Poodle Bets on Women to Save Nation

Santa Barbara History, Early Voting Facts, and the Path to Victory

Sign Up to get Nick Welsh’s award-winning column, The Angry Poodle delivered straight to your inbox on Saturday mornings.

THE FAIRER SEX: As if women didn’t have enough on their plates already.

But here’s the deal: If the human race is to dodge the bullet of Donald J. Trump — our would-be Day One Dictator — it will be up to the women to save the species.

I know that’s asking a lot. But there’s some genuine reason for hope. And even some actual evidence to back it up.

So please shut up with all the double-reverse-body-English-rhetorical-top-spin whining so many people are indulging in — “He’s going to win!” — as if by wailing so, you can inoculate yourself from the radioactive kryptonite poisoning such a victory would entail.

Here’s the deal: Inoculation in that scenario is impossible.

Here’s the other one: Victory is.

Here’s the kicker: Trump is not going to win.

Women will save us.

If Donald Trump gets beaten at the polls next week, it’s because women voters got off their couches in record numbers and rescued the nation from a second Trump term. | Credit: Courtesy

I’d say trust me, but based on my track record in such matters, that might be ill- advised. But then, this might be the time I finally break pattern and get it right.

Here is another supporting fact: The issue of reproductive rights jumps all party lines. It has no lane in which it can be confined.

Here’s an old back-in-the-day story that proves my point.

Republican Michael Huffington may have been reviled as a carpetbagging interloper from Texas when he ran for Congress, but Huffington–briefly a Montecito resident–won because he said he was pro-choice. It would be the first time Santa Barbara would be represented by a pro-choice member of Congress. | Credit: Courtesy

In 1992, Santa Barbara Democratic women rallied behind an utter non-entity of a Republican named Michael Huffington to run for Congress. He allowed them to persuade him to take a pro-choice position. It took a while before he learned how to say the words. But he had motivated tutors. And it didn’t escape notice that Huffington had boatloads of family money to finance his own campaign.

The incumbent, a staunch Catholic Republican named Bob Lagomarsino, had amassed a 1,000 percent anti-choice voting record over a long career.

There was an actual Democrat running in that race too. A woman. She was also pro-choice and clearly the most experienced candidate. But she didn’t have the money, and she was not particularly likable.

So, the Democratic women weighed their odds and settled on Huffington, a Republican, who became the area’s first pro-choice congressmember.

He wound up spending $17 million out of his own deep pockets to get elected. He went to Washington, and then, for a host of bizarre reasons, he flamed out fast. Since then, we’ve sent nobody but pro-choice Democrats to D.C.

And Santa Barbara is not unique in the nation.

Ancient history aside, more women are currently registered to vote than men are. More women actually turn in their ballots. As a rule, they tend to vote more reliably, if not religiously, than their male counterparts. Early returns, so far, suggest that a lot more women have already cast and returned their ballots — and significantly more than were expected, more than their male counterparts. This is true nationwide; it’s also true in the so-called battlefield states.

No, we don’t know which way those ballots will go. They have not been opened up and counted yet. So technically, it’s premature to say that Trump’s goose is cooked. But I would suggest his feathers have been plucked; his skin scalded, greased, and lightly salted; and his wings trussed. The only thing missing is the gravy and someone to turn on the oven.

But Trump kind of did that his own self by selecting three Supreme Court justices with the very deliberate intention of striking down Roe v. Wade. And when that protection was repealed, it’s worth noting, the number of abortions actually went up, not down, since. In some places, by a lot. There are new prescription drugs that can be obtained through the mail.

At the same time — however counter-intuitively — the number of babies dying at birth has also increased in the years since Roe v. Wade was struck down. In many states, women now find themselves having to carry to term babies that were never going to make it, babies that would previously have been aborted sooner. These are driving the spike in child mortality.

The Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s description of Puerto Rico as a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean. But people of Puerto Rico will never forget how Donald Trump, then president, blocked hundreds of millions in disaster relief earmarked for Puerto Rico in 2017 after back-to-back hurricanes wiped out the island. Instead, Trump showed up for a photo op in which he tossed out rolls of paper towels to disaster victims. | Credit: Courtesy

You try going through one of those deliveries. You don’t forget it. And if the circumstances that make this necessary are born out of political calculation, chances are you don’t forgive it either.

Just look at Kamala Harris’s last hurrah held at the same Washington ellipse where Trump exhorted his followers to fight for his rights. There, they listened raptly and attacked the Capitol accordingly. One hundred and 40 cops got injured. One cop was killed.

But the first speakers at the Harris event were a young couple who — because of changes in their state laws — could not get an early-term abortion for a child who had no medical chance of survival. They were forced to deliver their daughter, only for her to die shortly after birth. They were still outraged.

By contrast, the first speaker at Trump’s shindig at Madison Square Garden was Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian who made the crack about Puerto Rico being a trash heap in the middle of the ocean. Hey, he specializes in doing roasts; that’s his schtick. First rule of comedy: Know your room. Hinchcliffe failed. Trump failed. Today, the only thing anyone is talking about is that trash heap joke. Nobody’s laughing. Least of all the half a million Puerto Ricans now living in Pennsylvania. And they can vote.

So maybe women will be spared from saving the world from four more years of Donald Trump. Perversely, it seems Trump might well have done their job for them.