Despite some hopes by Republicans that they had managed to close the gender gap, in the final analysis women voted for Obama by a margin of 55-44%. Since women as a whole made up 53% of the voters, this gap has to be of considerable concern to the GOP.
But what was even more striking was that single women voted for Obama by a whopping 67-31%. Romney carried the married women’s vote 53-46% but again that was a smaller group.
The Fox News world takes a stab at understanding this and Amanda Marcotte says their explanations should not come as a surprise.
The overall narrative of the segment is, to paraphrase: Single women are so obsessed with birth control and abortion that they can’t be bothered to care about the economy or even take care of their kids. There were many jaw-droppers during the segment, but my favorite might be Gretchen Carlson saying that married women vote more on the economy, “because when you’re married, abortion is not really—or contraception for that matter—is not maybe a huge part of your life.” In Carlson’s bizarro world, only single women have sex and only married women have kids.
…
Other right-wing pundits were even more crass. Andrea Tantaros accused single women of voting for no other reason than wanting “free” birth control. Rush Limbaugh was his usual delightful self on the topic of single women having sex that doesn’t involve him, saying that by being pro-choice, Obama treats women “like vaginas” and that Republicans need to “start our own abortion industry” to get women’s vote.
The Daily Show‘s Kristen Schaal explains what is making single women behave in this way and what the GOP needs to do to win them over.
(This clip appeared on November 14, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Despite some hopes by Republicans that they had managed to close the gender gap….
lol wut?
Do Republicans have any points of contact with reality?
I realized that I should have given a link for that statement and have now done so.
Kristen Schaal is a biting, hilarious comedian. She has a way of rephrasing sexist views to show them for what they are: ridiculous. Sketches like this are kind of hard to watch, but at the same time funny and damning. It’s too bad we don’t see more of her.
For all its constraints as a comedy show, it’s hard to find better commentary on this sort of thing than the Daily Show.
The very same birth control is regarded as a regarded as a tax when required by the rhetoric coming from one side of their mouths and as a gift by the other side. Ugggh.
Heh. I wasn’t snarking at anything you wrote. I just thought it was funny that the Party for Legitimate Rape could possibly have thought they had closed the gender gap.
But looking at your link, I see that they might have done the same thing when they convinced themselves that Romney was going to win by a landslide: namely, cherry picking the polls that told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
This reminds me of an Onion article, “Todd Akin Spends Whole Night Wondering What Went Wrong”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/todd-akin-spends-whole-night-wondering-what-went-w,30297/
Probably the most apt statement of the entire election is one of their quotes from him, “I just keep replaying those weeks and months over and over in my head, searching for something, anything, that I could have said or done differently, and absolutely nothing comes to mind. Maybe it was my views on tax reform that did me in. I don’t know.”