It’s long been subjectively noticed that people are especially hostile toward Hillary Clinton on social media. A few days ago, the Washington Times attempted to objectively measure it. First they discovered that Hillary Clinton is portrayed much more negatively on social media than Bernie Sanders, and that most of the negativity seems to be coming from the right, not the left.
The words associated with @HillaryClinton are far more negative than those associated with @BernieSanders. Only nine words associated with Sanders are negative in tone, and 40 are positive. Just eight words associated with Clinton are positive, and 53 are negative. However, most of the negative words directed at Clinton — such as “Benghazi,” “injustice,” “jail,” “emails” and “unborn” — are associated with longstanding rightwing claims and do not point to specific critiques coming from the left. Indeed, just two of the words associated with @HillaryClinton – “Goldman” and “donors” — are tied to complaints commonly offered by progressives (in this case the claim that Clinton is cozy with Wall Street elite). And both of these words fall near the bottom of the top 100 rankings (at 97thand 98th, respectively).
Secondly they discovered that there was a definite sexist undertone to the negativity surrounding Hillary Clinton.
only 12 words associated with @BernieSanders carry gendered meaning. None were negative, and three of the four positive words refer to Sanders’s prowess on the basketball court. In contrast, among the 29 gendered words associated with Clinton, 13 carry a negative connotation, including several related to her husband. Indeed, the vast majority of the tweets mentioning Bill Clinton either blame Hillary Clinton for, or suggest her complicity in, her husband’s sexual misdeeds... Most of the negative words in this group are consistent with misogynistic claims, and several are particularly disturbing (e.g., “vagina,” “b*tch”). To understand these dynamics even further, we searched all tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton for any term from a set of 30 common gendered slurs, such as “bimbo,” “slut,” “whore,” and “shrill.” (A number of these slurs are too crude to mention.) We then hand-coded all of the tweets in which these slurs appeared, assessing whether the insult was indeed directed at Hillary Clinton.
Why is the political climate so hostile toward Hillary? An excellent article in Quartz hypothesizes that it’s because we don’t like woman who ask for power. We like women when they ARE in charge, but not WHEN they ask for it.
Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.
Apparently this same pattern can be seen with other women politicians including quite recently with Elizabeth Warren.
even progressive demigod Elizabeth Warren was seen as “unlikable” when she ran for the Massachusetts senate seat. Local outlets published op-eds about how women were being “turned off” by Warren’s “know-it-all style”—a framing that’s indistinguishable from 2016 Clinton coverage. “I’m asking her to be more authentic,” a Democratic analyst for Boston radio station WBUR said of Warren. “I want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring school marm.”
Once Warren made it to the Senate, she was lionized—right down to a Clinton-esque moment in which supporters begged her to run for President. Yet seeing Warren engaged in the actual act of running seems to freak people out.
As a study published by Harvard University notes:
When participants saw female politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having less communality (i.e., being unsupportive and uncaring), while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking male politicians.
When female politicians were described as power-seeking, participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them.
Would winning the White House cause public opinion to change again in her favor? We just don’t know because NO woman has ever reached a level of power comparable to Hillary Clinton in the United States.