Women voters switching: the big driver behind Trump’s polling decline
After the VP debate Trump used the word “monster” to describe Kamala Harris. A Trump campaign adviser Harlan Hill tweeted during event that Harris was an “insufferable lying bitch,” . This was even too much for Fox news which has banned him from appearing.
All this, I’d argue, will help reinforce the big electoral dynamic of this campaign – seen in the Morning Consult polling in the Tweet above – the struggle the President has with women voters. Just about all the polls that show a gender divide have highlighted this and there is little doubt that if the 53% of Americans who are female did not have the vote his re-election would look a lot more likely.
Quite what the scale of the female anti-Trump vote will be is hard to say but this from Politico’s Tim Alberta: highlights the challenge,
Last week, I heard from one of the smartest Republicans alive, a longtime party operator who lives in a state Trump carried by double digits. He told me the polling he was seeing there was something out of a nightmare; these were numbers he never expected to see in his lifetime. The only thing more dizzying than that? I had another conversation, with another dependable red-state Republican, the very next day, and heard the very same thing.”..Both of these men were sounding the alarm, alerting me that Trump could actually lose their states, and would at the very least drag down a number of down-ballot Republicans, because women have turned on the GOP at a historic clip. Trump lost women by 13 points to Clinton, according to exit polls, and Republicans have long worried that the figure could climb into the high teens. There is now genuine worry that the margin could explode north of 20 points—the biggest gender gap in modern election history.
With just three and a half week left to go it is hard to see how the Trump team can recover with this segment of the electorate. This is not something that can be changed easily.