2016 Postmortem

I believe, perhaps with a bias arising from my party affiliation, that most of the people who voted against Clinton because she's a woman are already in the Republican Party. In a race between two men, they would have voted for the Republican anyway. (In the hypothetical Sanders-versus-Palin or O'Malley-versus-Fiorina races, who knows? Some would uneasily stick with party while others might let their sexism override other considerations.) Many of them were probably making misogynistic posts on Facebook but their attitudes didn't cost Clinton any votes.

There are also some people who are independent or who tend to vote Republican, but who were influenced to vote for Clinton precisely to smash the glass ceiling. They voted for Clinton but would not have voted for a male Democrat.

In that connection, you mention women who've experienced being dismissed because of sexism, and who therefore "recognized the comments from those high to low who used misogynistic words to dismiss or disparage Clinton...." My speculation is that there was to some extent a backlash. These are the women who, I said, "remembered all the times they'd suffered from misogyny." That's why I said that some women who usually vote Republican defected this year; they voted for Clinton because they empathized with her. Do you think the comments you mentioned had at least some effect of that sort?

If we discount the dyed-in-the-wool sexists who would have voted for a Republican man against any Democrat, we're comparing two groups of swing voters for whom gender was a significant factor -- those voting for Trump, and those voting for Clinton. The net effect on the election depends on which group was larger (and, because of the Electoral College, where they lived). That's why I asked, in my first post in this thread, "Are there any hard data about the impact of the candidates' genders?" We can all speculate about the different factors but it would be nice to have something beyond speculation.

As for my alleged false equivalency, it was actually an analogy. For many voters, neither major-party candidate was perfect. If they're not going to stomp off and vote for a no-hoper Johnson or Stein, then they have to vote with at least some misgivings. People like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz criticized their party's eventual nominee during the primaries but then endorsed her or him anyway. Bernie's vote doesn't mean he agrees with Clinton that single-payer health care will never happen. Joe Manchin supported Clinton even though his views on gun control were much closer to Trump's. On the Republican side, some Republicans like Kelly Ayotte were so upset about Trump's attitude toward women that they refused to vote for him (Ayotte said she'd write in Pence), but many others expressed their disgust while voting for him anyway. The analogy here is that you can't pick out any one factor (emails, health care, sexism, gun control, whatever) and say that all 60-some million people who voted for that candidate were completely supportive of that candidate in all respects.