There has been a lot of reporting on the phenomenon of white college-educated women moving away from Republicans and, in some cases, running toward Democrats due to how repulsed they are by Donald Trump. Some of this has been anecdotal, but the polling on women is telling. In a Washington Post/ABC news poll, Trump enjoys 48 percent support among men compared to just 33 percent support among women. And check out the trend lines from the same poll on female party identification over the last eight years, which is moving increasingly toward Democrats and away from the GOP.
Democratic gains among women start around the end of 2014, when just over 50 percent of female voters identified as Democrats, and get a nice little bump when Trump becomes pr*sident, reaching 58 percent now. And in the eight-year period between 2010 and 2018, Republicans lost fully 7 points among women who identify with the party.
Indeed, Civiqs polling also shows independent women leaning more toward Democrats during Trump’s tenure, starting last spring with 40 percent preferring Democrats in the generic ballot compared to 51 percent now.
News outlets kicked out a plethora of reporting this week on the phenomenon of suburban women being politically activated by the Trump era. Below is a sampling of several deeply reported pieces from the Washington Post, McClatchy, and the L.A. Times (some of which included interviews with Trump supporters/suburban men too).
Washington Post, in Atlanta and Denver
Caroline Stover, 59, from the Atlanta suburbs: "He created a female warrior"
Since the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration, Stover has attended scores of rallies. She opened her suburban home on a quiet cul-de-sac in DeKalb County for a fundraiser for the Democrat running for secretary of state, John Barrow. She packed Manuel’s Tavern, a popular hangout, for a discussion of voter suppression and fraud.
McClatchy, in North Carolina, Kansas, Illinois, and Texas
Suzanna DiOrio, 46, from Charlotte: "I’m just frustrated with Republicans”
Asked at an early-voting site in southeast Charlotte to name the last Republican she voted for, she replied, “That would be Trump.” She saw the 2016 campaign as a choice between the lesser of two evils, and was “tired of the Clintons.” But now, she said, “I’m not happy at all,” pointing to Trump’s “tone, rhetoric.”
L.A. Times, in Orange County
Cathy Han, 48, a retired ob-gyn with three children: “Working mothers are good at multitasking. Before they were in the PTA, now they’re in politics”
Like [Katie] Kalvoda, 43, who retired in 2016 from running an investment management firm, many of the disaffected mothers were current or former working professional women with unparalleled organizational and multitasking skills. They were lawyers, professors, business owners and P.R. reps ready to roll up their sleeves and dive head-first into politics. The mothers formed a super PAC and went from one immaculately decorated Orange County living room to the next, recruiting a handful of women at a time to their cause.
The group’s super PAC is called WAVE (Women for American Values and Ethics) and now counts more than 700 members, has raised more than $200,000 for the midterms, and includes four women running for office.
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