What if Trump/Hillary Genders Were Swapped?

[AUChizad]

This more of me preaching to the converted, but I found this fascinating.

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html

I recommend reading the whole thing, but I won't paste it all. Basically, NYU staged a debate with two actors reciting the Trump/Clinton debate, but with a man in the role of Hillary and a woman in the role of Donald. They acted out the debate verbatim including subtle mannerisms, etc. expecting female Trump's likeability to dramatically decrease and male Clinton's likeability to increase.

Exactly the opposite happened. Here's a snippet from it.

 

[GH2001]

And this is New York university?

And they admitted it?

Not to sound contrary but did they do this hoping perhaps the opposite would happen and it backfired a bit?

[wesfau2]

Very interesting stuff.

Would love to see the reactions from an audience not located on an "elite coast."

I think there's more at play here than just the candidates' personalities and mannerisms.  My uneducated guess is that the NY crowd is more accepting of a female perspective, regardless of message, and that a crowd in Enid, OK, would find the "female" Trump unpalatable.

I also disagree with the methodology: they tainted the response pool by telegraphing the personalities behind the message.  They should try picking some random sound bytes from each candidate and have the opposite gender deliver them for reaction.  The current setup brings too much baggage with the viewer to be scientific, in my opinion.

Total speculation, of course, and I'd love to see this experiment played out in multiple venues across the nation.

Not to sound contrary but did they do this hoping perhaps the opposite would happen and it backfired a bit?

I think that's very likely.

[Kaos]

Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression—his tendency to interrupt and attack—would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.