Revenge of the White Working-Class Woman

<But over the past several months, that seemingly rock-solid core has started to fracture—and the fracture has widened dramatically this week for one key reason: Most of the white working class is actually female. And working-class white women now appear to be jumping off the Trump train.

It might be easy to write off blue-collar women as a special interest group, like the 18-25 demographic of some slice of suburbia. But the situation is almost exactly the opposite: If you look at the white working class—Americans without a college degree—the majority, 53 percent, are women. Right now, the numbers suggest that within that group, women’s interests appear to be diverging so quickly from their male counterparts they could stop whatever momentum Trump has left. “The rationale for [Trump’s] candidacy is that he is the champion of the hardworking Americans that the elitists have left behind. But many of those hardworking Americans are women,” says John J. Pitney Jr., an American politics professor at Claremont McKenna College.

Data show that for women in male-dominated fields, like construction and transportation, the rate of sexual harassment of women is significantly higher than in women-dominated fields like education and health services. Jones, the autoworker in Kentucky, says sexual harassment is endemic in her industry and has had an experience that lines up: She’s been sexually harassed by a male coworker in every factory she’s worked in, and at her last job, it was her supervisor harassing her. When she reported him, she says he retaliated and she was essentially forced to quit.

“Trump's recent statements bring up all of the times that I have been touched inappropriately at work or just in public trying to go about my day,” she says. “All those things that are shrugged off as ‘boys will be boys’ will become ACCEPTABLE under Trump.”

Beyond just being put off by Trump and his personality this election, though, white working-class women have different policy concerns in general than white working-class men. While white working-class men in battleground states surveyed by GQRR focus groups reported the economy and jobs as a top factor, white-working class women chose national security and terrorism more often than the economy. And Trump’s approach falters with these women. “They worry that’s he’s so aggressive and macho—and yet uneducated about the world—that he will embroil us in some conflict,” Anna Greenberg, of GQRR, says. >



http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/donald-trump-2016-blue-collar-woman-214356