#RepealThe19th : The Latest Groan-Inducing Development of Election 2016
In case you don’t know, its an election year. The nation is coming together behind the candidate they feel is best fit for the commander-in-chief position. Overall it seems like a pretty good system: you register to vote, you support a candidate, you vote, someone wins. What happens when the only thing between your candidate and the Oval Office is something pesky like women’s suffrage?
The past few weeks have been wrought with conjecture and polls about who is well on their way in the race for 270. One in particular stood out from the rest. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s political opinion and polls blog, posted an article about how the vote would be very different if only women voted and if only men voted in November’s presidential election. It is an interesting concept that went very wrong.
These two maps tweeted by Silver show Hillary Clinton winning in a monumental landslide if only women voted and Donald Trump overcoming the current odds against him if only men voted.
Enterprising and devoted Trump supporters came up with the perfect solution: #RepealThe19th. “The 19th” refers to the 19th amendment of the United States Constitution granting suffrage to white women. It was ratified in August 1920 but its run its course, according to a small segment of the internet. Bustle, NY Daily News, Buzzfeed, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, and many others had a field day analyzing if this was only a joke or something more serious. They decided its a little bit of both.
Over 167,000 posts were shared on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and mainstream news outlets about #RepealThe19th. Seventy-one percent of the sentiment around this troll-like hashtag is negative. Users cite the incident as the most recent display of societal misogyny.
The 28% of postings coded as positive around this hashtag are wrought with sarcasm.
#RepealThe19th is the latest gender-related scandal facing Mr. Trump in the past week. The Trump Tapes were released with damning recording of the presidential candidate speaking about women in very crass and shockingly inappropriate terms. Shortly after women competing in Trump-sponsored pageants have also come forward about his brutish behavior. Will he ever catch a break? Maybe once women’s voting rights are cast over that wall along with immigrants and hot mics.
