What’s Behind College-Educated, Suburban Women Flipping To Democrats

• 2018

What’s Behind College-Educated, Suburban Women Flipping To Democrats

These women who reside in wealthy suburbs are an odd group. Sometimes they vote on the economy, but their loyalty to the pocketbook only goes so far.

NOVEMBER 7, 2018 By D.C. McAllister

Suburbs in Northern Virginia, New York, and New Jersey, among others across the nation, swung for the Democrats in the midterms, securing their control of the House. College-educated white women in these areas are being credited for the win, giving credence to the women’s movements that have dominated the headlines for the past two years. But this is only part of the story.

These women who reside in wealthy suburbs are an odd group. Sometimes they vote on the economy, but their loyalty to the pocketbook only goes so far. If they think their equality is threatened or health care won’t be available to everyone, they’ll abandon the economy in a heartbeat.

In the 2018 midterms, exit polling showed that voters’ main concern was health care—a whopping 40 percent. Immigration came in second at 23 percent, followed by the economy at 21 percent. Given the Republicans’ goal to whittle away at Obamacare and the notion that this will leave people without coverage or access to health care, it’s not surprising that these women weren’t inspired by the economy to keep the Republican agenda going.

Another issue that affects how many women vote is fear of inequality. For two years, activist groups and politicians beat the drum that the Republicans are threatening women’s rights. New Supreme Court justices could mean overturning Roe v. Wade. Free birth control might end with changes in health care. The Me Too movement created an environment of fear that men are predators, especially those in the Republican Party.

The rhetoric of Trump as sexual deviant in chief filled the pages of women’s magazines. Protests, pussy hats, celebrities wailing about the dehumanization of women even as they objectified themselves rained down on female voters, enlivening their allegiance to equality, even when it’s not actually being threatened.

These two issues, along with hatred of Trump, drove these women to vote blue. They despise Trump, and they always have. They voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, 51 percent to Trump’s 45 percent. Some were Never-Trumper Republicans going for other candidates. They are, at the core, elitist. They didn’t like him then, and they don’t like him now.

Their feelings about Trump negated any objective judgment of his job performance or recognition that his policies and programs have benefited them greatly, including a strong economy and greater security for our nation. Emotionalism won the day.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won this group over Obama by six points because they had catapulted the economy to the top of their concerns. Many college-educated wealthy white women weren’t swayed by the war on women narrative at that time, nor were they concerned about health care as much, although it was still high on the list. They weren’t too worried; after all, Romney had instituted government health subsidies in Massachusetts.

Romney also soothed their elitist sensibilities. He was dignified. Their feelings could take a back seat to objective concerns because those fires weren’t stoked effectively enough to deter them. This wasn’t true for all women at that time. Some were swayed by the “binders full of women” attack, but not all.

This changed both in 2016 when they supported Clinton and even more significantly in 2018 when they flooded the polls to usher in a Democratic House majority. As reported by Ronald Brownstein just before the midterms, “Over two-thirds of college-educated white women, an unprecedented number, said they planned to vote Democratic for Congress, according to figures provided by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta.”

But they weren’t the only ones. College-educated suburban white men who were also offended by Trump’s behavior showed up to kick out Republicans. “Just over half of college-educated white men preferred Democrats in the survey,” Brownstein wrote. “That represents a sharp swing from their usual congressional voting behavior: Democrats haven’t won even 40% percent of college-educated white men in any congressional election since 2008, according to exit polls.”

This combination of elitist voters who can go Republican under some circumstances but will vote Democratic if they’re offended or worried about inequities made a difference in key suburbs.

Additionally, some of the congressional districts that had previously been favorable to Republicans because they were mostly rural—a stronghold for Trump—were redrawn to include wealthy suburbs, shifting the vote Democratic. As reported by USA Today, a fifth of the districts now under control of the Democrats had been redrawn in Pennsylvania.

