Two New York University professors conducted an interesting experiment to test this question: what if Trump had been female and Clinton had been male? Their assumption going in was that a male acting like Hillary Clinton did in the debates would have been perceived more positively.
Tad Cronn explains the experiment and its surprising (to leftists) results:
The idea was simple: Re-create a portion of the presidential debates, putting Hillary’s exact words into the mouth of a man and putting Donald Trump’s exact words into the mouth of a woman.
To isolate the gender factor as much as possible, the two actors hired even went so far as to copy each candidate’s posture, movements and inflections.
The professors hoped to show that Trump’s aggressive manner would not have been acceptable to viewers coming from a woman, while Hillary’s presentation would have won her fans if she were a man.
Upon showing the resulting video to audiences, the results were eye-opening. The male version of Hillary came across as an even bigger pompous jackass, while the female Trump won over viewers with her feistiness and courage.
“We both thought that the inversion would confirm our liberal assumption—that no one would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate,” said Professor Joe Salvatore. “But we kept checking in with each other and realized that this disruption—a major change in perception—was happening. I had an unsettled feeling the whole way through.”
Cronn closes with an intriguing thought:
I wonder, if anyone was brave enough to try it, if a similar experiment involving race would finally show liberals that, yes, it really was Obama’s policies that people hated.