Trumping Politics as Usual

Who is tougher? In many elections, candidates frame their appeals in gendered ways—they compete, for instance, over who is more “masculine.” This is the case for male and female candidates alike. In the 2016 presidential election, however, the stark choice between the first major-party female candidate and a man who exhibited a persistent pattern of misogyny made the use of gender—ideas about femininity and masculinity—more prominent than ever before. This book explores the Trump and Clinton campaigns’ use of gender as a political weapon, and how the presidential race changed the ways in which House and Senate campaigns were waged in 2016. The thesis of this book is that Donald Trump’s candidacy radically altered the nature of the 2016 congressional campaigns in two ways. First, it changed the issues of contention in many of these races by making gender more central to the general election campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans. Second, expectations that Trump would lose the election influenced how candidates for lower office campaigned and how willing they were to connect their fortunes to those of their party’s nominee. The fact that Trump was expected to lose—and was expected to lose in large part because of his sexist and other bigoted comments—caused both major parties to direct more of their resources toward congressional races, and led many Republican candidates—especially women—to distance themselves from Trump.