Trump loses women voters bigly

WASHINGTON: Hell hath no fury like women scorned. US President Donald Trump is about to discover the power of this adage as female voters of every kind – urban, suburban, white, black, Hispanic. educated, working class – are moving in droves to Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who has Kamala Harris as his running mate.
The Biden-Harris ticket has established the biggest lead among female voters in modern US electoral history.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, Biden leads among all women voters by an average of 18.6 percentage points in the 46 national polls tracked by the organization, with the gap ranging from 23 points in a WashingtonPost-ABC poll to 9 points in an Economist poll. Even the sycophantic Fox News gives Biden an 18-point lead over Trump among female voters. One CNN poll gave Biden a staggering 34 per cent margin among women voters.
Trump continued but narrowing lead among men is not sufficient to counter the desertion by women, who constitute the larger voting block by gender in America. Eligible women voters have been outvoting their male counterparts since 1980, including by 4 percentage points in 2016, according to Pew Research Center.
Although Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016 by 15 points among women, paving way for a nationwide popular vote lead, Trump reached the White House by winning suburban white women, a plurality of whom voted for him in battleground states. Surveys and polls now indicate those women are saying adios to Trump, reducing him to begging for their votes.
"Suburban women, will you please like me?" Trump pleaded awkwardly at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, making feeble excuses for his coarse language, boorish behavior, and sexist outlook that have disgusted many women. "I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" he added peevishly, promising that he would hold up low-income housing coming next to their homes in suburbia in order to stop crime.
Going by the poll surveys, women are not impressed.
Anger is also great among black, Hispanic, and in Trump’s eyes, “foreign” women, several of whom he has denigrated in public and in tweets, calling them crazy, low IQ, mad etc., and often disparaging their looks. In White House briefings and press conferences, he has been transparently hostile to female reporters if they question him sharply.
Trump has reserved special invective for Kamala Harris, calling her a "monster" and a "mad woman" among other epithets. He was at it again at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Thursday, telling his cult following that the glass ceiling "broke" Hillary Clinton in 2016 and suggesting the same fate awaits Harris.
"And they talked about the glass ceiling, right?" the President said. "The woman breaking the glass ceiling. And it didn't work out that way. The glass ceiling broke (Clinton). But there will be a woman that breaks the glass ceiling. It just won't be Hillary. And you know who else it won't be? It won't be Kamala."
Trump has previously suggested his daughter Ivanka has it in her to be President. He did not spare Savanna Guthrie, a white NBC news moderator, who fact-checked him and questioned him sharply during a townhall on Thursday, suggesting he was dealing with a “crazy” woman.
While women, particularly minority women, constitute a strong Democratic constituency, Biden’s overall national lead of 10 to 12 points is also built on men who voted for Trump in 2016 decamping to the Biden side. A recent Pew survey shows 49 percent of men are supporting Joe Biden, compared to the 41 per cent Hillary Clinton received. While Black women went 94 per cent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden is doing 6 points better than Clinton among Black men. Among white men, Biden is doing 10 points better than Clinton did.
All the numbers suggest Trump is in for a rout. But as pollsters and pundits keep reminding everyone, it looked the same in 2016 before a perfect storm won three key battleground states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) for Trump by a combined 80,000, giving him an electoral college majority even though he lost the popular vote by a massive 2.86 million votes.
This time Trump believes he will win by a bigger margin because there is a silent majority that will turn up on election day – a constituency pundits call the "shy Trump voter" who is too embarrassed to admit to pollsters that he or she is voting for Trump given his antics.