Thursday, October 17, 2024

Part I

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Is the Gender Divide the Most Important Divide? Just Look at a Looming Divide Between Men and Women in the 2024 Election

Well, as you look at the political landscape in the United States, there are some big developments, and in some sense there are some big new developments. And if anything, one of the biggest and the newest developments is the absolute divide, sociologically speaking, they would say, the absolute salience of the difference between men and women when it comes to voting projections, especially in the presidential election, but frankly politically across the board.

So for instance, yesterday, you had a front page headline in the Wall Street Journal. Gender gap is a defining feature of the deadlocked Trump-Harris race. Now, I began by saying this is new and it is new. In one sense, it’s at least newly acute or newly exaggerated, but it’s not entirely new because there have been differences between the voting patterns of men and women for some time.

Now, perhaps we need to step back for a moment and say, let’s just think for a moment, let’s just think. If you are looking at a distinction between men and women voting patterns, what would that distinction be? Well, I think that some people would say, well, women might be more conservative than men. Men might be more inclined to say more liberal positions.

Now there are liberal men and there are conservative women. But the reality is the big trend right now is that women tend, or at least you could say the women’s vote tends, to be more liberal and increasingly markedly more liberal than the male vote. And then you ask the question, why would this be so? And then you have to ask a second question, what is this telling us?

Well, the why would this be so according to the secular political observation world comes down largely to the issue of abortion. The argument is women are now very frustrated by the Dobbs decision handed down by the Supreme Court in 2022, and they are rising up in an entirely new way in order not only to support abortion rights, but to support only those candidates who most avidly support abortion rights.

Now, is that right or is that wrong? Well, the word new or just now in terms of the timing, that’s not entirely accurate. So the Wall Street Journal is not wrong when it says that the gender gap is the defining feature of the deadlocked Trump-Harris race, but what is false is the idea that this has come from nowhere. This hasn’t come from nowhere, this is coming from previous patterns.

And over the course of the last several decades and the last several presidential election cycles, we’ve seen it pretty clearly. But you know it’s not just there, we’ve also seen it in statewide votes. We have seen it on votes on particular issues. So on a range of social and cultural issues, moral issues, it is often the case that women as a composite take a more liberal position.

And you’re looking at a big question, why would that be so? Why would men in this case be a discrete voting block from women? And the big news, of course, is actually far beyond what’s implied in this headline because we’re now looking at the fact that you have a very significant growth in support for the Republican nominee coming from Black men.

And this has reached the point that it’s clear that Vice President Kamala Harris is in something of a panic mode about this. And so she has appeared on certain podcasts, she has offered some political proposals intended to get the attention of Black men. But you know, as you look a little deeper at this issue, it’s not likely that that is going to matter much because this is almost assuredly about more than appearing on a podcast and certainly more than just certain policy proposals

The concerns of Black men. And not only that, when it comes to Latino men, increasingly as well Trump has made radical gains in terms of the expected vote coming from Black men and from Latino Hispanic men. The reality is that there is an explanation for it, and it’s deeper than the secular media might anticipate or even understand.

So in terms of the Wall Street Journal’s report, that team of reporters yesterday tell us, “While a divide between sexes has become a fixture of modern elections, it appears to have broadened since 2020, cutting across many racial, educational and economic groups. Trump’s five point advantage among men in the 2020 election has widened to 10 points in the Wall Street Journal’s most recent national poll in late August. President Biden’s 12 point edge among women in 2020 has become a 13 point lead for Harris.”

So I know that came pretty fast and you know sometimes it’s hard to catch numbers. But in this case, the numbers are just weird and they are not symmetrical, they’re not aligned. So it begins with the numbers that back in 2020, Trump had a five point advantage among men that is now widened to 10 points. On the other side, we are told that President Biden had a 12 point advantage among women and it is now a 13 point lead for Harris.

Okay, just do the quick math. The increase from 12 to 13 is one point. The increase of five points for Trump, that’s a lot more of a shift than one point for Harris. This is one of the reasons why you see something like panic or at least deep anxiety setting in among Democratic political strategists. And that is because as you look at these numbers, Trump is making a far larger incremental gain in terms of this gender-based polling than Kamala Harris is.

Kamala Harris evidently has been able to move the needle just a little bit, at least in this report from 12 to 13. But you know there are other reports saying that Trump has increased his support among Black and Latino men to 12%. That has opened up that 12% gap. And you also have Kamala Harris with basically a 12% advantage when it comes to women.

Well, those in one sense cancel each other out, but they don’t because we’re looking at actual elections. Go back to 2016, 2020, if you have a significant shift towards one candidate, it is by definition at the expense of the other. I think that explains in part, as I said, a bit of the anxiety you now see setting in among Democrats.

