Last night, while Donald Trump swept the five states that make up the ‘Acela Primary’ – Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island – Hillary Clinton fulfilled expectations, winning four of the five states. Bernie Sanders picked up only Rhode Island.
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Donald Trump performed as was predicted Tuesday night, wwinning the East Coast contests, and picking up delegates across five states. Ted Cruz managed to eek out only a single Pyrrhic victory, quoting Hoosiers – albeit incorrectly – in preparation for the next major Republican contest in Indiana.
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Unfortunately for Donald Trump, in the night’s biggest contest, Pennsylvania, only 17 delegates will go automatically to the winner. But Trump performed much better than expected in the state, and that should scare Cruz going into the latter months. Where Cruz was expected to pick up delegates, he lost all but a few to Trump. Kasich, who was, on Monday a worthwhile ally on the #NeverTrump battlefield, faded into nothing across the board.
But while Cruz and Kasich limp past the Acela primary and into Indiana and California, it’s Bernie Sanders who had the most disappointing night. The only Clinton rival left, he had much at stake on the East Coast. The final primaries will take place in Sanders-friendly territory, including Indiana and Oregon, but some small sign of success was required to keep him in the contest, even until then. Unfortunately for Sanders, a mere win in Rhode Island is not enough to keep him in this game with any expectation of influence.
All is not perfect for Clinton, however. While she pulled out wins in Tuesday’s most lucrative contests, Maryland and Pennsylvania, she’s still seeing double-digit dips in favorability. And her core constituency, women, are slowly fading from active participation in the Democratic primary. Last night, Trump took aim at Hillary’s core constituency, noting that he, too, could play the “woman card.”
According to a Gallup poll released on Monday, only 31% of women are following the current presidential contest “very closely,” down from almost 40% in March. And the fatigue is bipartisan: Republican men are 8% more likely to be following the election than Republican women, and Democratic men are 11% more likely to be following the election than Democratic women.
In its analysis, Gallup blamed the waning female interest on “the general absence of women as candidates for the major parties’ nominations.” Among Republican women, that might be true, but Democrats have the mother of all likely presidential nominees: Hillary Clinton, a woman. And not just any woman. Clinton has marketed herself for nearly a decade as the only woman capable of breaking the glass ceiling into the White House.
Perhaps, then, rather than not having enough female candidates to tickle the nation’s lady-brains, it’s the fact that the female candidate, Hillary Clinton herself, isn’t much beloved. A quick glance at Huffington Post‘s favorability tracker shows that her favorability has been in free fall.
And it’s not as if the candidates have been ignoring women. Sixty-one percent of Clinton’s ads mention women’s issues, as do 30% of Bernie Sanders’s and 17% of Ted Cruz’s.
Of all advertising combined — including SuperPAC advertising — 34% featured some talk on women’s issues as they are traditionally defined: abortion, birth control, pay inequality in the workplace, and equal rights. With ad buys now in the multi-millions, that means a huge chunk of campaign resources across both parties has been allocated to wooing women voters. And Hillary Clinton has made a point of being more focused on “women’s issues,” in an effort to be not just the first female president, but the first feminist one.
She’s trying so hard to woo women, you almost have feel sorry for her — almost. Just this week, rumors began circulating that Hillary Clinton was vetting women for vice president in an effort at an all-female ticket (Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is rumored to be among the top candidates), and Monday she announced that she’d appoint women to at least half of her Cabinet seats. She’s even pledged that her Supreme Court picks will focus on women and women first.
It’s possible that Clinton herself is misreading women. Simply asking women to vote for another woman because she’s female is a message that fails to resonate among younger feminists, who are looking more for a candidate who provides radical change somewhere other than in gender. They prefer someone in possession of ideas, and not a certain set of genitalia. They were “ready for Hillary” almost a decade ago and have now moved on.
Clinton is also running at a time where feminism itself is in upheaval. While she might have recruited Millennial “feminists” like Lena Dunham to stump for her in key states, the women showing up to meet the Girls creator were there to bask in her star power — and then turn around and vote for Bernie Sanders.
Millennial women consider “vote for me because I’m a woman” identity politics, they fight different battles than their mothers, and with many being born after the Clinton era ended, view Hillary Clinton’s behavior towards Bill Clinton’s alleged sex assault victims with a mix of awe and horror. And for a generation raised on the authenticity of social media, Hillary Clinton is embarrassingly inauthentic (at best). Her message just doesn’t resonate.
