Why Women Might Care As Much About Abortion As Men Care About Coal
This shouldn't surprise anyone paying attention.
Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. During Kamala Harris’s curb stomp presidential debate, Trump praised the Supreme Court’s “heart and strength” when it denied more than half the country their reproductive freedom.
Trump and most Republicans seem to think they’ll pay no political price for this. The evidence supporting their belief is lacking. Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterms, primarily because of voter backlash to the Dobbs decision. Liberals flipped the Wisconsin Supreme Court in direct response to the state’s abortion ban. Voters in GOP-dominated Ohio passed an amendment protecting abortion rights in the state constitution. The very conservative Kansas even voted to keep abortion legal.
Other Republican states still have extreme abortion bans, including Iowa — where Ann Selzer’s final presidential poll showed Harris leading Trump by three points.
Yet, Republicans dismiss these trends. Scoffing at Selzer’s results, the Trump campaign reminded everyone in a flop-sweat-penned memo that Trump had done well with Iowa woman … in 2020, as if nothing had happened since then.
A recent poll even showed Harris within five points of Trump in Kansas. Now, she’s not likely to flip the state, but more than two-thirds of respondents in the poll said women “were in a better position than politicians to make decisions about abortion.” Women voters are speaking loud and clear, but it’s as if no one listens unless you’re a man or a lump of coal.
‘She badmouthed coal’
The day was March 13, 2016, and Hillary Clinton told a CNN town hall audience in Columbus, Ohio: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”
Now, just before that, she’d said, “I’m the only candidate [who] has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.” And immediately afterward, she said, “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”
However, it was that one unfortunate line that haunted her.
Later, at a May roundtable discussion in West Virginia, an out-of-work coal miner confronted Clinton about her past remarks: “How you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend. Because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.”
In a West Wing flashback scene, a dairy farmer confronts presidential candidate Jed Bartlet about a vote he made in Congress that cost him a lot of money. Bartlet appreciates his anger but doesn’t back down. (Watch below.)
“I put the hammer to farms in Concord, Salem, Laconia, Pelham, Hampton, Hudson. You guys got rogered but good,” Bartlet admits before explaining his reasoning. “Today for the first time in history, the largest group of Americans living in poverty are children. One in five children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, back-breaking, gut-wrenching poverty any of us could imagine. One in five, and they’re children. If fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received. Let me put it this way: I voted against the bill because I didn’t want to make it harder for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that. But if you expect anything different from the president of the United States, you should vote for someone else.”
The 2016 presidential campaign wasn’t fictional and Hillary Clinton wasn’t a man. So, of course, she apologized to the man who defined himself by his job like a David Mamet character.
“What I said was totally out of context from what I meant,” she said, attempting to clarify her point. “It was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”
The coal comment became part of a larger narrative that began during the Democratic primary and ended with Clinton losing the Rust Belt in November.
In mid-September, journalist Heather Long interviewed Charlie Saltkield, a longtime Democratic voter who had “done OK” during Barack Obama’s presidency but nonetheless planned to vote for Donald Trump.
“My dad was a coal miner. You can’t go against the coal miners. It’s my heritage,” Saltkield told CNNMoney over lunch at a Waverly, Ohio, diner (probably one of the first “Trump voter diner” interviews).
It’s weird that anyone would embrace a history of capitalist exploitation and black lung as their “heritage.” I acknowledge and respect my enslaved ancestors who died in bondage, but I still support “anti-slavery” candidates. Saltkield wasn’t even a coal miner, but his “heritage” is about more than a form of employment, which is why Clinton’s proposal for well-paying, non-carcinogenic clean energy jobs fell flat with these voters.
Coal mining is considered a traditionally masculine job — men in hardhats and dusty overalls already up and gone by five o’clock in the morning. Their wives waiting at home for them with a hot dinner. Trump vowed to save the coal industry, and while that was a lie like everything else he says, what he actually offered behind the bombast was preserving a way of life that Democrats like Hillary Clinton threatened.
American women would also like to preserve a way of life that’s been under steady attack since Trump took office. This way of life isn’t dependent on a dying industry or vanishing factory jobs. They simply want control over their own bodies, the self-determination that is a key part of a true democracy. Instead, thanks to a far-right Supreme Court, gerrymandered Republican legislatures are passing laws that render them second-class citizens. Rust Belt men might long for the “simpler” times when their working-class fathers could provide for a family of four, but women are left remembering the days when their mothers could access necessary medical care or cross state lines without taking a blood test.
‘Just transition’
Joe Biden briefly ran into trouble during the 2020 campaign when he dared suggest that some white men might have to adapt to a modern economy. At a New Hampshire rally, Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.” It’s not quite that simple, but it’s also not impossible. However, the media considered even broaching the topic like touching a political third rail.
Journalist Dave Weigel observed, “This sort of ‘just transition’ stuff was murder on Clinton in 2016 …” He added, “The ‘if you can throw a wrench, you can throw a ball’ analysis is the sort of thing you hear from well-meaning rich people who don't live in Appalachia.”
However, since the MAGA Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, American women have been told to ‘just transition’ from fully autonomous individuals to living incubators. Donald Trump has repeatedly told women that he’s their “protector” (whether they “like it or not”) and that under his rule, they “will no longer be thinking about abortion.” Biden and Hillary Clinton were accused of “elitism” for their “clean energy job/learn to program” proposals, but Trump and MAGA’s rhetoric about abortion isn’t even well-meaning. It’s dismissive and openly hostile. They insist that white women in particular will concern themselves with the issues male-dominated MAGA prioritizes — the border, crime, inflation … and trans people for some reason. Meanwhile, women are demonstrably less free than they were four years ago.
Today, let’s hope women send a unified message that MAGA can’t ignore.
As a woman, I approve this message
>>It’s weird that anyone would embrace a history of capitalist exploitation and black lung as their “heritage.”<<
Stephen, as a SC native, you undoubtedly know how lots of Southerners (especially men) are about their regional and familial heritage. I remember as a child seeing license plates featuring an old hillbilly with his rifle and rebel flag saying ‘Hell No, I Ain’t Forgettin’!’ To vote against one’s “heritage” means a betrayal of their grandpappies, who worked hard in the coal mine or on the farm to put food on the table and a non-leaky roof over their heads. It’s in the blood, perhaps particularly here in the Bible Belt, and very difficult to overcome.
>> Women voters are speaking loud and clear, but it’s as if no one listens unless you’re a man or a lump of coal.<<
Ain’t that the truth.
Thank you, Stephen, and tonight, may the best woman win.