numbers. So the only evidence that we have shows that having women on the ballot in the Trump era is a good thing.”
“I think Democrats have a lot of trauma about the 2016 outcome and are suspicious that voters have an unease with women candidates,” she added. “But the actual record shows a different story.”
Pointing out that this is a barrier for the woman candidates is not a very popular thing to say in some Democratic circles. And not just when talking to old white guys in Ohio either. Even among the more progressive types, it's often referred to as "playing the sexism card" or worse, an illegitimate evocation of "identity politics."
I certainly think twice about mentioning it --- it's often not worth the argument. But it's obvious to me, and virtually every center-left woman I know, that sexism is not confined to Republicans and it isn't even confined to men. It's so deeply embedded in society that most people don't even recognize it when they see it much less when they assume it themselves.
A woman won the popular vote last time but was, of course, denied the White House anyway, a common problem for high achieving women in the workplace, which explains some of the disillusionment. "Even when we win, we lose" is an experience many women have had in their lives. And to lose to a misogynist barbarian like Trump makes it all the more galling. However, it was the first time a woman stood on the big stage with a male political opponent and it was not something anyone had seen before in American politics. It takes people seeing women in contention for it to feel more normal.
I have written that I thought the first woman president would probably be a Republican. It seemed likely to me that it would have to be a "Nixon goes to China" kind of thing to change this dynamic. But I'm not sure about that. This presidential campaign has a bunch of highly qualified Democratic women competing and it's making it all seem much less ... odd. Clinton's races in 2008 and 2016 broke the ice but she was a known quantity with a unique career and political trajectory --- half new (highly qualified with a political resume in her own right) and half traditional (the wife of a country's former leader) that it didn't model women as competitors in the modern sense. But that's happening now. And whether or not one of the women running today makes it to the top of the ticket, it will be the norm going forward that women will run.
And, at some point, one of them will win. But whoever she is, she will have had to swim against a sexist undertow in her own party as well as the opposition to get there. That is just a fact.
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