The changes weren’t trivial: Democrats increased their share of the vote by an average of 20 percent in the districts they flipped in the Keystone State. The biggest change came in the 5th congressional district, a sprawling, mostly rural district in central Pennsylvania. Democrats won an anemic 33 percent there in 2016. In 2018, with the new boundaries in place, they won over 65 percent of the vote.

The suburban slaughter in the midterms, therefore, can be attributed to three things: motivated college-educated white women who put their fears about women’s issues and health care over economic and national security; both college-educated white women and men who are personally offended by Trump’s personality and rhetoric; and redrawing of district lines to include these groups to curb Republican advantages.

It’s uncertain if Trump can do anything to attract these voters. Probably not. That ship has likely sailed. The best he can do is shore up his base for the next election. The rest of us—conservative women in particular, who don’t vote by feelings and unfounded fears—need to step up. It falls on our shoulders to educate our suburban sisters about the role of government in their lives, the dangers of government-run health care, and the lies of feminism regarding “inequalities” in America.

Denise C. McAllister is a journalist based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @McAllisterDen.

Photo Pxhere.com / CC0

2018 2018 Midterms feminism Midterms suburban women womenwomen voters

Judicial Watch EXCLUSIVE Interview w/ Caravan Member in Guatemala

Judicial Watch EXCLUSIVE Interview w/ Caravan Member in Guatemala

October 23, 2018

A 40-year-old Honduran who previously lived in the United States for decades and got deported is part of the Central American caravan making its way north. Judicial Watch is covering the crisis live from the Guatemala-Honduras border this week.
This interview occurred around 35 miles from the Honduran border near the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula where a group of around 600 men, ages 17 to 40, marched demanding that the U.S. take them in.

A 40-year-old Honduran who previously lived in the United States for decades and got deported is part of the Central American caravan making its way north. Judicial Watch is covering the crisis live from the Guatemala-Honduras border this week.

Twitter and AP are fake news

Twitter and AP are fake news

If you've ever wondered why it is that all coverage by the mainstream seems essentially the same, all you have to do is take a look at Twitter.

Twitter has become a mainstream press echo chamber in which the self-important journalists with blue check marks beside their names decide what stories are important and what is the proper politically-correct slant to put on them. Independent journalism in the mainstream media — that journalism where editors in the newsrooms were driving the journalists to do their best work and "scoop" the other media outlets rather than conspire with them — has long gone.




Twitter has become the lifeblood of professional journalists. Researchers Shannon McGregor of the University of Utah and Logan Molyneux of Temple University engaged in a study to find out whether that's a bad thing.

As the Columbia Journalism Review points out:

"Our results indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment," the researchers write. "For journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications." Among those implications, they argue, is that journalists can get caught up in a kind of pack mentality in which a story is seen as important because other journalists on Twitter are talking about it, rather than because it is newsworthy. The researchers argue it can also distort the way a story is reported. For example, when the photo of Chris Christie looking uncomfortable while standing behind Donald Trump in 2016 was published by the AP, Twitter exploded with jokes, and multiple news outlets wrote about it, but those familiar with Christie said there was nothing unusual about his expression.

But one aspect of the study was interesting. Two-hundred Twitter-using journalists used as subjects for the research were given tweets with headlines from the Associated Press website and what they supposed were random tweets that contained AP headlines but were designed to look like tweets from anonymous sources. When asked to rate the newsworthiness of the tweets, journalists who spend a lot of time on Twitter ranked the "anonymous" tweets as more newsworthy than the AP stories; indicating even mainstream journalists recognize that AP is fake news.

Russian bots still at work

Despite Twitter's efforts to crack down of fake accounts — in which Twitter is purging conservatives and alternative media from its platform — the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the users and accounts alleged to have spread "misinformation" during the 2016 election are still active.

"Twitter has absolutely taken some measures to take some sites down, but they have not taken the vast majority of what we looked at down," one of the researchers told Politico.

The study also noted that more 30 mainstream news outlets — including NPR, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed — had posted stories with embedded tweets from the Russian "troll farm," Internet Research Agency.

