Pirate's Cove

Thomas B. Edsall wonders about the Democrats running on it in an opinion piece that is less opinion and probably more actually political news than most NT Times news stories. This also shows that Democrats will use anything to gain political advantage

Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?

Many think the issue of sexual harassment — embodied in the #MeToo movement — will work to the advantage of Democrats in upcoming elections. A mid-December NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey gave the party a three to one advantage over Republicans on the matter. But it is hardly guaranteed to do so.

Views of sexual harassment and of gender issues generally differ sharply by age, sex and partisan allegiance — all of which create substantial unpredictability. The issue has the potential to accelerate the growing discontent among well-educated white women with the Republican Party. But it could also intensify hostility to the liberal agenda among conservatives, particularly white men, many of whom view women’s complaints of discrimination as “an attempt to gain advantage” in the workplace.

This complex dynamic is illuminated, for example, in the work of Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, a psychologist at Tufts, who recently reported a growing divergence on gender issues between male and female voters under the age of 30.

I included that last paragraph because Edsall spends a lot of time going through this study, that study, other data, particularly among Democratic Party voter views. Some poo poo the idea of using #MeToo as it is not a unifying idea, others support it. We see that not as many Democrat males care about misogyny for real, and that calls of sexism and misogyny just do not have the power they once did. Even among women it can be polarizing.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and an expert on the politics of gender, is more optimistic about a positive payoff for Democrats than either Kam or Griffith. In an email, Lake argued that the issue of sexual harassment will motivate young and unmarried women to vote, that it has already helped restore Democratic loyalty among college-educated women and that it will improve prospects for women running for office.

Now, the one thing missing from all this is the notion that the majority of people who have been accused of sexual misconduct are, in fact, Democratic Party supporters. Many of them are big time Democrat donors. It looks like a huge swath of a major Democratic Party industry, Hollywood, is full of sexual harassers and predators. We’ve seen many in the liberal news organizations get accused and even lose their jobs over it. So, while Edsall ends with

In other words, what looks like a favorable climate now for Democrats is in fact highly volatile, particularly when the man in the White House likes to set bonfires.

he forgets to mention the danger of running on #MeToo when your donors are the very thing you’re running against. And, with Trump in office, you can bet he’d make darned sure that everyone knew that the majority of those accused are Democrats.