Clinton's Rhetoric and Reality
“But I am a woman, and like millions of women I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that embraces and respects the potential of every last one of us.”
The idea that sexism played a role in Clinton’s defeat has been a high-profile storyline coming from the Clinton campaign and its allies (Ellen Malcolm, Gloria Steinem) in recent weeks. With this type of remark, the Clinton campaign ends its effort true to form—making an assertion, not an argument. In fact, the assertion of sexism as a contributing factor for Clinton’s defeat is one for which very little evidence exists.
Take, for instance, the three states in whose primaries Clinton had the biggest victories—Arkansas, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The exit polls for all three states indicated that bias played a role in the outcome—but not gender bias. In Arkansas, 19 percent of voters said the gender of the candidate was important to them; they voted 71-23 for Clinton. In West Virginia, the 18 percent of voters who said the candidate’s gender was important voted 75-19 for Clinton. In Kentucky, 16 percent of voters said the gender of the candidate was important to them—they broke 79-19 for Clinton.
The bias appeared on the question of race, not gender. Eighteen percent of Arkansas voters said the race of the candidate was important to them: their margin was 68-24 for Clinton. For the 22 percent of West Virginians who said the candidate’s race affected their vote, the breakdown was 82-12 for Clinton. And in Kentucky, 21 percent of the voters said Obama’s and Clinton’s race mattered: they fell 81-16 for Clinton.
What about big Obama states? The lack of any evidence of sexism here is even more apparent. In Vermont, Obama won by 20 points. But among the 17 percent of voters who said gender was important to them, 67 percent voted for Clinton. And in Wisconsin, Obama won by 19 points. Yet of the 15 percent of voters who said the candidate's gender mattered, Clinton easily carried the day, 63-37.
Perhaps, it could be argued, subtle gender biases affected voting. But here, too, little evidence exists. The ABC cumulative exit poll was published today; it excluded some of Obama’s best caucus states (Washington, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota) but otherwise was comprehensive. Its findings? In the Democratic primaries, 57 percent of the voters were women. (They went 52-43 for Clinton.) It’s true that Obama carried the male vote (50-43), but the breakdown in both genders was far greater on racial and generational lines.
So who were these hidden sexists, swinging the margin of victory to Obama? The Clinton campaign has never quite said.
A case for sexism affecting the Clinton campaign does exist--but one the campaign never raises. In 2002, Clinton and her advisors very well could have believed that the country never would elect a woman who voted against a war, perhaps explaining her Iraq war vote. Had she cast a vote against the war, there probably would have been no opening for the Obama campaign. But, it seems to me, the Clinton campaign can hardly blame others for their own (erroneous, as it turned out) expectation of voters' sexist stereotypes.
Clinton, of course, did confront instances of overt sexism on the campaign trail (though, it seems, far less often than the overt racism Obama confronted, which his campaign did its best not to stress). And she occasionally attracted clearly sexist comments from journalists who would never have dared utter an implicitly racist comment about Obama. But—as her New Hampshire victory implied—whenever these obvious or even not-so-obvious instances of sexism occurred, Clinton benefited, as would be expected in a Democratic electorate that was almost 3-to-2 female.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza picked up on another item from the Clinton address:
She added that while her campaign had failed to break the final—and highest—glass ceiling, that it had still managed to put “about 18 millions cracks in it,” a reference to the votes she won during the entirety of the presidential primary fight.
Since the onset of popular election of senators, the United States has elected three African-Americans (Ed Brooke, Carole Moseley-Braun, and Obama) to the upper chamber. In the current Senate alone, 16 of the members are women. There’s no doubt that—all other things being equal—it’s harder for a white woman to be elected President than for a white man. But the suggestion that it’s harder for a woman than a minority candidate to win a presidential (or a statewide) election is absurd.
Clinton ends, then, true to form. Sexism somehow hurt her campaign—just like earlier claims: she had a chance of catching Barack Obama in the delegate race after Wisconsin; the party trying to ensure that Florida and Michigan followed the rules was comparable to the rigged election in Zimbabwe; a sizeable bloc of undeclared superdelegates was willing to award the nomination to the second-place finisher in the delegate race.
Hopefully, as Andrew Sullivan has argued, the campaign, with its concluding claim of sexism, represented the last gasp of identity politics.