The role of gender in the election

There are going to be plenty of postmortems of the last election, trying to understand how Trump managed to win. These analyses will look at exit poll data to see what they can learn about who people voted for and why, and break it down by demographic categories. There will of course be analyses of many factors such as campaign messages, strategy, and tactics.

I looked at data on the number of votes going back to the 2008 election and have made the chart below. Each vote total is in millions, as is the US population at that time. We see that the percentage of the US population that voted this year was roughly the same as past election years, except for the sharp increase in 2020.

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America reveals itself. And it is not pretty

The people have spoken and what they say is that they want a corrupt, amoral, hateful narcissist as their president.

Donald Trump has always been this way. One might find excuses for how he won his first term in 2016 by saying that he was largely unknown then, a novelty act that a large part of the country was willing to take a chance on. But in the period since then, he has revealed himself very clearly, and surrounded himself with awful people who espouse the same misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ views. And people said, “Yeah, I’m fine with that”.

There will be innumerable postmortems as to how and why this came about. It seems to me that Kamala Harris was a good candidate and ran a good campaign. One can disagree with this or that policy (For example, I strongly disagreed with the way she and Joe Biden addressed the war in Gaza and the Israel-Palestine issue generally) but I doubt that any one of those was a decisive factor in her loss. The voters wanted Trump.

He has also been given control of the Senate and (likely) the House of Representatives and the chance to appoint more right wing US Supreme Court justices and federal judges. Basically, he now has a much freer hand than he had in his first term to wreak havoc and leave lasting damage.

It is said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. It is hard to imagine that any country deserves leadership like this.

But here we are.

We are at the meaningless ‘vox pop’ state of election reporting

Today is election day and until the polls close and vote totals start coming in, there is really nothing to report. So the media is filling time and space with responses from voters as they exit the polling stations, asking them whom they voted for and why.

While well-designed and organized exit polls can use this information to obtain trends and do important post-election analyses, these ad-hoc interviews are useless.

Getting quotes from random people about something or other is a standard reporting trope but such quotes are usually selected to support the narrative that the reporter has already decided upon and hence are cherry picked.

But we get them anyway.

What will happen on election day and when to expect results

The final day of voting for the US elections is Tuesday. As with everything else involving elections in the US, the process is complicated by the fact that all 50 states and the District of Columbia have their own voting times and procedures. Also, each state has its own rules about how and when early and mailed ballots are processed and counted. As a service to those readers of this blog who live in other countries and may be bewildered by the complexity of the process, I thought that I would write an explainer so that those interested (and patient enough!) can follow the results as they slowly emerge on election day and the days following.

Note that while I emphasize the presidential race in this post, there are also a slew of important congressional and gubernatorial elections, as well as ballot initiatives such as ten abortion-related ones in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Nebraska and four other states . See here for a compilation of all the things that are up for votes and which ones are worth paying close attention to.

To start, this map tells you when polls close in each state (Note that the times are Pacific times. You can get similar maps for other time zones by going here.)

People outside the US are often bemused by the fact that media outlets are the ones who project winners because in many other countries it is a centralized governmental body that handles the vote counting and declares who is the winner only after all the votes are counted. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the large number of votes cast in each election by each person for a whole slew of races (I had to vote in 23 separate categories in my county in California) makes the vote tallying more complicated and as a result, at least for the major races, media outlets have stepped in to project results more quickly, using exit polls and early vote count totals.
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The despicable attacks by the GOP on the transgender community

I wrote in an earlier post about how infuriating it was to read about the deaths of women denied medical care because of the extreme anti-abortion laws in many states that were enacted following the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022. But that is not even the only terrible policy the Republicans and the creepy Trump-weird Vance ticket have promoted. We also have them use vile anti-trans rhetoric to fireup their base.

Donald Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his closing argument before Election Day, using demeaning language and misrepresentations to paint an exceedingly narrow slice of the U.S. population as a threat to national identity.
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His rally speeches now feature a spoof video mocking trans people and their place in the U.S. military. The montage, interspersed with clips of the Vietnam War movie “Full Metal Jacket,” typically draws loud boos at his rallies, as do Trump’s false claims about female athletes and his mocking impression of what he says is a trans woman lifting weights.
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Stories that make me want to throw things

In films and TV shows, you sometimes see people who are really angry or upset smash things by throwing them across the room or sweeping them off tables. I have never done such a thing or know people who have done so and felt that it may be artistic license taken by directors to show extreme anger. But the most recent story from ProPublica about yet another woman who dies because of the abortion bans was so infuriating that it made me better understand why someone might do something like that.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.
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