Okay, let's cut through the sanctimony and the phoniness for a second and talk about how most people, especially most male people, talk about beauty queens. Would you say their words are respectful, politically correct, and family friendly?
And what about Bill Clinton? Would you say that most people are able to talk about him for more than five minutes without mentioning his history of sexual affairs? Yeah, not so much.
Think about that before you join the chorus of Donald Trump detractors and even supporters who seem to be 100 percent sure Trump is dangerously getting off message by responding to Hillary Clinton's attacks connected to former Miss Universe Alicia Machado or threatening to bring up the many accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton by women Hillary subsequently trashed. As much as his comments about Machado are turning off female voters, and as much as his toying with the decision to bring up Bill's affairs seem off-topic to many others, these comments are likely helping Trump continue to connect and possibly even fire up male voters.
And it's male voters who have been underrepresented at the ballot box over the past few decades. In fact, the gap between female and male voter turnout has been widening. In 2008 and 2012, the number of women who came out to vote outpaced men by four percentage points after the gap had been mostly two percentage points for almost every other election before that for decades. This really translates into total voters, as women made up 53 percent of the total voter base in 2012 and men haven't been the bulk of the voters in any presidential election in 36 years. This is eerily similar to the shrinking white vote in America that Trump has tapped into.
To put it simply, a lot of men are staying home. One reason could be that the candidates for president from both parties have seemed to be a lot more interested in wooing female voters for a long time. Even in 2004, when much of the George W. Bush re-election campaign was based on supporting the war on terror and in Iraq, the campaign directed much of those efforts at so-called "security moms" as opposed to a uniformly hawkish and pro-military approach.
And remember that famous interview with Oprah Winfrey when Bush and his wife Laura made the strong effort to win over women voters by recounting the story of how Laura straightened him out when she told him he'd have to "choose between her and Jack Daniels? For every woman hoping to change their man for the better, and there are millions of them, that interview was pure gold.
