‘Everything she said was great, but to me it’s like, right, that’s not going to happen…’
Editor’s Note: Article contains mild profanity.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A familiar refrain is emerging as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., moves to assume front-runner status in the Democratic presidential primary: She’s a bitch.
Axios reported on the findings of a left-leaning focus group of nine women in Appleton, Wisconsin, that it conducted last week with Engagious, a firm closely monitoring several Trump-backing swing states.
Seven of the women had flipped from Obama to Trump, and two others had flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton.
While most indicated that they preferred left-leaning policies like Warren’s, they disliked her personal demeanor.
“I like what she had to say, but I still think she’s—sorry—a bitch,” said Jill T., a 56-year-old who backed Obama and Trump.
It did not take long for the comparisons with Clinton to follow. A common liberal trope is that Clinton—and other assertive women like her—are held to an unfair standard because of their gender.
The problematic complaint diminishes other areas in which women benefit from perceptions of gender roles and expectations (e.g. the positive attention Clinton got for being the “historic” first female candidate), ignore the equally offensive ad hominem attacks levied at male and female conservative candidates, and—most of all—deny the objective reality of Clinton’s persona.
Warren seems destined to follow a similar path, faced with the dilemma that she must be hardened enough to meet the current president blow-for-blow in a general election but still empathic enough to sell her radical socialist agenda as a moral imperative while distancing herself from Trump’s style of confrontational politics.
Another of the focus-group women observed that Warren may have to be a “bitch” in order “to win and to survive.”
Others feared she may be too “too emotional” and viewed as a “pushover.”
Perceptions varied widely over Warren’s electability and leadership capabilities—with her gender assuming a central role in the discussion.
Several of the women doubted that she could overcome the handicap of being a woman while running against Trump, working with a predominantly male Congress, and asserting herself with other world leaders or adversaries.
“Warren won’t be looked upon as a leader because she’ll be presiding over a House and Senate full of men,” said Nicole W., a 33-year-old Trump voter. “I’m worried she won’t be taken seriously.”
Not all of the women in the group thought Warren’s policies would be embraced either.
“I think she brought across good points, but it’s whether or not she’ll be able to follow through on what she’s saying,” said Alicia K., 44.
Some were more cynical, saying they expected her charisma to be tempered by the political realities of the Capitol Hill landscape.
“Everything she said was great, but to me it’s like, right, that’s not going to happen,” said Sandy D., a 62-year-old Clinton voter.
And others still lauded her “strong-willed” determination and her message but still preferred Trump as the better leader.
Alicia K. said she liked the idea of student-debt forgiveness and Warren’s hard-line taxation policies—which the candidate has claimed will hit corporations but has refused to answer how middle-class taxpayers may be affected.
Axios noted that the opinions of the nine participants were not statistically significant enough to draw broader conclusions.
However, they did offer a cautionary tale for Warren that Clinton failed to heed, not to take for granted that Midwestern values followed lockstep with those of left-wing urban centers on either coast.
Axios said a March focus group in the same Wisconsin town suggested voters were tiring of Trump, who narrowly won the state by around 22,000 votes. However, that does not guarantee they will prefer the alternative.
As CNN reported recently, Trump is also gaining ground in some Midwestern, blue-collar regions where his rollback of stifling Obama regulations has helped usher in economic recovery.
In Eveleth, a small, Minnesota mining town, residents noted that they were put off by Democrats’ shift leftward and that Republicans, led by Trump, had stepped in to fill the void as the party representing working-class laborers. Trump lost Minnesota in 2016 by just 44,000 votes.
“I don’t think by any means this is a locked down Democratic state it used to be,” said Cindy Rugely, an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.