WHITE SETTLEMENT, Texas — Pro-God, pro-guns, and pro-life. Breawny Gray Trammel has all the Christian values you might expect of a married mother-of-three in a traditionally deep-red Texas county who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
But she will not be voting for him next year.
“I want to be proud of my president,” she said, “and it’s hard to do.”
Her decision highlights a growing concern for Texas Republicans. Suburban female voters are moving away from President Trump, turning once reliably red counties into targets for Democrats, and sending strategists to rethink the messages and issues that can connect with women.
National figures show the extent of the gender divide. A Quinnipiac survey released on Monday found that 61% of women disapproved of the way Trump was handling his job while 35% approved.
In contrast, some 48% of men approved with 46% expressing disapproval.
For now, the Trump campaign and its Texas donors believe an appeal to the base will see them through 2020. A sophisticated data and voter registration operation will identify Republicans who did not vote last time.
Doug Deason, Texas co-chair of the Trump Victory Committee, said the target is some four million evangelical Christians who were not registered to vote or who were registered but did not turn out.
“We are working hard, spending tens of millions of dollars to get the Republican vote out,” he said. “We should be fishing where the fish are — and the fish are the evangelicals.”
But Republican strategists fear for down-ballot races if they cannot hold on to voters such as 29-year-old Trammel.
She was raised by evangelical parents in White Settlement, Texas, an affluent suburb of Fort Worth. One of her uncles is a pastor, and she works in the administrative office of a church. She spends her evenings studying to become a nurse.
George W. Bush is her favorite president, and she had never thought about voting for a different party until now.
“I was not for the wall ever,” she said at home, wrestling her two-year-old son away from her school folders. “I thought I would vote for him and people would talk him out of it,” she said.
“Texas Republicans here are aware of what Hispanics bring to the community. And it’s important that we have that. We just want them legal. But when you say that, now, it brings a negative response — these valid points are turned upside down since Trump took office and that’s why I’m eager to get him out of the way.”
[Previous coverage: Suburbs return to Trump, GOP fights to keep them]
It is also a question of style, an aggressive manner that she said did not reflect well on the office of the president.
It was the late Sen. John McCain and his attacks on Trump’s presidency that made her take the tough decision to jump ship.
She said: “He helped me realize that just because I’m Republican doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything Trump says.”
The shifting suburban vote and the disappearing Republican women were two of the factors cited in 2018 when the Democrat Beto O’Rourke ran Sen. Ted Cruz to within three points of an extraordinary upset.
Tarrant County, where Trammel lives, backed O’Rourke. Long seen as deep red territory, the result served as a wake-up call to Republican analysts who have seen similar shifts in the suburbs running from Fort Worth to Dallas and beyond.
Down-ballot Republicans also struggled. The GOP lost two House seats and 12 Texas House seats. Fears of more losses are behind Trump’s frequent visits to the state, including one he will hold Thursday evening in Dallas, say analysts.
Brendan Steinhauser, whose firm works on Republican messaging for the 2020 race, said several factors were at work against the GOP, including a diversifying population. But the disappearing suburban women were significant for a party that used to see white, married women as its most important base of support.
“Alarm bells should be going off everywhere,” he said. “The suburbs are the battle. Winning the middle is what will win the election.”
For Steinhauser, winning back voters like Trammel means moving beyond the conventional conservative talking points of immigration, low taxes, and economic growth.
“We have to talk more about things like fighting human trafficking, ending the opioid addition crisis, talk about the achievements Republicans have made on criminal justice reform,” he said. “Expanding pediatric cancer research. That sort of thing.”
