2.19.19 The Decline of White Women’s Electoral Power?
| The Decline of White Women’s Electoral Power? “White women skewing conservative is a decades-long trend, but their power may be waning,” writes Tina Cassidy in The Boston Globe. Cassidy gives a brief history of women’s suffrage and outlines which parties women have traditionally supported, and argues that white women’s large role in the growth of the conservative movement has been largely underreported. “Two recent studies — one looking at suburban Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s, and another focused on Long Island and upstate New York in the 1970s — describe the trend in detail. Both studies make the case that church committees and Parent Teacher Organizations served as early networks comprised of white mothers who held ‘traditional values’ and who had time to organize,” she writes. White women’s political power is now diminishing, she contends, because of a broader decline in religiosity and other demographic shifts. Citing PRRI research on the topic, Cassidy writes: “The number of evangelicals is decreasing; Southern Baptists lost one million members over the last 10 years. To place that statistic in a broader context, a large study by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that the number of white evangelical Protestants fell from about 23 percent of the US population in 2006 to 17 percent in 2016.” |
| Politico Magazine: The One Trait That Predicts Trump Fever “Chevy Chase’s rejection of Trump in the primary election could be chalked up as liberal Beltway Republicans rejecting Trump. But if we look deeper, we see parallels to Trump’s performance in some very conservative places in Middle America, and the conditions that might have led to both of those places’ rejections of him,” writes Timothy P. Carney in Politico Magazine. Carney argues that locales like Chevy Chase, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., have community institutions that produce strong social cohesion and were therefore better positioned to reject Trumpism. Addressing President Trump’s strong support among white working-class Americans, Carney argues that this label is better seen as a reflection of a social class, rather than a statement of race or income. He quotes another writer, Emma Green, who explained recent PRRI research on the subject: “‘White working-class Americans of all ages,’ writes Emma Green in the Atlantic, citing research by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, ‘were much less likely than their college-educated peers to participate in sports teams, book clubs, or neighborhood associations—55 percent vs. 32 percent said they seldom or never participated in those kinds of activities.’” |
| North Carolina’s 9th District Race Deemed “Unlawful” by Officials Several months after the midterm elections, North Carolina officials are presenting evidence that the outcome in the state’s 9th Congressional District race may have been tainted by fraud. “The evidence will show that a coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme operated during the 2018 general election,” says North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Kim Strach. NPR’s Miles Parks reports: “In the unofficial tally for the 9th District race, Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. But the election has been tainted by allegations that an operative hired by Harris collected and potentially manipulated some vote-by-mail ballots.” Per 2018 PRRI polling, 38 percent of Americans say eligible voters being denied the right to vote is a major problem with the country’s election system. However, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify this as a major issue (56 percent vs. 19 percent). |
| NYC Set to Ban Hair Discrimination “Under new guidelines to be released this week by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, the targeting of people based on their hair or hairstyle, at work, school or in public spaces, will now be considered racial discrimination,” writesStacey Stowe in The New York Times. While the policy applies to everyone, it appears to be designed to protect black New Yorkers, since the change specifically mentions residents’ rights to have “natural hair, treated or untreated hairstyles such as locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, fades, Afros, and/or the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.” The change in law gives new recourse to victims of hair discrimination who have been punished, fired, or demoted, by giving the commission the ability to levy up to 250,000 in fees on defendants, with no cap on damages. |