ORLANDO, Florida — First, Cynthia Lackey engaged in a small act of rebellion: She wrote in the name “Mitt Romney” on her 2016 presidential election ballot.
By the midterm elections, she had switched her party registration from Republican to independent. Last week, the 50-year-old mother-of-three volunteered to help Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s push in Florida.
“I’m on their phone bank thing,” she said. “I don’t want people to make the same mistake I made.”
The mistake, as she sees it, was to waste a vote in 2016 that could have been used to prevent President Trump’s election.
She is one of millions of Republican women who have switched allegiance in horror at Trump’s public comments about women, his lurch to socially conservative positions, embrace of climate change skepticism. And many are recoiling from a party they say has enabled him at every turn.
And it is not just Democrats who see a turning tide in the suburbs of battleground states such as Florida. Trump insiders say there is little point in spending money on trying to woo women back.
The president himself raised the issue during a visit to Pennsylvania on Tuesday when he took credit for abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to diversify suburban areas, which he claimed had been destroying America’s suburbs.
“So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood,” the president told a rally in Johnstown, before adding that he did not have time to always speak politely.
“You know, I can do it, but I got to go quickly. We don’t have time. They want me to be politically correct.”
For all the focus on Trump, evidence suggests that he represents the acceleration of an existing trend rather than a new phenomenon.
In 2016 the gender gap, 13 points according to exit polls, was clear but not enough to doom Trump’s campaign.
This time around, polls suggest he is hemorrhaging female support. A survey for the Washington Post and ABC News published this week put the gap at 23 percentage points. With male support evenly split between the two candidates, the overall result put Biden ahead 54% to 42%.
Trump may have accelerated that gender divide, but pollsters say it preexisted his descent of the golden escalator in 2015.
Women broke Democrat in 1994 by a margin of 48% to 42%, according to the Pew Research Center. But by last year, the numbers were 56% to 38%.
Lackey, of Fort Lauderdale, said the Republican Party would also suffer from the Ted Cruzes and the Lindsey Grahams who condemned candidate Trump before changing their tune when he became president.
“The hypocrisy of politics in general, but the hypocrisy this party has displayed in the last four years, has killed our respect for the party … and a lot of women I know feel this way,” she said.
A female friend of Lackey’s and another lifelong Republican, who asked not to be named in case it affected her professional life, said she voted for Trump because she was sick of politicians. She wanted to give a businessman a chance.
“I thought that he would do what a CEO does, which is bring in people smarter than you, that are more capable, bring in specialists,” she said before collapsing into giggles.
Unnecessary trade wars, loss of American leadership in the world, Trump’s stance on the environment, the administration’s hardening stance on abortion all meant she would be voting for Biden this time.
Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project of anti-Trump Republicans, said the COVID-19 pandemic was also at the forefront of suburban women’s minds.
“We’ll be focusing our messaging to them on how life is going to be impacted, everything from Halloween being shut down or not, having to make those difficult decisions, whether to send your kids to school or not being able to see your grandparents,” he said.
Even the Trump campaign is looking to other demographic groups to make up the difference.
Campaign manager Bill Stepien said he expected the coalition that backs Trump in 2020 to be different from the one that elected him in 2016.
“I’m absolutely sure that that there are some votes that we won’t perform as well in certain parts of the country or among certain voting populations,” he said in a conference call with reporters. “But I’m more than certain that those are going to be offset by gains in certain voting populations, black, Hispanic, and others, based on the president’s appeal, policies and the outreach he’s been conducting for the last four years.”
