Bimbo. Dog. Fat pig. These are just a few of the things Donald Trump has called women. And the big political ad making waves this week in the 2016 presidential primary, featuring Trump quotes recited by women on screen, didn’t leave it there.
A full 60 seconds elapse of horrifying, misogynist nonsense, and as of Tuesday afternoon, more than a million people had viewed the ad on YouTube alone. If you’re a woman who doesn’t know how she feels about Donald Trump, the ad leaves no question how Trump feels about you.
And in an election in which Republicans are likely to face the first female major party nominee for president, Trump at the top of the ticket would be an absolute catastrophe.
Women are a majority of voters in this country. And in poll after poll, while Hillary Clinton runs neck and neck with many of her male Republican opponents, she leads Donald Trump by extraordinary margins.
In the last Quinnipiac national poll, Clinton pulled in 44 percent of female voters, while both Rubio and Kasich won 45 percent. She opens up a bit of a lead among women against Ted Cruz, but she defeats Trump among women by nine points.
This is made even more striking when you look at the same data among men, and see very little change in the share of the vote going to the Republican candidate whether it is Trump, Cruz, Rubio or Kasich versus Clinton. Trump’s general election deficit is almost entirely explained by his struggles with female voters.
Even within the GOP primary, Trump tends to do better with men than with women. Across the Super Tuesday states, Trump consistently performed many points better with male voters than female voters within the primary electorate. And polling from ABC shows that some 45 percent of female Republican primary voters would be very dissatisfied with Trump as nominee.
Republicans have known for years that they need to do a better job of reaching out to women. On many fronts, they’ve got a great story to tell. Many female governors, including the impressive Nikki Haley of South Carolina, proudly call themselves Republicans. Carly Fiorina, while failing to win the Republican nomination, put forward a respectable and powerful voice for female conservative leadership on the debate stage this year. These women challenge the idea of conservative women as either timid followers or outrageous cartoons, and have worked to debunk the negative stereotypes left behind in the wake of Sarah Palin’s rise and fall.
With Clinton as the Democrats’ nominee, Republicans must get it right this year. Clinton, thus far, has engendered little enthusiasm from women. Young women, an essential voting group, have gravitated very heavily toward Bernie Sanders in the primaries, often by absolutely astonishing margins, and campus feminists have raised very serious concerns about Clinton’s treatment of women who accused Bill Clinton of misconduct or assault.
The fact that Republican contenders besides Trump are running so close with Clinton among women (and are winning white women by double digits in some polls) means the opportunity is clearly there. But with Trump as the Republican nominee, hopes of winning over women may be completely over.
I am one of those commentators who did not ever expect that we would be staring down the barrel of a Trump nomination, or at least I did not come around to fearing that reality until we were into the fall of 2015. As a result, I am now hesitant to boldly proclaim that Trump doesn’t have a shot at winning something, as I’ve been wrong before.
But in 2015, a large part of the belief that Trump wouldn’t win was based on data showing him being viewed somewhat unfavorably; Republican voters weren’t crazy about him at first, but were in a persuadable place. Most female voters are
not in a persuadable place on Trump. Only a third of women had a favorable view of Trump in that February Quinnipiac poll; four out of ten Republican women have a strongly unfavorable view of Trump.
And we haven’t even seen the Democratic Party unload its full cannon of research and attacks on Trump. One can expect there’s even more to come.
Republicans have work to do to rebuild ties and support with a whole host of growing and critical voter groups, including women. With Donald Trump as nominee, no matter how many times he extols the virtues of Planned Parenthood or brings Melania on stage with him, there’s no way the Democratic Party will allow him to claim the “pro-woman” mantle.
Donald Trump may well wind up as the Republican nominee. But his odds of winning the White House are absurdly slim, and most of that is due to his horrible standing with women. He may be in the business of trying to flip on all of his positions during the general election. But you can be sure his opponents won’t let female voters forget what he’s said and done, and that will spell absolute disaster in November.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for The Washington Examiner and author of “The Selfie Vote.”
