Trump losing support from GOP women
Of all the tribulations facing Donald Trump, perhaps none is stirring as much anxiety inside his campaign as the precipitous decline of support from Republican women, an electoral cornerstone for the party’s past nominees that is starting to crumble.
In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.
But even more powerfully, his support from regular Republican women is falling after Trump’s provocative remarks about everything from the silence of the mother of a slain Muslim soldier to how women should respond to sexual harassment in the workplace.
“For people like me, who are Republican but reasonable and still have our brains attached, it’s hard to see Trump as a reasonable, sane Republican,” said Dina Vela, a project manager in San Antonio who said she had always voted Republican and remained wary of Hillary Clinton. She has visited Clinton’s campaign website and now plans to vote for her.
Since the two parties held their nominating conventions, Trump’s lead over Clinton with Republican women voters has declined by 13 percentage points, according to polls conducted by the New York Times and CBS News.
In politically moderate swing states like Pennsylvania, which aides to Trump say are crucial to his victory, Trump’s standing with women overall is perilously low among registered voters: Just 27 percent of women back him, compared with 58 percent for Clinton, according to a poll by Franklin & Marshall College.
Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said that Trump’s divisive and combative tactics, which seem to have intensified since he secured the Republican nomination, were amplified in the eyes and ears of the nation’s female voters.
In an interview, Walsh cited a controversy Trump had set off just moments before, when he seemed to suggest that gun owners who care about the Second Amendment take action against Clinton if she is elected. Democrats immediately denounced his remarks as a reckless invitation to his supporters to commit violence.
“That kind of rhetoric is inflammatory, and I think we are seeing that women in particular have a real problem with it,” Walsh said.
The danger for Trump is that the erosion could accelerate as leading Republican women publicly break with him, making an argument that the national interest must supersede party loyalty.
In what has turned into a steady drip, prominent Republican women from the worlds of business and politics have been publicly renouncing Trump over the past few weeks. Among them: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine; Sally Bradshaw, a top aide and strategist to Jeb Bush when he was governor of Florida; and Maria Comella, a former top adviser to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.