Republicans Are Demonizing Female Candidates to Win Votes. Don't Let Them.

From ELLE

The 2018 midterms are close upon us, and for Republicans looking to keep control of Congress, the face of Democratic iniquity definitely has a certain...look.

According to a new report by The Hill, Republicans are planning to hold on to their seats by tarring their opponents as “puppets” of more widely known and hated politicians: Specifically, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (old! Corrupt!), Rep. Maxine Waters (crazy! Scary!), and Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (radical! Socialist!). Other popular targets include feminist harpy Kirsten Gillibrand and Trump’s old favorite, Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren. You may have noticed these Democrats all have one major thing in common: they’re all women. And while this strategy may seem ludicrous, especially given that none of these women, on their worst days, could match the ongoing flame-out in the Oval Office, it may not be. If history shows us anything, it’s that this gambit is depressingly likely to work.

In practice, these politicians don’t all exercise the same level of power, and there are male politicians with equal or greater power who have largely been spared. Bernie Sanders is a socialist, but the RNC has yet to send out a mailer comparing him to Stalin, whereas Ocasio-Cortez - who technically hasn’t even been elected yet - is already a “mini-Maduro.” Trump occasionally goes in on Senate Minority Leader “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer,” but he has made a point of designating him Pelosi’s “sidekick” - a soft and powerless accessory to the real, female threat.

Still, framing these women as the evil masterminds behind the Democratic party stands to be effective. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether any particular politician is “bankrolled by Pelosi” (an accusation lobbed at New Jersey House candidate Andy Kim) or “a total puppet” for Maxine Waters (Trump’s line of attack against Ohio insurgent Danny O’Connor). This is less about the power wielded by any specific politician and more about the terrible specter of power wielded by women, generally - a fear that is becoming especially pressing for conservative voters, as we head into an election dominated by an unprecedented number of female candidates.

Some GOP operatives are reportedly nervous about the line of attack, fearing it will provoke backlash: “Republicans need to be careful and smart about the language they use when they’re critical of female opponents,” strategist Doug Haye told The Hill. (One imagines he means “careful” as in “make sure those sexist dogwhistles are barely audible,” not “smart” as in “not sexist.”) For Democrats, lulled by the prophecy of a blue wave, it may seem impossible that the GOP could preserve their grip on power just by making sure white people are scared of Maxine Waters. White people are already scared of Maxine Waters, and that hasn’t made Americans any more likely to give up their healthcare without a fight or approve of the’ government stealing immigrants’ babies.

The fact is, though, that there’s no real reason to think that the GOP strategy of attacking Democrats by attacking women is doomed to failure. Nor, probably, would it hurt them much to be uncivil or unsubtle in how they phrase it. It didn’t hurt Donald Trump when he claimed Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever,” said Carly Fiorina was too ugly to run for President (“look at that face… would anyone vote for that?”), and spent an entire debate physically menacing Hillary Clinton, and in two out of three cases, those were women from his own party. Even as neutral onlookers and Democrats assumed those attacks would tank him, he went on steadily consolidating power among his base. If the studies about “hostile sexism” among Trump voters are any indication, many people vote Republican precisely because gender progress makes them uncomfortable, and they’d like to roll it back. For them, the sight of a powerful man insulting and humiliating women isn’t untoward, or Neanderthal; it’s what they voted for.

It’s always been easy to whip up political outrage by pinning the sins of a whole society - real or perceived - on women. When Reagan-era politicians wanted to gut welfare, they spoke, not of male welfare recipients, but shadowy “welfare queens,” largely imaginary mothers profiting off the system and refusing to work. When World War II-era psychological screenings revealed unprecedented numbers of men dealing with mental illness, the best-selling treatises of the day blamed, not societal anomie or the wages of war, but “Momism,” the supposed epidemic of overbearing mothers raising weak sons. It goes on, and on, right up to GOP candidate Jim Rubens declaring in 2013 that “women in the workplace,” by stealing jobs that belonged to men, were responsible for mass shootings.

Women can seem less like people than like vessels for all the world’s discontent, free-floating symbols waiting for some social crisis to attach themselves to. In part, this is because we still think of women as creatures designed to please us - when a woman does something we don’t like, or disagrees with us, it reads less as independence and more as a moral failure. In part, it’s because our sexist culture trains us to feel a certain baseline dislike and distrust of women, no matter what they do. Either way, our anger at “bad” women is more personal and visceral than our anger about abstract issues - and thus, it’s easier for politicians to exploit.

Our anger at women tends to become particularly intense when those women do hold positions of power. Female managers are, famously, disliked. In politics, the thought of women who actively seek power inspires “moral outrage.” In one 2016 study, just reminding men that “in a lot of households, American women make more money than men do” was enough to get those men to switch their votes from Democrat to Republican - and, not coincidentally, from a female candidate to a male one.

It’s really not surprising that Republicans would try to portray every Democratic challenger as an extension of that dreadful female power. White conservative voters are terrified - of demographic change, of cultural change, of “political correctness,” a term that seemingly denotes any politics that places a value on caring for others. That fear is very easy to symbolize as a wave of tyrannical, Democratic women hammering on the gates of power, ready to take away everyone’s guns and let millions of immigrants into the country and fire each and every accused sexual harasser. Whether those fears are irrational or bigoted (which they are) is beside the point. Politicians will still exploit them for all they’re worth.

That’s not to say the situation is hopeless. The 2016 election may have been dominated and defined by misogyny - Trump’s misogyny and the country’s - but that crude display of male power has sparked an equally forceful female rebellion. Fearing and blaming women, like any other cultural meme, becomes less powerful as we become more conscious of our knee-jerk reactions. The more we’re able to talk about our fears of female power openly, the less convinced we’ll be when an attack ad portrays some female politician as a shadowy mafioso with her finger in every pie or a crazed, bomb-throwing, reporter-punching militant. And the more we unlearn our fear of women, the less likely it is we’ll vote for politicians who stoke it.

There is, after all, a reason that GOP strategists are worried about going in on female politicians - there is one set of voters that is reportedly especially disgusted with Trump, who it would be unwise to alienate any further. This election will come down, as everything seemingly has in 2018, to the women.

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