The other issue here, by the way, just a footnote, is that the Democratic nominee in a presidential election has traditionally overpolled. By overpolled, that is to say the polls predict a larger margin than the Democratic candidate generally gets. Now it’s also true that in the year 2022, the Democrats underpolled, which is to say in that election it was thought that Republicans are going to make more of a gain in the House and in the Senate that didn’t happen. And that was again against the evidence coming from the polls.

But in general, and this is where you have to look at the similar kind of point of comparison when you’re looking at presidential elections in recent cycles, the Democratic nominee has traditionally overpolled. And yet you also see something else, and I mentioned this on The Briefing earlier this week, you have internal polling among the Republicans and internal polling among the Democrats, and you start to pay attention when those internal numbers on the two opposing sides increasingly agree.

But there’s a remarkable line in this Wall Street Journal article, it’s just absolutely rich with worldview significance. And it comes as the team of reporters is telling us that Democrats are concerned about this shift in likely voting patterns among Black and Hispanic men or Black and Latino men as decided in this study. And here’s the sentence, “In fact, with Black and Latino men moving toward Trump, the poll suggests that America is becoming a bit less divided politically by race and more divided by gender.”

Okay, I said that’s really heavy in worldview significance. Let’s ask the question why. Why would this shift, a shift from a division on the basis of race to one which is an electorate more divided by gender? You say, why is that an even more basic thing? It is because gender is more important than race. That is to say as you’re thinking about ontology, the entire theological understanding of being, what it means to be human, what it means to be made in God’s image, you don’t find, for example, race in Genesis 1. You do find sex. You do find male and female, created he them. It’s even more basic to creation order.

By the way, that’s a really good thing for Christians to hear. Let’s repeat it. When you look at the question of biological sex, you look at God creating us in his image as males and as females, that is more basic, more ontologically foundational, more theologically significant than anything related to race.

All right then, we are the people who shouldn’t be surprised by this particular line in the Wall Street Journal article, but that raises some other giant worldview issues with all kinds of theological and biblical Christian significance. So why would men and women vote differently? Well, let’s just look historically at, say, American politics. So remember that for a lot of the American political experience, women didn’t have the vote. And one of the reasons used to argue for male only voting is that women are simply too emotional when it comes to voting, and they are primarily referenced to the domestic sphere. So what do they know about politics? And so women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

Well, that just didn’t wash over time. So you have all over the western world among nations that have the vote, that hold elections, that are constitutional republics, you have movements for the granting of the franchise as it is called to women. And so that happens by the time you get to the early 20th century, women have the vote in the United States.

Well, does it turn out that women are too emotional to vote? No, that’s not how it turns out at all. Women and men, well, we have our own profiles but that’s not the big issue. It turns out that one of the effects of women getting the vote in American political history, but also in Britain and some other places is the increased attention was given to, wait for it, domestic issues and in particular, issues related to the family and in particular, issues related to, for example, the welfare of children.

And so when you had women voting, you had something of a reset of the political equation. And you know what? Politicians then, if they wanted to get elected, had to get a sufficient number of women to vote for them. And so they had to give more attention to these issues historically categorized as more domestic issues. I think we can understand that.

Women were, as it turns out, on the forefront of efforts to restrict and to criminalize abortion. You also had women at the forefront of movements against alcohol, temperance movements, and eventually the prohibition movement. You had women giving attention to other issues, but you also had a basic unity among men and women on so many of these issues.

Part II

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Motherhood Matters at the Ballot Box: There is a Divide Between Male Voter and Female Voters, But Also Between Women Who Are Moms and Women Who Are Not

And you say, well, when did it begin to show as a great divide with women shifting more to the left? And the answer to that is the 1960s and the ideological worldview issue at stake was often what you had in terms of gender feminism as it was known, the feminist movements, movements that were described at the time for the emancipation of women. And of course, that is also when you saw the rise of open arguments about changing public policy to allow for abortion for example.

And so the entire complex of issues, the redefinition of marriage with no-fault divorce, the arrival of abortion rights legislation, and then eventually of course the Roe v. Wade decision that affected the entire nation. And you look at a host of issues. Now, the gender feminists came with far larger ideological ambitions, but the real effect was on the issues we just talked about.

And so all of a sudden you had feminist organizations saying to women, “You need to vote this way because you are a woman.” And you had arguments also coming from the gender feminists that women have a unique take on the entire society and it leads women to see what men can’t see, et cetera, et cetera. And during the 1970s and the ’80s, you have other issues that are rising. You have an increased attention to the dynamic in the American electorate between conservatives and liberals that quickly became a dynamic between Republicans and Democrats. What had been a post-war consensus after World War II becomes a fractured political equation by the time you get to the 1970s. And at that time, that’s also when you saw a difference in the voting patterns between men and women.

