The other takeaway from reports all over: IIRC, exit polling shows that 57% of white women voted for the GOP in Virginia. While they were in court trying to take away the right to choose. While they appealed to racist tendencies. While they use hate and fear to scare them. So many use "They're voting against their best interests" to describe poor/working class voters that vote Republican. That phrase more accurately applies to white women that vote Republican and then almost immediately cry about how bad they are. Forget the "white working class" dogma, it's more "The White Whining Class"
Or the WWAC crowd, referenced in Adam Jentleson's “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy”
“The second part [of this book] shows how the modern, post–civil rights Senate began applying the filibuster to a broadening range of bills and issues, and married the old vision of minority rule with new, rigid leadership structures. Under McConnell, this marriage allowed the GOP base of wealthy, white, anti-choice conservatives—a reactionary superminority I call the WWACs—to impose its will on the majority as never before”
The question is why do the suburban women still allow themselves to be susceptible to appeals constructed by reactionary conservatives and so end up voting "against their interests" anyway?
It's not like a lot of suburban moms don't have cashflow problems, even if they're part of a wealthy two-income family with some inherited assets maybe in the background as well.
They do want their daughters to be healthy, able to succeed, become independent, make their own way.
They do know what it's like to struggle, while raising their kids, to come up with money for education, straight from daycare right through college.
Some of them are actually pro-choice, or at least so in the sense of making a distinction between holding personal views and believing that other women have the right to make their own choices.
And yet they will still vote for GOP policymakers who run blatant or subtle bogeyman ads that appeal to the deeply racist and misogynistic attitudes that underpin American history. And yet they'll tolerate near-fascist astroturfing of school board meetings even while voting for candidates of a party that insists it's the Dems who want to control free speech. And yet they'll turn around and elect a guy like Youngkin.
But two weeks after the election they'll be back to complaining about the potholes in the freeway or the fact that their kid's daycare costs an arm and a leg every month.
Meanwhile the GOP think-tanks feed to the op-eds of newspapers a ramped-up focus on the threat of terror in Africa, and the Pentagon and the GOP's congressional liaison staffers trade info on who might want this or that appropriation tweaked to include more money for specialty weapons or satellite camera improvements
:
"fuck your pothole repair and daycare fee problems, dearie, it's a dangerous world and we have real work to do."
I have friends who more than once since the year 2000 have said they voted for a Republican and came to regret it, Twenty-one years and some of them will still 'fess up this or next year to having done it again. Go figure.
