I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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First, there will be a Zoom chat tomorrow at 12:30. Since I haven’t had one in a while, it will be a solo affair. Here’s the link. If you have questions of issues you want me to address, please shoot me an email or include them in the chat below.
Part Of The Problem
This is a quick follow-up to my post about why switching from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris is not an ideal option for Democrats. Here’s something that I hadn’t realized about the 2020 election — compared to Hillary Clinton, Biden did worse among white women and much better among white men. From Gallup (bold added).
As Biden increased his level of support among White men in the 2020 election relative to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump gained among White women, which had the effect of further narrowing the gender gap among White voters. In 2016, Trump won White men by 30 points (62% to 32%). That gap narrowed to a 17-point margin for Trump in 2020 (57% to 40%). White women, a group sometimes categorized as swing voters and who broke nearly evenly in 2016 (47% for Trump to 45% for Clinton), favored him in 2020 (53% to 46%).
Woah. I knew Biden had improved among white men, but I hadn’t realized it was a 13-point swing. That’s a pretty significant shift over four years.
There is also this (bold added).
Trump’s stronghold among White men without a four-year college degree loosened somewhat in 2020. While he still won this group by a little more than two-to one (66% to Biden’s 31%), that 35 percentage point gap is notably smaller than the 50-point gap in the 2016 election, when 73% of White men without a college degree supported Trump, compared with 23% who supported Clinton. Meanwhile, White men with a four-year college degree have become increasingly supportive of Democratic candidates, breaking close to evenly in 2016 (47% for Clinton, 44% for Trump) but supporting Biden by a 10-point margin in 2020.
At the same time, Trump’s vote share among White women without a college degree grew slightly between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. In 2016, White, non-college women supported Trump by a margin of 56% to 33%. By 2020, Trump’s vote share rose to 64% among this group compared with 35% supporting Biden. Among white women with a college degree, support for Biden was on par with support for Clinton in 2016 (59%-40% in 2020).
There are several possible explanations for the shift among male voters, but the most obvious is that in 2016, a lot of men were not willing to vote for a woman to be president and cast a ballot for Trump. But in 2020, when Democrats nominated a man for president, they shifted back. I don’t think this is the only explanation — and I’m not sure it can only be chalked up to misogyny —but when you consider the discrepancy between men and women with similar educational backgrounds, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion. (
This gender gap is also evident among Black and Hispanic voters, perhaps most dramatically in 2016 when Clinton did very well among Black and Hispanic women but underperformed among Black and Hispanic men).
All of this is a long way of saying that a) men are the worst and b) considering a) maybe it’s not the best political idea to replace Biden with Harris. (I haven’t even gotten into the fact that Harris is Black, which creates another set of challenges in a country not only founded on male supremacy but also white supremacy).
I hate making this argument because it means abiding by the misogyny of the electorate. But if people are going to argue that 2024 is the most important election ever and Trump must be defeated … they need to reckon with the full implications of suggesting that it’s too risky to go into the general election with Biden as the party’s standard bearer when the most likely replacement for him would be a Black woman.
I tend to think that Harris would beat Trump, but when you look at the numbers from 2016 and 2020, as well as the polling today, it’s a hard case to make.
Awful Alabama
I have an MSNBC piece coming out tonight about the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that said embryos are children, which will likely make IVF treatments illegal in the state. Three Alabama clinics have already announced they are pausing IVF procedures — and considering the legal issues raised by the issue (outlined here by Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern), I’d imagine many others will follow suit.
This is a personal issue to me because my daughter was born via in vitro fertilization (and I wrote about that for MSNBC), but I want to say a word about the politics of this issue: it’s a disaster for Republicans.
Let’s put aside the fact that most Americans support fertility treatments and that only around 2 percent of babies in America are born via IVF. This ruling is yet another reminder of the extreme conservative position on abortion — and how it has the potential to affect more than just reproductive rights but also fertility treatments and contraception. This position, as I probably don’t need to remind you, is deeply unpopular. And any time we are talking about abortion, women’s health, reproductive rights, and, now, IVF, it’s bad for Republicans. For all the sturm and drang over Biden’s age or the “crazy shit” that comes out of the math of Donald Trump, I strongly suspect that abortion is going to be the most consequential issue in the 2024 campaign — and that’s a big part of the reason why I think Joe Biden is probably a good bet to win.
Musical Interlude
Great post, and yes, I wish that my half of the human race wasn't garbage. But here we are.
I also think you are right about the Alabama ruling (and Haley's foot-in-mouth today saying that she believes that unimplanted embryos are persons. Talk about a facepalm) and the dumb things the R's keep saying/doing re Abortion and the halo of other culture war items (contraception, Obergefell, etc that the most right SCOTUS justices seem eager to unravel) it is going to be interesting times indeed
It's spelled "whoa."