Fake Dead Sea Scrolls

The Museum of the Bible opened to much fanfare in Washington, D.C.,last year It is the largest privately-funded museum in the city. Its funding comes from 51,000 donors, the largest of which is Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts chain founded by the conservative Christian Green family.

Among the Green family's donations are about 1,000 biblical artifacts from its collection of 40,000 ancient artifacts, which is said to be among the world's largest biblical collection in the world. The Green's donations include items from Dead Sea scrolls to ancient copies of the Bible thought to be more than 1,000 years old.

But it turns out some of them are fakes. Last week the museum revealed that five of its most highly-coveted Dead Sea scrolls are forgeries, and other scroll relics from its collection may also be phonies.

As ScienceAlert.com reports:

According to the museum, independent tests by researchers in Germany indicate five of the institution's 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments "show characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin". "Though we had hoped the testing would render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artefacts," explains the museum's chief curatorial officer, Jeffrey Kloha.

It's not known how much the Museum of the Bible paid for its forged fragments, but estimates run into the millions.

The five identified forgeries have been removed from display and replaced with three others. But the authenticity of those has also been questioned.

This is not the first controversy surrounding the Green family's collection. Last year Hobby Lobby agreed to pay a $3 million fine and forfeit thousands of ancient Iraqi artifacts that federal prosecutors claim were smuggled illegally from the Middle East.

Who's really in that "migrant caravan"

To hear the mainstream media tell it, the migrants currently marching northward in anticipation of picking vegetables, waiting tables in Mexican restaurants, making up hotel room beds and roofing houses in the United States are simply everyday Honduran/El Salvadoran/Guatemalan moms, pops and kids — but mostly moms and kids — eager to march 1,400 miles for a better life. And while there are some of those in the group who, as Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández described it, were fooled into joining the northward trek, many more of them are men with criminal histories and past deportations who are aggressively demanding the U.S. take them in.

Judicial Watch found some of them in the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula. The men were aged 17 to 40 and some of them were chanting "vamos para allá Trump!" (We're coming Trump) as they clenched their fists in the air while marching.

"We need money and food," said a 29-year-old man who made the trek with his 21-year-old brother.

Another man in his 30s contradicted media reports that caravan participants are fleeing violence and fear for their life. "We're not scared," he said waving his index finger as others around him nodded in agreement. "We're going to the United States to get jobs."

Guatemalan intelligence officials confirmed that the caravan that originated in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula includes a multitude of Special Interest Aliens (SIA) from Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, as well as other criminal elements and gang members.

The fake news AP is reporting that about 1,700 of the original group of migrants have given up, turned around and gone home, but many vowed to drag their kids all the way to the U.S. despite the obstacles. 

Planning for the Invasion

Originally published at Fox News   By Newt gingrich

As of Tuesday, the caravan of now more than 7,000 Central American invaders trekking through Mexico toward the United States was roughly 1,000 miles from the nearest point of entry. A second group of roughly 1,000 is also seeking to join them.

They may still be weeks away from our border, but this leaves little time for President Trump, Congress, and all Americans who care about our national sovereignty and the rule of law to solve three incredibly pressing challenges. I discussed these on Monday on Facebook.

First, we must determine – and do – what we can right now to end this invasion before it reaches our doorstep. Second, we must develop and execute a cohesive, efficient, effective plan for preventing these invaders from illegally crossing our border and swiftly deporting those who are successful. Finally, we must fix the debilitatingly stupid amalgam of immigration laws, policies, and court rulings that enable and encourage migrants to band together and stage these types of illegal invasions.

Newt Live: The Caravan Invasion

Should we fail to solve any of these problems, our already dysfunctional immigration system will be further crippled, our relationships with Mexico and our Central American neighbors could be severely damaged, our border will be overwhelmed by droves of new migrants, and America will become significantly less safe.

If this caravan is allowed to get through, the next caravan will be even bigger – and the one following that will be enormous. According the Gallup World Poll, 29 percent of people who want to migrate from Latin America and the Caribbean want to make the United States their permanent homes. That is 37 million people who want to come here. We must demand and ensure that they do so legally.