Now wait just a minute. Am I saying women are liberal? Nope, that’s not the point. As a matter of fact, many conservative movements and many conservative organizations are led by women and driven by women, and their strategists are women and their followers and membership includes an awful lot of women. So the conservative movement also requires a great deal of leadership and investment from women. But as you’re looking at the electoral pattern, it is imbalanced.

But here’s what I also want to say. You’re not saying enough when you say the women’s vote because there are differences among women and some of them are also incredibly predictable. And so the biggest line where you see a breaking in two directions of women voting, some voting conservative, some voting more liberal, some voting Republicans, some voting Democrat is whether or not they are mothers with a child in the house. If they are mothers with a child in the house, guess what? They’re a lot more conservative in terms of a voting segment than if they are single and they’re not married, they don’t have a husband, they don’t have children in the house. That makes a huge difference.

And that was seen graphically in a recent gubernatorial election that is a run for the governor’s seat in the state of Virginia where you had mirror image votes. The vast majority of women with children in the home voting for the Republican, the vast majority of women without children in the home voting for the Democrat. So one of the ways you look at this in worldview terms is to say this is a particular kind of liberal vote. It’s not just the ideological Left, it is also what is defined as lifestyle liberalism. So let’s just be honest. If there is lifestyle liberalism, there probably is something like lifestyle conservatism as well. Okay?

I’ll just say you can kind of predict it by the car. I pointed out you can predict it by the restaurants where they go. You can predict it by other consumer forms. You can predict it by understanding whether the voter, in this case, the woman voter lives closer to a Whole Foods or a Walmart. Yes, that has a big distinction in the vote. But this is also where you could say there’s probably a difference. And this isn’t absolute, it’s just a generalization, but in politics, generalizations matter. It probably matters whether the woman voter in this case is driving a Tesla or a minivan. There is also no question that a turning point came in 2022 with the Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade. And this is where you’ve all of a sudden discovered that there is a mobilization of a huge energy, political energy, electoral energy among women on the pro-abortion side. There’s just no other way to look at it.

And in this sense, it’s hard to explain in absolute terms exactly how this happened. But evidently, as you look at the gender divide on the question of abortion, that has now turned into what the political scientists would call an extremely salient issue, which is to say there are more women who at least say they’re voting on the issue of abortion than was true before. And there is no corresponding movement among men. Now, by the way, on that issue, I have to say that when you look at men inclined to vote democratically, more of them are citing abortion according to a lot of these polls. But there is no corresponding movement in terms of the anticipated vote, and that’s why there is such concern on the Democratic side, and that is why slippage in the Democratic vote when it comes to Black and Latino male voters, that’s a very big issue, because it doesn’t take much of a side for it to end up with a very big difference.

And this is where you have to understand those so-called swing states, and particularly the metropolitan areas in those swing states can be absolutely determinative. And that’s one of the reasons why the campaigns are following the strategies and the tactics they now are. And that’s why Kamala Harris is appearing on these podcasts and why she’s trying to make a lot of visible appearances and at least at this point, it isn’t apparently having much impact on the race. And that is because I would argue that you have the shift in the male vote about issues and political motivations that are far deeper than anything Kamala Harris can cure over the next two or three weeks.

Well, we need to come back to this and probably we’ll talk about it again with an update before the election. But we need to come back to it after the election because boy, are we going to have a lot of material to think about when we look at the raw data coming in from the election, we find out how people actually did vote. And then it’s going to take about, well, 3, 4, 5 weeks before there is a sorting of a lot of this raw data in order to find out what these things mean in terms of trends.

Within just a matter of weeks after the election, there are going to be charts, there are going to be graphs. And I can just tell you in advance, no matter how it goes, it is going to be fascinating and we are going to learn a lot because an election is like an x-ray or a CAT scan of a population. You all of a sudden find out, not how they say they’re going to vote or even if they’re going to vote, you find out if they’re going to vote and then you find out how they voted and those are the numbers that matter.

Part III

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American Missile Defense System and Troops Now on the Ground in Israel: What That Says About American Support for Israel

Now I want to move to another issue, and I think this is really, really important. And sometimes there’s a headline and it takes a moment to recognize, wow, there’s a lot more here than this headline. This headline’s important, the headline’s interesting, but boy, this points to something a lot more important and more urgent. So here’s the headline coming from the Associated Press, “US to Send Anti-missile System and Troops to Israel.” All right, there he goes. The United States is sending an anti-missile system and a limited number of troops to Israel.

