Although the United States correctly focuses on the coronavirus pandemic, last week’s events in Washington underscored that two years after women fueled the Democrats’ push in 2018 to turn the House of Representatives, Trump and Some members of his Republican Party have not learned the lesson: – and he still cannot demonstrate that they will treat women as equals and will respect the dignity of their work both at home and in the professional sphere.
As Trump stepped up his campaign to stir fear in the hearts of white suburban voters by arguing that they will not be safe in the United States from Joe Biden this week, he tweeted an opinion column in the New York Post praising his efforts to get rid of a Regulation. of fair housing from the Obama era. In passing, column author Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, argued that women “should focus on what’s at stake for their families” if Biden is elected.
But in the Thursday afternoon tweet that looked like it was straight out of the 1950s, Trump said: “America’s suburban housewives should read this article. Biden will destroy their neighborhood and their American dream. I will preserve and improve it! even more!”
McCaughey had referenced “women,” not “suburban housewives” (a term that began its slow death when Betty Friedan wrote “The Female Mystic” in 1963, helping to awaken the women’s rights movement).
In another example of her inability to think about the consequences before speaking, she wished Ghislaine Maxwell “good” during a coronavirus briefing on Tuesday, despite facing charges of recruiting, preparing and ultimately sexually abusing minors. 14 years. Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplice.
Trump’s muffled tweet about suburban housewives was in line with his long history of using degrading language to describe women and his attempt to win the 2018 midterm for his party by sparking a backlash to the #MeToo movement Calling it a “very scary moment” for young men.
He also recalled his long history of sexism, intimidation, and name-calling against women who challenged him, including those who accused him of sexual assault (which he denied).
With his derogatory and gender-based language, Trump has never figured out how to regain lost ground with female voters since 2016 and 2018. And now he can lose them by potentially historical margins in the November election.
The president followed Vice President Joe Biden by 25 points among women (35% to 60% of Biden) in the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll and by 28 points in the Quinnipiac poll in mid-July showing Biden leading Trump among female voters 59% to 31%.
See Trump and Biden face-to-face polls
Those numbers should be particularly alarming for the Trump campaign, given that Democrats’ best result among women in a national presidential exit poll was 56% to 43% in 2008, the year Barack Obama beat the Senator from Arizona John McCain. Among white women in the latest Washington Post / ABC poll, 50% supported Biden, 46% Trump.
CNN Director of Poll and Election Analysis Jennifer Agiesta notes that Democrats have never beaten most white women according to exit polls dating back to 1972. (Former President Bill Clinton beat white women among 48% and 43% in 1996, but the party has never reached the threshold of 50% or more).
In 2016, Trump brought white women from 52% to 43% over Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. Only 4% of black women voted for Trump, and only 25% of Latinas supported him.
And as CNN’s Harry Enten wrote this weekend, this is not an election in which the economy, which Trump believed was his greatest strength, drives the election.
Right now, when the number of coronavirus cases in the US has exceeded 4.1 million and more than 146,000 Americans have died, surveys have consistently shown that Americans, particularly women, are most concerned about Covid. -19 than for any other problem.
Voters trust Biden more than Trump to handle the pandemic, and largely because of that, the former vice president has maintained strong leadership in the polls, both nationally and in many of the key battlefield states that Trump needs to win reelection.
In a new round of CNN polls released Sunday, Biden’s lead in the changing states of Michigan, Arizona and Florida was largely driven by his advantage among women, according to Agiesta.
Trump this week launched several initiatives aimed at increasing his support among female voters.
At the White House, she handed the microphone to Charron Powell, the mother of LeGend Taliferro, who told the heartbreaking story of losing her four-year-old son to violence in Kansas City while she helped Trump defend the controversial initiative. – known as “Operation Legend” – to send federal agents to big cities to fight violent crime.
In another appeal to women during one of his coronavirus briefings, he said his administration requested $ 105 billion to help reopen schools amid the outbreak and argued that the money should “follow the student so that parents and families are in control of their own decisions. “
But it also undermines its own message by continuing to argue that children should return to school in person, and falsely claiming that children do not get sick or easily transmit the virus, despite surveys showing that most parents with children School-age children do not feel safe sending them back for in-person instruction.
And when the president began pushing to reopen schools weeks ago, CNN’s White House team reported that he and his advisers hoped the issue would help him with voters, many of whom bear much of the burden of doing Juggle your children’s homeschooling while working from home. But with alarming spikes in cases across the country, Trump’s speech has not gone as planned.
The gender language of the week, from Trump’s tweet to Florida Republican Republican Ted Yoho’s verbal attack on Ocasio-Cortez, an incident in which the Florida Republican reportedly called the New York Democrat a “disgusting” and “bitch”. Within the reach of a journalist for The Hill newspaper, it was a reminder that Trump and many of his allies still do not understand how to talk to women, much less about them.
During a heated exchange, Yoho challenged Ocasio-Cortez for his comments on unemployment and rising crime in his home state. He denied using the insult against her and made a speech on the floor that was expressed as an apology, but maintained that “no one was harassed, intimidated or attacked.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who accused him of lying, enhanced the tense exchange by delivering a nine-minute speech to denounce misogyny and “abusive” language that he and his colleague, Republican Representative of Texas Roger Williams, used to confront her. as I walked up the steps to the east side of the Capitol to vote on Monday afternoon.
In many interviews with female voters of all political stripes in the past three years, one of the things that many of them said they dislike about Trump is his rude and sexist language and how dialogue in the United States has changed, convincing his followers and allies who can say what comes to mind, no matter how hurtful or offensive it is.
For Trump and Republican acolytes like Yoho, there are now too many self-inflicted mistakes to count. They are dragging their own party with them, and no one will be surprised if the women rise up once again in November and give the Democrats a victory.
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