The clearest answer to alleviating this issue while the caravan is still in Mexico, is for Mexico to stop it. President Trump has already made clear that securing the border is more important than our recent trade agreement with our southern neighbor, and Mexico should take him seriously. Many of the members of this caravan forced their way through the Guatemala-Mexico border. They are already in violation of Mexican law, and Mexican law enforcement should take action.

Furthermore, we should not underestimate the degree to which human traffickers and transnational criminal gangs, such as MS-13 and other cartels, are involved with this invasion force. Mexican authorities should also be seeking to weed these elements out of this migrant army – and dealing with those who may have legitimate asylum claims through the Mexican system.

Our neighbors must understand that while they did not assertively deal with this problem at their southern border, they will own the problem if it gets to their northern border.

This relates to what we must do if or when the caravan is allowed to arrive at the U.S. border.

President Trump should instruct the Attorney General to issue a clarification to define the qualifications for asylum. Asylum is meant to provide protection for people who are fleeing real persecution and human rights abuses, such as genocide. Simply being from a poor country that lacks opportunities does not qualify someone for asylum.

We already have approximately 750,000 backlogged asylum cases, and some of those cases date back to 2014. These invaders should be screened (preferably in Mexico) so they never enter the U.S. system.

The federal government should also immediately begin coordinating with local and state governments along the border to develop an organized, completely nonviolent system that can deter these migrants from crossing into the United States and process and return those who do within a matter of days – not weeks, months, or years. I know Texas already works with federal officials to prepare for mass migration events. Other border states should follow suit (if they don’t already) and begin preparing now for this caravan’s potential arrival.

If we are serious about preventing this caravan invasion from being imitated, we must overwhelm them, stop them in their tracks, and quickly return them to their home countries. By my estimate, we should have four to five U.S. forces for every member of the caravan. If we want to protect our country, our border, and our rule of law, we must mobilize so much force that we don’t have to use it.

The news media should be allowed to cover the preparation and the overwhelming response to the caravan, so the members of the caravan – and every potential caravanner across Central and South America – will see that their plan will not work.

These first two problems are urgent and difficult. The third problem is just as urgent – but it is an order of magnitude more challenging. That is figuring out how we must fix our failing immigration system so that this type of situation doesn’t arise again.

Our immigration system has been completely broken by Democrat-backed laws that make it easier for immigrants to flood our system and stay in our country while their cases take years to process. It has been further hobbled by activist judicial rulings that have tied the hands of border enforcement officials and prevented them from keeping track of those who cross the border illegally.

Once we deal with the immediate problem of this invasion caravan, Republicans and the White House must work to fix our broken immigration system once and for all.

Giving Away Money Won’t End Poverty, but It Will Destroy Something Special About America

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman

One of the left’s hot new policy ideas is simply to give money to everyone to end poverty.

And of course, California is leading the charge.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., proposed a national plan last week that would give families making under $100,000 a tax credit of $500 per month, which adds up to $6,000 a year.

Harris’ plan, though vague on details, is quite similar to a policy idea that’s becoming increasingly popular.

Universal basic income, or UBI, has a wide variety of supporters from radical leftists to tech CEOs. It’s essentially a no-strings attached money giveaway to ensure that nobody falls below the poverty line.

Even a few conservative and libertarian-leaning thinkers, like Charles Murray, argue that the universal basic income could be an improvement over the current welfare system. Their reasoning is that it essentially does a better job of cutting out bureaucratic middlemen—though that rests on the unlikely assumption that all other welfare programs would get eliminated.

Proponents of UBI argue that it will stave off the effects of automation and provide an efficient way to prevent poverty in the turbulent, globalized economy of the future. The idea is that middle and working-class jobs will simply disappear, leaving wide swaths of society unable to make ends meet.

It has certainly been gaining steam as a serious policy proposal.

Stockton, California, is set to roll out a UBI program in November, though it will generally be limited to a few families. Other cities might experiment with it too. Chicago aims to be the largest city to try such a program.

