The Ghosts of Elections Past,Present,and Future: Gender and Racism in Electoral Politics

We have heard it ad nauseam. The working class are to blame for the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Like the Reagan Democrats that preceded them, the working class—especially those in the Rust Belt and South—failed the Democratic Party and the promise of the election of the first female president in U.S. history. This is not that essay. Instead, I want to turn our attention to white women. Note, I included race (white) and did not include class (poor, working poor, working class, middle class, upper-middle class, wealthy, the 1%).

As a historian, I believe it is simply too shortsighted to scapegoat the working class. I believe it also denies the legacy of racism in the U.S. electoral system. So, as any historian is trained to do, we must look backward before we look forward.

On July 28, 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first woman in U.S. history to be nominated as a presidential candidate on a major party ticket. Regardless of your political affiliation, this was a significant moment in electoral history that will be written into textbooks for generations to come. It was such a big deal that a “Ghost of Elections Past” was bothered day after day as voters visited her grave. Women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony is bured in a picturesque spot in Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains. During the few weeks before and after the presidential primaries, her gravestone was hidden behind “I Voted” ovals of red, white, and blue. I will admit, one part of me experienced a nerdy goose bump moment when I saw the photos of Anthony’s headstone. Yet, the bumps were soon replaced with the reminder that Anthony’s fierce commitment to fighting for the rights of women to have the vote was tarnished by her outrage that newly freed and already free black men would be granted the right to vote under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It reads, the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” According to Anthony,

What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question. (Newman 1999)

Anthony’s ally and constant comrade in the suffrage movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton concurred, “No; I would not trust [them] with all my rights; degraded, oppressed [themselves], [they] would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are” (Stanton, Anthony, and Gage 1882).

While some may be tempted to excuse Anthony and Stanton’s comments as products of their time, this is precisely the problem. Racism is continually justified in our country. Anthony and Stanton went so far as to ally with white southern racists to try to defeat the ratification of the 15th Amendment driving a wedge in the suffrage movement that would plague it well into the twentieth century until the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. This race wedge defined the limits of the women’s movement throughout the twentieth century and continues today.

Enter “Ghosts of Election Present.”

So what happened? White women repeatedly voted against their own self-interest. Let us run some numbers (and note, I come at these like any ordinary American voter, not as a trained social scientist). In 2004, Republican George W. Bush got 55 percent of the white female vote and Democrat John Kerry got 44 percent in what analysts call a “reverse gender gap” (one working in the GOP’s favor) of 11 points. In 2008, Republican John McCain got 53 percent of the white female vote and Democrat Barack Obama got 46 percent—a gap of 7 points. Compared with four years earlier, the reverse gender gap remains but decreased by 4 points. Progress? No. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney got 56 percent of the white female vote compared with President Obama who got just 42 percent. Far from narrowing, the reverse gender gap among white women widened to 14 points (Cassidy 2012).

In 2016, despite the presence of a white woman on the ballot, the gap persisted among white women with a staggering 10-point split. Republican Donald Trump got 53 percent of the white female vote and Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton got 43 percent of the white female vote. As a whole, white women still opted to vote for someone who not only did not look like them, but was also heard by the entire nation (and beyond) admitting to sexually harassing women (Fahrenthold 2016). It certainly runs contrary to the fears of the pre-19th Amendment politicians who worried that women would vote as a bloc. In 1870, when Victoria Woodhull ran for president, the New York Herald claimed, “Mrs. Woodhull may rely on rolling up the heaviest majority ever polled in this or any other nation . . . women always take the part of each other” (Hess 2016). I can only imagine Woodhull, another Ghost of Elections Past, rolling in her grave.

If we apply additional demographic categories to the 2016 voting trends, the intersection of race and class can be seen in even more stark contrast. Among non–college educated (a frequent synonym for working class), white women embraced Trump by handing him 66 percent of their votes, while college-educated white women opted for Clinton but hardly with the same enthusiasm. Clinton earned 51 percent of college-educated white women’s votes—this is a 15-point difference between Trump’s successful wooing of the non–college educated versus Clinton’s college-educated white women. If the projections of the 1870 New York Herald held true, Clinton should have walked away with 100 percent of the college-educated white women’s votes.

Let us compare the 2016 numbers with voter behavior of African American women and Latina voters. Among African American women, non–college educated voters gave an amazing 95 percent of their votes to Clinton with only 3 percent voting for Trump. Among college-educated African American women, the voters shift 3 percent points to the right giving Trump 6 percent and Clinton 92 percent. Among Latinas, the numbers are still overwhelming for Clinton among non–college educated Latinas with Clinton getting 70 percent and Trump getting only a 25 percent, and another small shift rightward among college-educated Latinas with an additional 2 percent going to Trump (Cassidy 2012).

Racism is a critical factor in understanding how women vote. While women as a whole may not vote as “a bloc,” white women do seem to vote as a bloc—a bloc that seeks to protect white dominance. In the words of journalist Clover Hope (2016),

Overwhelmingly, white people voted to preserve whiteness. Institutionally-educated and middle class white people voted to retain their power. The truth is that this is how it’s always been.

So, what is the “Ghost of Elections Future” left to do? White voters (me included), particularly white union members, need to realize, as Clover Hope points out, “The fear is that we continue to live with the knowledge that all along, it was you” (Hope 2016). Organized labor and social justice advocates must take a vigorous intersectional approach to political education. We must break free of socially ascribed and self-imposed silos to educate and organize across racial, gender, and class lines. Otherwise, we will continue to hand over elections to candidates who seek to protect white supremacy and economic inequality.