This week's Iowa survey conducted by state polling guru Ann Selzer included a juicy tidbit: Non-college-educated men and women in the Hawkeye State have developed a big difference of opinion over Donald Trump. A giant 54-point chasm of a difference, in fact.
Trump is leading presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden among non-college-educated men by 36 points, but Biden is winning their female counterparts by 18 points. "In 2016, you didn’t see that kind of split between male and female in that demographic,” Selzer told The Washington Post's Greg Sargent.
According national exit polling in 2016, Trump won both groups handily, by 27 points among the women and 48 points among the men. But the demographic of non-college-educated women is particularly important because, according to analyst Ron Brownstein, the women "reliably cast slightly more than half of all the votes from the white working class." So if Trump loses them, he’ll have a giant deficit to make up to win the white working class overall—arguably his most important demographic alongside white evangelicals.
Brownstein deemed white non-college-educated women to be so important, he started questioning in July 2019 whether they would prove to be Trump's downfall in 2020, particularly because his racist attacks seem to alienate working-class women even as they seem to reinforce his popularity among white working-class men.
As Brownstein noted, working-class whites are overrepresented in the critical Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and particularly Wisconsin, where they accounted for three-fifths of all voters, according to Census Bureau data. Non-college-educated women have also been reliable Republican voters in every presidential race since 1980, with the exception that Bill Clinton won them in '92 and '96. Trump simply supercharged their allegiance in 2016, winning them by more than 23 points per Pew Research Center and 27 points per the exit polls.
So the prospect that Trump might be alienating the voting bloc less than five months from November is both tantalizing and certainly a big piece of what's putting Iowa in play. Selzer's poll for the Des Moines Register found that Trump was only up by a single point in Iowa, 44% - 43%, similar to recent Civiqs polling finding the race deadlocked.
Looking at the Civiqs tracking poll of white non-college-educated women during Trump's presidency also suggests the demographic is souring on him. Trump's approval rating with the group has been slightly above water most of his presidency, with the exception of a distinct negative turn in late June 2017 when congressional Republicans were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicaid and roll back its ACA expansion, and cut back financial help for people purchasing insurance from the individual market.
As Senate Republicans rolled out that monstrosity in late June and the White House made a big push to pass it, Trump's disapprovals with white non-college-educated women tick up until the late Sen. John McCain kills the whole effort with his thumbs-down vote in late July. At that point, Trump's approvals with the women start a slow reversion back to a more favorable posture.
But ever since about mid-May of this year, Trump is back in slightly negative territory with the group, and it appears to be healthcare-related once again—this time having to do with coronavirus. As with many groups, Trump gained some credibility with the bloc around mid-March when he declared a national emergency due to the pandemic and looked to be taking charge of the response. But after a week or so of Trump heading the task force briefings, his approvals start to tick down again, taking a negative turn once again around mid-May, shortly after infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies that reopening the nation too soon could lead to avoidable "suffering and death."
But in the three critical battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump is faring worse with white non-college-educated women than he is nationally, where he's just 2 points underwater, 47% approve to 49% disapprove. Here's where Trump stands with the bloc in the battlegrounds:
- MI: 44% approve/52% disapprove (-8)
- PA: 47% approve/50% disapprove (-3)
- WI: 44% approve/54% disapprove (-10)
These negatives also appear to generally track with how Trump is polling overall in the three states, with FiveThirtyEight.com finding Biden's average margin for Wisconsin (D+6.2) and Michigan (D+7.6) much higher than Pennsylvania's (D+.1).
But Pennsylvania's inflection point for when Trump goes negative among white working-class women is particularly interesting.
In the Keystone State, Trump's disapprovals with the group are falling around mid-March right until we hit March 20, when his disapprovals reverse among the demographic and start bouncing back up, never to recover. At that time, anxiety around COVID-19 was rising in the state and on March 18, the state's first COVID-related death was reported. On Friday, March 20, Trump was heading up a task force briefing (remember those?) when NBC's Peter Alexander questioned whether Trump was giving Americans a "false sense of hope" by hyping unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine as potential cures for the disease.
Finally, Alexander asked, "What do you say to Americans who are scared?" The question prompted a vicious and particularly unpresidential moment from Trump at a time when a reeling nation most needed a steady hand at the helm. Remember, at this point briefing viewership was at a high point, attracting some 8.5 million cable viewers a day.
"I say that you are a terrible reporter. That's what I say," Trump said, calling it a "nasty" question. Trump proceeded to berate Alexander over a query that to most Americans was not only perfectly reasonable but also entirely pertinent.
On the day that exchange took place, Trump was at +3 points (50% approval/47% disapproval) with white non-college educated women in Pennsylvania in Civiqs polling. But as coronavirus case counts and deaths began to steadily climb in the state, Trump's disapproval rating rose right along with them. Now, his approvals are the exact opposite, 47% approve to 50% disapprove.
In his 2019 piece, Brownstein wondered whether Trump's racism and charged rhetoric was turning off this critical demographic of female voters. While it certainly doesn't seem to be helping him with white working-class women in the same way it does their male counterparts, Trump's inability to lead in a national crisis, particularly on healthcare-related issues, appears to be what's dooming him most with this group.
After conducting a series of focus groups in 2019 with white working-class voters in Nevada, Maine, and Wisconsin, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote that many of the women who backed Trump in 2016 now viewed him as "ego-centric and divisive and failing to deliver for working people, particularly the women and particularly on health care.”
That sounds about right. Greenberg was among the first to zero in on this divide between white working-class women and men, and his findings seem to hold true both in Selzer's recent Iowa poll along with the Civiqs national and statewide tracking poll. Trump's failure to deliver for the working class is killing him with these women, and he's not able to paper over that failure by making racist appeals in a way that seems to work with white working-class men. According to Civiqs, white non-college educated men still approve of Trump by 28 points nationally. That's not exactly 2016 territory, but it's a far cry from where the women are.