Yesterday I wrote about a Washington Post poll of battleground districts which found that women favored Democratic candidates by 14 points. This was notable but not a world record or anything.
However, most of the WaPo polling was done pre-Kavanaugh. Today, CNN has the results of polling done within the past few days and it shows women favoring Democrats by a stunning 30 percentage points:
I’m really not sure what to think of this. It’s almost too big to believe. And yet, the polling for men looks pretty ordinary, so there’s nothing obviously wrong here. If this really does demonstrate the effect that Kavanaugh has had, liberals shouldn’t feel any qualms about continuing to attack Republicans with gusto about their treatment of women. Republicans are doing their best to scare us away from this by claiming we’re a “mob” that lost support thanks to our assault on Kavanaugh, but don’t believe it. We should keep our attacks loud and strong.
Of course, there’s no reason I should think anything different. I happened to get my advance copy of the November issue of MoJo today, and I have a short piece in it saying exactly that: namely that the white working-class backlash of 2016 was a small and temporary thing. Based on the evidence, I think the backlash was almost solely due to the fact that a black man was in the White House for eight years, and it began fading away the moment he was gone. Overall levels of sexism, racism, and xenophobia are probably back to their 2008 levels already, and Donald Trump’s naked and unrelenting bigotry—which may have served him well during the precise historical moment he ran for president—is now losing him more votes than it gains. Certainly it looks like this has been the case for his handling of the Kavanaugh affair.
