White Women Under Attack For Voting For Donald Trump: 'Weak Sisters'

White women are coming under fire for helping Donald Trump win back the White House, and one critic has branded them "weak sisters."

Despite polls suggesting the President-elect was struggling with white women , a majority of the demographic backed him over Democratic presidential candidate Harris, just as they helped elect him over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Lorraine Ali, a news and culture critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in an opinion piece : "These weak sisters exist—and persist."

Newsweek has contacted Harris' campaign for comment.

Trump triumphed over Harris , who is Black and South Asian, to win a second term on Wednesday, marking the second time he has defeated a female opponent in a general election.

Harris had courted women in both parties and made reproductive rights central to her campaign, warning that more abortion restrictions would follow if Trump is elected.

And an ad by Vote Common Good, a nonprofit that endorsed Harris, and was narrated by Julia Roberts had urged women to vote how they want , suggesting that many would secretly vote for Harris even if their husbands were backing Trump.

Exit polls show that Trump won white women voters by eight points nationally—53 percent backed him while 45 percent supported Harris.

Trump led with white women by seven points in 2020, with 53 percent choosing him over President Joe Biden in 2020—a significant rise from his performance with white women in 2016, when he got about 47 percent of their vote, compared to 45 percent who backed Clinton, according to the Pew Research Center.

This year, white women were also the biggest subgroup of voters when broken down by race and gender, making up 37 percent of the electorate.

Meanwhile, most Black women (91 percent) and Latino women (60 percent)—who account for a far smaller percentage of voters—backed Harris over Trump this year.

"So much for Democrats tapping into the hidden power of a 'silent majority' of women who were thought to be hiding their political views from their husbands," Ali, wrote in the L.A. Times, Thursday.

"As disappointed Harris supporters perform a postmortem on the vice president's candidacy in an effort to root out America's entrenched misogyny, they need to look in an entirely different direction—toward (white) women themselves.

"It's hard for many to "imagine a mother or auntie who thinks it preferable to vote for a man who paid hush money to a porn star and bragged about groping women than for a scandal-free female candidate with more experience in politics.

"Or that such a large swath of women were unmoved to change their vote despite rape victims forced to give birth to their attacker's child for lack of abortion access, or by deaths due to pregnancy complications in states where the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision has led to restrictions on doctors. But these weak sisters exist—and persist."

During MSNBC 's election night coverage, Joy Reid said that white women did not come through for Harris despite the state being one where access to abortion has been limited since the Supreme Court 's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.

"Black voters came through for Kamala Harris. White women voters did not," Reid said. She also suggested that race may have been one of the reasons why white women voters did not back Harris.

"If people vote more, you know, party line or more on race than on gender, and on protecting their gender, there's really not much more that you can do but tell people what the risks are and leave it to them to do the right thing," she said.

On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin blamed "uneducated white women" for Trump's victory.

"Black women tried to save this country again last night," she said on the show. "What we did not have is white women—who voted about 52 percent, right, for Donald Trump—uneducated white women is my understanding."

However, others have argued that Harris did not do enough to win over white women and that the ad urging women to vote secretly was a "fail."

"The Harris campaign and her acolytes angered a lot of women—and rightly so—when they began actively talking down to conservative women in the final days of the campaign," USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques wrote in an op-ed, pointing to the ad narrated by Roberts.

Jacques said that like men, women "vote on a variety of issues, such as the economy, crime and immigration, and Harris offered voters nothing to give them confidence she could handle these top concerns."

She added: "If I were giving advice to the next Democratic presidential candidate, it would be to knock off the blatant disrespect for a clearly powerful group of voters who are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves."

Author Anna Rollins wrote in an op-ed for Slate that the Harris campaign "made major mistakes in campaigning to white women who they thought might switch 'sides' in the wake of Dobbs."

Calling the ad narrated by Roberts "incredibly condescending," Rollins said the "sweeping characterization of conservative women as weak, fragile victims who unwittingly vote against their best interests underestimates both their power and their intellect."

Rollins, who said she had voted for Harris, added that if the Harris campaign "had identified the pain points of conservative white women—particularly about the economy—and offered substantive solutions, it would have had a good chance of gaining their vote."