Republicans are finally starting to realize that half the nation is made up of women, and it’s making them nervous.
Not only do women register and vote at rates higher than men, they prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to Donald Trump by a whopping 13 percentage points, according to the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll. Worse for Republicans, that difference has grown since before the Democratic National Convention, when women preferred Harris by 6 points.
“I’m not sure I know what to tell Trump to do to stop that free fall,” a senior Senate Republican aide recently told The Hill. And a Republican pollster struck the same note, saying, “The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women. Given the prominence of abortion in this year’s race and Trump’s past statements about women, the traditional gender gap could become a gender chasm.”
So far, Trump’s current 5-point advantage with men doesn’t seem to compensate for Harris’ edge with women. In the same poll, she leads him by 6 points among likely voters overall.
That women favor Harris should be expected when the Republican Party is putting forward a candidate who has been found liable for sexual abuse and who regularly brags about overturning Roe v. Wade, thereby eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.
It surely hasn’t helped that Trump picked as his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who seems to value women only by the number of babies they’ve produced. It’s easy to believe that a good amount of the shift over the past two weeks isn’t just because Harris gave such a sterling address at the DNC (though she did). It’s also likely due to the apparently endless stream of video and audio clips showing Vance’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies.
But it’s not just Trump and it’s not just Vance. Republicans have spent years hardening the GOP into the party of toxic masculinity and “tradwives” (short for traditional wife and referring to women who participate in “traditional” gender roles). And Republicans seem unable to discuss the Democratic nominee without throwing in a big dollop of misogyny. It’s not like Republicans are keeping it a secret: In 2024, demeaning women is practically the Republican platform.
Women have noticed.
In 2016, Trump and his appeals to misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and every other form of bigotry seemed to catch the nation off-guard. But in 2017, women marched in record numbers to protest Trump’s election.
Those marches may seem like history now, but they were historic. And Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms. They lost the White House in 2020. And even if they retook narrow control of the House in 2022, they lost the Senate. They’ve spent most of the time since 2016 losing.
This year features the first presidential election since Roe was overturned, and the guy who takes credit for that happening is on the ballot. And Trump won’t win women’s support by flip-flop-flipping himself or refusing to answer when asked about a national abortion ban.
Women make up more than half of the electorate. Republicans have spent decades positioning themselves as the “get back in the kitchen” party. The GOP should be happy if they keep Harris’ advantage down to 13%.
Hmm. Gap. Chasm. Canyon … is there something bigger?
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