After his election victory in 2016, Donald Trump regularly boasted that he had achieved his success by winning over the majority of female voters. Of course, that was not true: the Republican won a majority of the White women, which led him to believe that women of color literally did not count.
Polls show that there was a clear gender gap in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton had a lead of about 12 percentage points among female voters, while Republicans were ahead among men. Four years later, the gap was even larger: Joe Biden defeated the then-incumbent by about 15 percentage points among women.
“Someone said women don’t like Donald Trump,” the Republican presidential candidate recently boasted to his supporters in Pennsylvania. “That’s wrong. I think they love me; I love them.”
According to the data, the affection seems to be extremely one-sided.
The question, however, is whether Vice President Kamala Harris can do at least as well as the other recent Democratic candidates. Trump, for his part, seems surprisingly eager to help out and alienate as many women as possible. A New York Times report summarized:
In case any voter had forgotten that Donald J. Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women, he spent about 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day. At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, detailed the women’s years-long allegations and denied that they were telling the truth.
A jury in New York found Trump guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll earlier last year. On Friday, the former president attended a court hearing where his lawyers asked an appeals court to throw out the jury’s verdict. (The Republican did not attend the hearing but apparently planned to attend last week’s trial.)
Shortly thereafter, the Republican nominee gave a confused speech at Trump Tower—it was called a “press conference,” but he refused to answer a single question—in which he not only made outrageous comments about Carroll and the recent trial, but also thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone of another woman who had also accused him of sexual misconduct.
As part of his defense, Trump seemed to suggest that he did not find the woman attractive enough to attack her.
“I know you’re going to say that’s a terrible thing to say, but that couldn’t have happened,” the Republican said of the plaintiff. He added: “She wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She wouldn’t have been the chosen one.”
A Washington Post analysis noted shortly thereafter: “So the ‘chosen one’ is the one he would willingly attack? Even with the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion.”
A week earlier, Trump had also seen fit to repost an online post alleging that Harris had offered sexual favors to advance her career. A New York Times report added that the “repost was the second time in 10 days that the former president shared content from his personal account that included sexually oriented attacks on Ms. Harris.”
A few days later, the Republican candidate told Fox News that Democrats “demean and marginalize women.”
I know that Trump is leading the public debate by taking a gender equality approach, but for him to accuse Democrats of demeaning and marginalizing women the way he has demeaned and marginalized women is not only baffling, but should only widen the gender gap.
