President Trump’s decisive victory Tuesday is forcing Democrats to explain their loss — and they’re turning to a familiar scapegoat: white women.

“Black voters came through for Kamala Harris. White women voters did not,” Joy Reid said on MSNBC. “If people vote more party line or more on race than on gender and protecting their gender, there’s really not that much more you can do.”

“Can’t believe I actually had faith in other white women to choose our collective reproductive rights over their own whiteness. Naïve and dumb,” Majority Report’s host, Emma Vigeland, posted to X.

 The New Republic ran a story with the headline, “How White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats — Again.”

As a white woman, I have this advice: The more you blame us, the further you’ll drive us from the Democratic Party.

Trump won 53 percent of the white female vote to Vice President Harris’s 45 percent, according to exit polls. Much of this win came from white women without a college degree, who preferred Trump by 28 points.

Among college-educated white women, Ms. Harris won 57 percent of the vote to Trump’s 41 percent. For an election in which the gender and educational divides were supposed to be the defining factors — and Ms. Harris’s path to victory — this 16-point lead is better than President Biden or Hillary Clinton managed, but not good enough.

Much ink has already been spilled on why the Democrats lost the working class, men, people without college degrees, and, most recently, Latino men. Here is why they didn’t win college educated white women in a blowout. If the party is going to do an autopsy and not just blame racism and misogyny, they should listen.

Abortion is not enough. We may not like the restrictive abortion laws in places like Texas, but there are other, more pressing issues to us. When Trump promised not to sign a nationwide abortion ban, many of us believed him. Trump likes to win. Restricting abortion has not been a winning issue for Republicans.  

How many abortion ads can you watch on YouTube before they start to feel as trite as the accusations Trump’s a fascist? The Democrats didn’t seem to be offering much else.

Grocery Prices are too high. Women generally buy the groceries for their families. Being told repeatedly that the economy is strong feels like gaslighting.

Transgender issues with children. A friend in New York City who voted Republican for the first time this year listed transgender participation in women’s sports as a top reason.

“Pro woman,” she texted me about the Democrats, “except letting men take trophies and physically harm women in sports during competition and then calling them bigots when they call for safe and fair competition.”

Parents with children in middle and high school are worried about the rise in children identifying as trans. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump won Gen X voters, this parent demographic. The issue is not theoretical to them.

Democrats have refused to confront the growing evidence that puberty blockers are not reversible, that children change their mind about a lot of things, and that America should take a page from Europe and hit pause on medical transitions for minors.  

Covid lockdowns. This same group of parents watched their children suffer through remote school and mask mandates. Covid vaccine mandates for teens to play school sports sent one friend over the edge. They blame Democrats for the most draconian rules.

Immigration and Crime. There is a migrant intake center at the end of my old block in Manhattan. The local park turned into a waiting room for mainly African migrants last spring. Then there were a few shootings in the park. A friend told me the city started to feel out of control during Covid and has struggled to recover since. Democrats opened the borders.

RFK Jr. as a bridge to Trump. I know a handful of women who voted for Trump because they supported Mr. Kennedy. They liked his focus on eliminating additives and dyes from food. Covid also radicalized a subset of crunchy mothers on vaccines. These are not conservative ideologues.

Identity Politics. People are sick of it.

These same issues are now being talked about by Democratic strategists to help woo back men and other groups the party lost. Yet pundits like Sunny Hostin of the View dismiss white women who voted for Trump as “uneducated.” The Harris campaign told us to lie to our husbands about our vote — as if we’re all subservient trad wives in semi-abusive relationships. This condescension is off-putting. Instead of blaming white women, Democrats can look in the mirror.