Even former President Barack Obama jumped in on the idea and voiced support for a basic income in a July lecture in South Africa.

But the concept of the universal basic income isn’t a new one. It has been tried already and hasn’t exactly met the grand expectations of its advocates.

Finland launched a basic income program in 2017, which was set to run for two years. It gave 2,000 unemployed people a monthly income equivalent to $678 with no strings attached.

The program was ditched before it was ever completed.

One of the primary reasons Finland pulled the plug is that taxpayers simply became fed up with paying people not to work—especially with the looming threat of huge tax increases to enlarge the program.

As The New York Times noted: “Many people in Finland—and in other lands—chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work.”

In addition, taxpayers balked at a 30 percent tax increase that was suggested to make the program universal.

A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggested that the program would require a 30 percent tax increase to be made universal, and that it would actually raise Finland’s poverty rate from 11.4 percent to 14.1 percent.

Unsurprisingly, people love giving away money until they realize they are the ones footing the bill.

After just a year, the Finnish government put a halt to the program and added basic work requirements to unemployment benefits to encourage recipients to find a job.

But one op-ed in The New York Times denied that UBI was the problem, arguing instead that Finland simply failed to implement it correctly. The authors wrote that if the government had just expanded the program, it all would have succeeded.

This is a pretty common fallback for all of those who prefer big-government solutions to solve all of our problems.

But, as President Ronald Reagan once said, “the more the planners plan, the more the plans fail.”

Given the bad early warning signs from the program, it makes sense to pull the plug and not risk a catastrophic and incredibly costly failure.

The U.S. has also experimented with basic income policies. The federal government created a test program used across many states in the 1970s. The result was that they created a disincentive to work, and wages dropped.

A study of the results found: “For each $1,000 in added benefits, there was an average $660 reduction in earnings, meaning that $3,000 in government benefits was required for a net increase of $1,000 in family income.”

Currently, most basic income proposals are at the local level, but some argue that it would be a good idea on a national scale.

Of course, creating such a program would be astronomically expensive.

One estimate by the investment management firm, Bridgewater Associates, put the cost at $3.8 trillion per year if each citizen is to get a basic income of $12,000, according to the New York Post. The entire current federal budget is just over $4 trillion.

The largest problem with the basic income is ultimately not the cost, but its potential impact on American culture. What happens after we’ve had a generation, or multiple generations, being rewarded for not working?

Certainly, we’ve seen this problem with welfare in general, which is why we’ve seen a continual push for work requirements which have successfully moved able-bodied adults off the public dole and back into the workforce.

Giving a check to every American, regardless of need or situation, risks creating a kind of warehoused society whereby one class of people works while the other skates by mostly on public money, seeing no incentive to work and better their condition and status.

The Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler said it best, calling UBI essentially the gateway drug to socialism.

“Progress is about incentives,” Kessler wrote. “The reason UBI will fail is the cycle of dependency built into it. It is a gateway drug to collectivism. Turning the U.S. into Venezuela is a universally bad idea.”

If something like this were implemented on a national scale, it would pull us far away from the culture of hard work and the self-made man that has defined the best in American civilization.

Trump’s Proposed Rollback of Transgender Policy Is Good News for Many Who Are Suffering

By Walt Heyer  The Daily Signal

Thank you, Mr. President, for moving to make male and female great again.

In the last few years, biological girls have seen their rights violated in school bathrooms and in sports. National confusion has ensued ever since the previous administration decided to reinterpret Title IX’s sex anti-discrimination clause to include self-proclaimed “gender identity.”

That may soon come to an end under the Trump administration.

The Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a memo that would reverse the Obama administration’s action and return the legal definition of “sex” under Title IX civil rights law to what its authors meant: sex rooted in unchanging biological reality. According to The New York Times, the memo was drafted last spring and has been circulating ever since.

Title IX bans sex discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, meaning schools have to abide by the government’s interpretation of Title IX or risk losing federal funds.

