Donald Trump’s Support Among Republican Women Starts to Slide
By MICHAEL BARBARO and AMY CHOZICK AUG. 9, 2016
nytimes.com
Of all the tribulations facing Donald J. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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. But to her own surprise, she has started visiting Mrs. Clinton’s campaign website and plans to vote for her.
Since the two parties held their nominating conventions, Mr. Trump’s lead over Mrs. Clinton with Republican women voters has declined by 13 percentage points, according to polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News.
In late July, 72 percent of Republican women said they would vote for Mr. Trump, a healthy majority, but far below the level won by the past three Republican presidential nominees. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 93 percent of Republican women. In 2008, John McCain won 89 percent, and four years earlier, George W. Bush won 93 percent.
In politically moderate swing states like Pennsylvania, which aides to Mr. Trump say are crucial to his victory, Mr. Trump’s standing with women over all is perilously low among registered voters: Just 27 percent of women back him, compared with 58 percent for Mrs. 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 Mr. 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 on Tuesday, Ms. Walsh cited a controversy Mr. Trump had set off just moments before, when he seemed to suggest that gun owners who care about the Second Amendment take action against Mrs. 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,” Ms. Walsh said.
Alarm over Mr. Trump’s temperament crosses demographic lines. But decades of social science research about gender and politics suggests that women have a unique perspective on government and its leaders that frequently diverges from men’s — a view, Ms. Walsh said, grounded in their longer life expectancy, their lower pay and their expectation that government will play a meaningful role in their lives.
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