How Trump’s condescending pitch to ‘suburban housewives’ blew up in his face in spectacular fashion: report
According to a report from the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s attempts to gain back voters in the suburbs — particularly women — has not only failed but has created a movement among the women the president condescendingly calls “suburban housewives” to see that he is defeated in November.
As the Beast’s Emily Shugerman explains, Donald Trump has a woman voter problem and he has been trying to make inroads in the suburbs by using racist dog-whistling to make a connection with what he undoubtedly only sees as white moms. And while his appeal seems to have fallen on deaf ears– if the polls are to be believed — his pandering has also created a backlash.
“If you search ‘suburban housewives’ on Facebook—between the pages dedicated to gossiping about the Real Housewives reality shows and one called ‘A group where we pretend to be suburban PTA housewives’ —you will now find at least eight groups dedicated to overthrowing Trump,” Shugerman reports. “The group descriptions and membership varies, but the message is the same: Trump cannot count on suburban women to pull him over the line this November.”
According to Loni Yeary Gentry, a stay-at-home mother of three in Kentucky, who created a “Suburban Housewives Against Trump” Facebook page, she was just reaching out to moms like herself and was surprised that some women she thought would be supporters of the president felt like she did.
“I think people may make assumptions,” she explained. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”
Pointing out that Trump won the suburban vote by 5 percentage points in 2016, where he is now losing, Shugerman notes that Trump and his surrogates — many of them women — are out pushing a “law and order” message that is not being welcomed with open arms, in part, because the suburbs are not as lily-white as the president thinks.
“Mary Hayes, the founder of a Facebook group called ‘The Real Suburban Housewives for Biden/Harris,’ pointed out a flaw in Trump’s logic: The suburbs are not dominated by the white women who so famously supported him in 2016. By trying to appeal to suburban housewives with racist comments, Hayes said, Trump is alienating a large part of the increasingly diverse group,” the Beast report states.
Hayes, a Black woman and mother of three from Northern Virginia dryly explained, “He might as well have said, ‘The white housewife will be voting for me because I kept the low income [people], or the minorities, or however you want to say it, out of your neighborhoods. You cannot want to get the vote of somebody and discard certain people in that same community.”
According to Jaime Spataro who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs and hosts a “Suburban Housewives for Biden/Harris” group with 2,400 members, Trump’s view of women like herself is offensive.
“When I hear the term ‘suburban housewife,’ I think of a woman in a dress with an apron in the 1950s, vacuuming with a cocktail ready for her husband when he comes home after work at 5:30,” she explained. “That’s so antiquated and out of date.”
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