As the Republican party has shifted its rhetoric away from drab Romneyite fiscal conservatism and towards the sadistic racism that is Donald Trump’s stock and trade, there is some evidence that growing numbers of white women are turning away, repulsed. CNN’s polling places white women’s support for Republicans just lower, at 49%. According to the Wall Street Journal, white women’s overall support for Republicans slipped from the infamous 53% in 2016 down to 50% in 2018. Preliminary results from this week’s midterm elections seem to suggest that the trend is continuing, with Republican candidates slowly losing the support of suburban white women across the country.

White women supported Mitt Romney at 56% in 2012, and supported George W Bush by 55% in 2004 All of these totals were lower than those for white men, who continue to support Republicans at alarming rates, but they were solid majorities nonetheless. Even these robust showings by Republican white women were down from their previous highs: Ronald Reagan won a staggering 62% of white women in 1984.

White women supported Mitt Romney at 56% in 2012, and supported George W Bush by 55% in 2004. The truth is that the 53% of white women who voted for Trump in the last presidential election was actually an improvement on even worse numbers from previous cycles. The real story of white women voters is both more grim and more complex than the 53% figure reveals. It casts doubts on the political convictions of liberal white women, colors leftist perception of female-coded liberal political projects like the Women’s March, and has prompted long-overdue calls for increased political leadership by women of color. On the left, this number can elicit exasperation, rage, and even suspicions about the moral legitimacy of the feminist project. In the sectors of the left where the figure and its implications have become a perennial theme, the number is treated both as disappointing and darkly unsurprising, a reflection of the conventional wisdom that white women would rather choose the racism espoused by the Republican party than join in the moral coalition represented by men of color and other women. It is the percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. F or the past two years, the American left has been haunted by a number: 53.

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