=========
=========
Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
=========
=========

Why, it’s just impossible that women could really vote for Republican candidates! There must be some nefarious explanation, with evil and abusive men being responsible, of course. From the very left-wing The Guardian:

How many husbands control the votes of their wives? We’ll never know
Door-to-door canvassers tell stories of husbands who bully, silence and control their wives into voting conservative
Rebecca Solnit | Monday, November 19, 2018 | 6:00 PM EST

Progressive organizer Annabel Park told the story that made me start to wonder. “I can’t stop thinking about this woman I met while doorknocking for Beto in Dallas,” Annabel wrote on social media a few days before the midterm elections.

“She lived in a sprawling low-income apartment complex. After I knocked a couple of times, she answered the door with her husband just behind her. She looked petrified and her husband looked menacing behind her. When I made my pitch about Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, her husband yelled, ‘We’re not interested.’ She looked at me and silently mouthed, ‘I support Beto.’ Before I could respond, she quickly closed the door.”

Annabel told me afterwards, “It’s been on my mind. Did she get beaten? That was my fear.”

There’s a form of voter intimidation that widespread and unacknowledged. It’s the husbands who bully and silence and control their wives, as witnessed by dozens of door-to-door canvassers across the country I heard from.

I started asking around and found that a lot of get-out-the-vote ground troops had witnessed various forms of such bullying, intimidation and silencing in relation to this election and in earlier elections, too.

There’s more of this drivel at the original, but one thing stands out: no statistics at all are given, and the story is just a bunch of anecdotes, unverifiable anecdotes. I loved this one in particular:

The problem matters for voting rights whether or not it influences outcomes, and it’s also a reminder that many women are not free and equal in their domestic lives. Yet another canvasser reported that one of those husbands, this time in Turlock, California, told her, “And if she needs to know how to vote, I’ll just take her in the back and beat her.” He was sort of joking but sort of not.

Really? And just how did the canvasser, or the article writer, know that he was ‘sort of not’ joking?

This was little different from Hillary Clinton trying to explain her unexpected loss to a first time candidate, whining in a Vox interview that:
After Comey’s announcement, men could turn to their wives or girlfriends and say, “I told you, she’s going to be in jail. You don’t wanna waste your vote.” And women voters who might have been on the fence decided not to vote for Clinton. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m taking a chance, I’m going to vote,’ it didn’t work,” Clinton said.

Odd, but you’d think that women who wanted Mrs Clinton to win and heard such from their husbands or boyfriends would be more inclined to vote for her, to help keep her out of jail. After all, no one ever thought that Mrs Clinton would really face prison if she had been elected President; she could only face jail if she lost.

According to the left, only white heterosexual men are allowed any independent thought; all others must toe the line and vote as the left tell them they must vote. If you have a vagina, and there is a female candidate running, you must vote for the female candidate, unless, of course, that female candidate happens to be running as a Republican. In fact, it doesn’t matter if there is a female candidate running: if you have a vagina, you must vote for the Democratic candidate, or you are a traitor to your sex, a betrayer of all other vagina-endowed persons.

The Guardian article asked “whether voting by mail takes away the privacy of the voting booth and the ability for women to act on their beliefs without consequences.” Really? The 2018 Florida fiasco shows that the Democrats believe that voting methods away from the polling place, whether absentee, provisional or voting by mail, will provide a trove of votes for the Democratic candidates, not the Republicans.

The left simply cannot accept the notion that while white men are allowed to vote based upon whom they believe will benefit their families and themselves most economically, white women, or any woman for that matter, must vote Democratic, even if they happen to believe that the Republican candidate might be more helpful for their family and personal situations.

Perhaps, at bottom, the problem is that the left is so heavily single. Though almost everyone wants to couple up — that’s simply an inborn human trait — the ones who haven’t been successful at that seem to have little understanding how couples behave. For married women, and married women have been voting heavily Republican for years, it is the financial status and stability of the couple together rather than the woman individually which can be paramount.

For so many on the left, that very simple concept is utterly baffling. And thus they have people like Rebecca Solnit, a long-time feminist writer who at least appears to be single — Solnit is her family’s name, and I could find no reference to her being married or ever having been married — being apparently unable to conceive of the economic and political unity that marriage can encourage. Husbands and wives tend to agree on things, simply because they are married to each other; they have a commonality of interests.

Leftism, socialism, liberal politics, progressivism, however you wish to label it, is the politics of defeatism, the politics which say ‘I’m not good enough, I need help, I just can’t make it in the world on my own.’ Conservatism is the belief that, whether individually or together, in marriage, we can succeed, we can survive, we can make it, regardless of what real life throws at us.

The left may have their occasional victories, but, in the end, it is a belief in defeatism, and eventually they will have to lose.
____________________________________
Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.