Amanda Carpenter is a contributing editor at Conservative Review and a CNN political commentator. Previouslyshe was communications director to Sen. Ted Cruz during his presidential campaing, and before that a speechwriter to Sen. Jim DeMint.
She has a piece up at The Washington Post that has the title One GOP woman wonders why the men in her party won’t defend her.
It is well worth reading. Carpenter remains a strong Conservative Republican. She makes clear that she will vote for down-ballot Republican, but leave a presidential selection blank.
Her focus is less on Trump than it is on the failure of the Republican party elders to listen to and apparently even to value women voters.
She begins by noting that Eric Trump tweeted out what an electoral map would look like if only men voted, to which she responds
It was a mistake, but fitting nonetheless. The way Trump has conducted his campaign, it’s as if the Republican Party would like female voters to fall off the map completely.
She recounts how she and other Republican women have for years attempted to defend the party against Democratic charges of being anti-women, then writes
What did we get for it? The nomination — by way of a largely older, male voting base — of a brazen and unapologetic misogynist.
And she is just getting started.
The very next paragraph reads
I want to ask the men leading the GOP some questions. Why didn’t you defend women from this raging sexist especially after so many Republican women — for so many years — eagerly defended the party from charges of sexism? You must make us out for fools.
She observes the apparent fear of party types of offending Trump supporters of whom she notes that they were
the types who showed up at rallies wearing T-shirts that said, “Trump that b—-” and “She’s a c—, vote for Trump.”
She immediately follows that with these words:
Somehow, in some amorphous but unambiguous way, it was decided that appealing to those voters was more important than appealing to women.
As for those who attempt to defend as Trump himself did his remarks on the Access Hollywood bus as locker room talk, she is even blunter in what she says of such Republican officials:
Perhaps, they should talk to some rape survivors. They need to hear what those women heard when Trump bragged about grabbing a woman’s genitals, aggressively kissing women without consent, and getting away with it because he’s rich and famous. That wasn’t boyish banter. That was a confession of assault.
One more quote, the very next paragraph:
If the GOP has truly convinced itself that openly engaging in sexual assault fantasies is something normal that men do among one another, I have a suggestion. Relocate the Republican National Committee headquarters into a men’s-only locker room. Eliminate all pretenses of wanting to let women in.
That would be back to the days where those locker rooms might be for the golf clubs where business deals were contracted and to which women were not admissable.
Carpenter rightly points out that not all men are like that, not even all Republican men. But in case anyone wants to excuse having supported Trump by saying they did not know how bad he was, she points out how much was already well known, both from his “smutty” tv and Howard Stern appearances and interviews in print, and from how he himself acted towards women during the primary campaign.
I share this because it indicates that even with Republican women who have not as a result switched to supporting Clinton and/or left the party, the Republican party has with the nomination of Donald Trump created a massive problems for itself with women.
Worth keeping in mind well after this election.
Oh, and one other note? Considering what we are seeing in polling data about white college-educated women moving away from Trump and to Clinton, and given how fierce Carpenter is about the party’s tone deaf approach to women, it is well worth noting the following list:
Maggie Hassan
Katie McGintey
Deborah Ross
Catherine Cortez Masto
Tammie Duckworth
Even if the Dems lose all the other competitive Senate races, if we win just those five it is a 50-50 Senate and with the vote of VP Tim Kaine we take control of the Senate.
Do women matter this election?
You’d better believe it.
And when Donald Trump is pissing off the Amanda Carpenters of the world so badly, the Republicans have a problem that does not go away after this election.