There's more to the female vote than how offended we are.

As America recovers from last week’s shock election results that ended with a President-elect Donald Trump, the finger pointing is in full swing. If there’s someone poised to pick up a large share of the blame, it’s the white women who voted 53% for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump got a larger share of Latino and black voters than Mitt Romney or John McCain. Yet the story isn’t Hillary Clinton not being able to secure as much of their vote as Barack Obama. The story of the election is that Trump got a majority of the white woman vote. The blame game is strong. “How could they?” people wonder.
It’s a fair question. Many things that Trump said about women were offensive. But it’s strange that people focus only on women being offended. Trump said many offensive things about many people, including men. We don’t wonder how shorter men could have voted for him when he called Marco Rubio little. Why should women be insulted on behalf of other women more than men are on behalf of other men?
There’s also the continuing idea that women should all line up a certain way on “women’s issues.” But the fact is that women are split on a lot of them. Free birth control might sound nice, but there are real women paying much higher insurance premiums with Obamacare who understand there is nothing free about it. Women continue to be split on abortion. APew Research poll from April found that only 55% of women thought abortion should be legal “in all or most cases” and there’s a lot of gray area when we get into later term abortions.
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For many women voters in the states Hillary needed to win, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, the issue could be largely financial. Industry in these states has declined and Donald Trump has promised to bring back the jobs. Whether he can do it remains to be seen, obviously, but he spoke to their pressures and concerns.
Additionally, white women, particularly those with a husband or without a college degree, may have felt that there was no room for them on a Clinton agenda focused on so many other identity groups.
Late on election night a distraught friend had a Facebook post wondering what to tell her kids in the morning. I commented that we should keep it simple and make sure not to worry them, especially if the children are small. One of her friends responded to me: “Doesn’t sound like your kids are brown-skinned immigrants. This is a bigger deal for some of us.” And just like that I didn’t belong in the anti-Trump club. As a Never Trump Republican, I had spent the last year and a half agitating for Trump not to be the Republican Party candidate and then not to be the president. But my whiteness disqualified even my opinion on parenting. Never mind that my kids have two immigrant parents or the election had been a whirlwind of anti-Semitism for me in my Twitter mentions, complete with gas chamber references and sending me “back” to Israel. The line was drawn and I as a white (albeit Jewish) woman with white children was on the other side of it. How many white women in places like Michigan or Pennsylvania felt like that?
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As America comes to grips with its election our introspection should include who we are leaving out of the national conversation. There are clearly people hurting in our country who have felt ignored for too long. Those of us who didn’t want Trump need to be humbled by what we’ve seen and work harder to understand his voters. Dismissing them didn’t work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and it won’t work now.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist based in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter @karol.