When the Obama administration announced it was including “gender identity” under the word “sex,” many schools felt they had to treat gender identity as the standard for determining access to bathrooms, sports teams, etc. The result was headlines like “Transgender Athletes Dominate High School Women’s Sports.”

The memo spells out the proposed definition of “sex” as applied to federal statutes as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” The proposed definition won’t include a “select a gender” option, as was offered under the Obama administration.

>>> A Former Transgender Person’s Take on Obama’s Bathroom Directive

This is simply a return to reality. Sex is an immutable biological reality, while gender identity is a social construct that can change over time. The two terms are not interchangeable. The authors of Title IX meant biological sex, not gender identity.

The Obama administration’s conflation of the two was not just legally problematic—it also pushed transgender ideology further into the mainstream. That’s regrettable, because transgender ideology has real and harmful effects on people who are suffering and need help.

When individuals try to live out life in an ideology that has no basis in biological fact, the consequences are stark.

I know, because I lived the trans life for eight years.

I have received hundreds of regret letters from trans people who now realize—too late—that gender-pretending is damaging. Regretters have called gender change “the biggest mistake of my life.” The late transgender movie actress Alexis Arquette called her gender transition “bulls***” because no one can really change their gender.

So many have written me personally about the unhappy consequences of imitating the opposite gender for so many years, telling of lives needlessly torn apart and thoughts of suicide. I put those emails into a book, “Trans Life Survivors,” which shows the human toll caused by encouraging distressed people to undergo permanent surgeries and take powerful hormones without considering other causes and treatments.

>>> My ‘Sex Change’ Was a Myth. Why Trying to Change One’s Sex Will Always Fail.

This past weekend, I opened my email as I do each morning and found another message from a person who had ignored biology and went head-first into trans ideology. Now, this person wants out:

I am now 40 years old, post op male to female transgender person. And to put it simply, very miserable in life now. I have followed you on YouTube … and totally agree with your theories! I am at my wits’ end with life and what I have done to myself. It’s an inspiration to see and read about what I would call “survivors!”

Many trans folks, after years of “living the life,” now want to detransition. Many report to me that they were sexually abused, raped, or molested at a young age—in one case, as a toddler.

Teenage girls are flocking to gender change as an escape. One 15-year-old girl, who the gender experts diagnosed with gender dysphoria, explained to her mother that she wanted to “erase my past” because she was sexually abused by her dad.

In another case, a young 14-year-old girl confessed that “I used being trans to try and escape being scared about being small and weak. I thought that if I presented myself as a man I’d be safer.”

Another girl’s mother wrote that her daughter was raped at age 19 and desperately “is trying to remove any connection to her being female visually or sexually.”

This is the kind of suffering that has driven many to change genders. As a society, we need to honestly consider: Is changing genders an effective long-term treatment for past sexual abuse and feelings of insecurity?

Obviously not.

>>> I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery

Billy, another trans life survivor, had been sexually abused at age 11 during a summer swimming camp by his diving coach. Billy explained to me that after the abuse, he hated his genitalia and wanted to become a female. Abuse can do that.

Billy, like so many abused as children, was diagnosed by the “gender specialist” with gender dysphoria and given cross-sex hormones and reassignment surgery. He lived fully as a transgender female until regret set in.

Now he has detransitioned back to male and is married—a true trans life survivor who prefers to live a biologically authentic life.

Trans ideology ruined the life of another friend, born male and now living as a trans female. After being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, his excellent employment allowed him financially to transition from male to female. But sex change regret has set in, and now he wants to detransition.

This nice-looking, tall, slender, intelligent transgender person is another who had been sexually abused as a child.

Too many people tell me that even when they establish a history of sexual abuse and communicate that to the gender therapist, the therapist disregards it. If a client wants to change their gender, the therapist will affirm them without reservation and help them down that path.

As a former trans person, and as someone who daily receives stories of physical and emotional devastation wrought by trans ideology, I look forward to a federal definition of sex as being rooted in immutable biology, without the option of being self-selected.

The science is absolutely clear. Sex doesn’t change over time, even with hormones and surgery—and that’s a good thing.