The New York Times headline, the latest US contribution to Israel’s air defenses. It is called the THAAD System. That is T-H-A-A-D, which stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. And here’s the thing, it turns out that the United States of America, in terms of these sophisticated defense systems only has nine of them. The United States Army controls seven of them. It is believed that two of them were already in the Middle East and now one of them is being sent to Israel.

And it’s not just this missile system, this defensive missile system, it is also about 100 American military personnel because the United States is not turning over this system to the IDF, that is Israel’s Defense Force, in order for them to run it. It is sending Americans to run it. It is an American missile system, and now you have American troops on the ground.

Okay, let me just give us a wake-up call here. This is absolutely huge. I want you to note the very same day, there were other headlines and those headlines had to do with the United States Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and the United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, sending a joint letter to Israel saying, “You better increase humanitarian aid in Gaza or we might cut off military supplies.”

Now, I’m not saying that’s a false play. I’m not saying that’s some kind of camouflaged move. I think those two cabinet members are doing what the president wanted, what the Biden administration wanted in sending this public signal. And I think the Biden administration seriously wants to see more humanitarian aid. There were quantifications given to the people there in Gaza.

But what’s notable is what the Biden administration didn’t say in this case, even though President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel do not have a good relationship. Well, you have the fact that even in that letter from the two cabinet secretaries, it’s pretty clear that it’s something of a nudge more than a threat. But when the big news is actually seen in context, the big news is sending the THAAD system to be located there in Israel, deployed in Israel with a hundred US troops, that’s massive, and that speaks a lot more loudly than any letter coming from two cabinet secretaries.

So why did the United States do this? Your first inclination is not going to be wrong, but it’s not right enough. Your first inclination is going to be, well, the United States did this because of our ally, Israel. This is for the protection of Israel because Israel is our ally. We are friends of the nation of Israel. We have mutual defense systems when it comes to the nation of Israel. This is for Israel’s sake we’re doing this. And I just want to tell you that’s not untrue, but it is not enough.

One of the points I want to make is that nations act in their own self-interest. That’s what nations do. If nations don’t act in their own self-interest, eventually they cease to be nations. Now, I’m not saying that nations don’t do generous things such as say the Marshall Plan undertaken by the United States after World War II, but even that was in the self-interest of the United States because the United States did not believe it was in our own self-interest as a nation to allow the political disintegration or decay of Western European nations. We believed it was in our self-interest as a nation, our national interest to help these European nations after the war to get back on their feet and feed their own people.

So was it a generous act? You bet it was a generous act, but it was also an act in the nation’s self-interest. The same things are going on right here, and we need to see beyond the headlines. It is telling us something that in the midst of all the political folderol, in the midst of the fact that there are now Palestinian nations and allies calling for Israel to be expelled from the United Nations, the United States, and not just the United States, but the Biden administration is actually sending this THAAD equipment along with all the personnel needed to attend to it, to be stationed inside the nation of Israel that puts American lives at risk. It is an incredible statement of an allyship between the United States and Israel.

But it’s also something else. Let’s go back to national self-interest. What else is it? It’s also an indication that it is true that not only is the United States a friend of Israel for good reasons and a defender of Israel for good reason, it is also a defender of Israel for our own national interest. I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. I don’t think the American people think about this. I think Christians in the United States should understand this. It is not just important that Israel be defended for the sake of Israel. That is enough, frankly. But it is also true that we need to understand our responsibility to protect Israel and Israel’s place in the world and Israel’s security, Israel’s existence precisely because Israel’s enemies, wait for it, are our enemies.

And just to tell you where Israel stands in the midst of all of this, it is losing allies. I’m not saying officially they’re switching sides, but for example, you have European nations that are now criticizing Israel in ways that I think go way over the line. They’re failing, by the way. And more than this, usually they’re failing to defend themselves as well. But it is true that the United States has a vested interest in the continued security of Britain.

And Britain does a pretty good job, frankly, as compared to other European nations, and it’s in America’s interest that Germany continue to survive. It’s also in our interest that the issue in terms of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine be settled in a way that does not threaten Western security. It’s not just about the Ukrainian nation, it is about Ukraine, but it’s about the entire security picture for all of Europe and the free world.

But I just think it’s important to recognize even as you have open calls in newspapers like The Guardian in London for Israel to be kicked out of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and even as politically we recognize that actually could happen, that’s where you’re going to see a test case for the United States of America because it is hard to imagine how the United States could stay in the United Nations if Israel is kicked out.

I don’t think you’re going to have the Biden administration make that point right now. And frankly, the Biden administration, just in terms of time, is likely to escape the United States having to deal with that question right now. But you know voters in the United States better recognize that it will make a great difference in this country as to who is in the White House when that kind of decision point comes. And I can guarantee you this, I can guarantee you that in Israel, they understand that even better than we do.