The Washington Post reports:

[Miranda Murphey] is 39, a high school English teacher with a PhD and part of a voting demographic whose rebellion could upend the political map of the country: not just suburban women, not just white suburban women, but white suburban women in the South, whose loyalty Trump will need to remain in power.

It is the kind of loyalty that has always been expected of white Southern women, who have long played a role as allies of the status quo. This was true during the days of slavery, then the days of segregation, and held true when the women’s rights movement arrived and white Southern women joined the conservative movement instead, rallying to the slogan, “Stop Taking Our Privileges.” In all the decades that followed, it has been the votes of white Southern women that have defined and shored up the modern Republican Party.

Black women and Latino women consistently deliver huge margins to Democrats. And in the 2016 election, 52 percent of white women outside of the South voted for Hillary Clinton, according to a study by the University of Arkansas’ Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society.

It is white women in the Deep South who have remained the loyalists, the research showed, giving Trump 64 percent of their vote in 2016, a figure that did not include Miranda Murphey, who had first started reevaluating her politics after the election of Barack Obama, even though she had voted Republican.

“It was all the comments I kept hearing, like, ‘Change the channel, I don’t want to see that black face,’ ” she said. “It was always that he was black, not that he was liberal, not that there was a problem with some policy. I always thought being a Republican meant supporting the military and lower taxes, not being racist and ignorant.”

Then came Trump, who Miranda found so morally repugnant that for the first time in her voting life she wrote in the name of the Libertarian Party candidate and went to bed expecting that good and decent conservatives would do the same. She woke up realizing she was wrong. Church members had voted for Trump. Her parents had gone for Trump. [Her husband] Phillip: Trump.

And then came Liz, a new English teacher in her district who was outspoken and had a sticker on her cellphone with an image of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the word “Dissent.” She was not like anyone Miranda had met before, a Republican who’d become a Democrat and who described her Trump-era self as a “full-on rage machine.” [Continue reading…]