Christine Flowers commentary
Every election has a post-mortem. Depending upon your list of priorities, yours might not match your neighbor's.
In my case, I viewed Nov. 5 through the lens of abortion, immigration and election integrity, so neither of the two major party candidates was a perfect fit.
One promised mass deportations, the other lobbied for mass abortions or at least an elimination of virtually all restrictions on the procedure.
As far as integrity, neither party calmed my suspicions that we were not going to return to the madness of 2020. As it turns out, the process worked. The center held.
And kudos to the Democrats for doing what the GOP failed to do four years ago: Accept the bitter results and move on.
This is likely due to the overwhelming electoral and popular vote victory of Donald Trump. To borrow a phrase from the last cycle, the result really was "too big to rig."
But something else has become clear. The heralded "women's vote" didn't have the expected impact.
It was likely — excuse the pun — trumped by another factor that was almost completely ignored by pundits and pollsters.
First let's talk about the ladies. Ever since 2022 when the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, conventional wisdom had it that women were angry at an almost feral level.
There was this perception that we'd been reduced to a quivering heap of hormones, incapable of seeing beyond our uteri.
Almost every about politics included at least one reference to the "revenge of the reproductive rights voter," warning us that the GOP had forever lost the female vote because of its alleged assault on abortion access.
Even though Dobbs was decided by the Supreme Court and did not represent legislation directly impacted by the Republican Party, women and their advocates saw Trump as the source of their anguish since he'd appointed three of the justices in the Dobbs majority, thereby fulfilling his promise that he'd overturn Roe.
Of course, no one thanked Nixon for giving them the right to abortion since he was the president who'd appointed Harry Blackmun, author of Roe, but the abortion lobby isn't much about logic, science or consistency.
In any event, Republicans did start feeling the heat from women voters and suffered some major electoral defeats, including at the 2022 midterms when an expected red wave became a blue tsunami.
That was credited almost entirely to angry women. I suppose it was reasonable to assume, then, that the angry ladies would be back in 2024.
That's what all the pollsters told us.
That's what the GOP believed as they started inching back from the whole abortion issue and adopted the mantra of "state's rights."
That's what Trump himself emphasized when he kept saying on the campaign trail, and rightly so, that there would be no federal abortion ban.
But women were on the warpath. Abortion was only one of their grievances.
They also still remembered the MeToo movement, and the Access Hollywood moments, and more recently the E. Jean Smith civil suit where a judge did not find Trump guilty of rape but made a civil determination that he sexually assaulted her.
That determination, which had no criminal relevance at all, was seized upon by angry females to paint Trump as a predator.
The media helped them out by replaying all sorts of sordid stories, some corroborated but many not, of past indiscretions and misbehavior.
Against that backdrop, it was very reasonable to believe that a majority of women would be motivated to vote against Trump.
But guess what? That probably didn't happen. I say probably because we don't yet have a complete breakdown of the demographics of the vote.
Still, since women make up a majority of the active electorate and Trump won by fairly healthy margins, it stands to reason that women were not as predictable as the pollsters thought.
Perhaps they overlooked the power of pro-life women, or women who cared more about their pensions and security than abortion rights. Or maybe they ignored, to their great detriment, women who cared not only about their daughters but also about their sons.
Which brings me to that other factor I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
I think that when we do an actual post-mortem of this election, we will see that millennial and Gen Z men and the people who care about them voted in large numbers against the Kamala Harris.
That's because they'd been exposed for years to this poisonous brew of hostility and "toxic masculinity," constantly subjected to the idea that something was wrong with them simply because they were male.
That stupid Gillette razor commercial a few years ago attacking them.
The absolute destruction of due process rights in Title IX scenarios by the Biden administration.
And of course, the MeToo witch hunts.
I'm thinking that they digested all of this and said "what do we have to lose?" if we vote against the woman who essentially accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a racist.
Boys and young men are not blind, after all.
My point is that it's foolish to presume that only one set of self-identified victims will be motivated to end their victimization.
That's a mistake we only realize after all the votes are counted.
Christine Flowers can be reached at
