The GOP Response to the Kavanaugh Allegations Sends an Unmistakable Message to Women

To understand why women overwhelmingly support a Democratic takeover of Congress—a landslide majority of 65 percent, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey—it’s worth parsing some of the initial Republican responses to the sexual-assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. The remarks explain why, on the cusp of the first national elections of the #MeToo era, Republicans on the ballot are confronted with a gender gap that threatens to become an unbridgeable canyon.

After Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical-psychology professor, put her name to the accusation, announcing publicly that she’d passed a polygraph and had shared her story in a 2012 therapy session, Senator Orrin Hatch, a longtime that even if the assault accusation were true, the past wouldn’t matter so much: “It would be hard for senators not to consider who he is today.”