If you believe the latest polls, you have to believe that President Trump is in trouble with women voters, particularly white suburban college-educated (WSCE) women voters. Trump’s polling deficits with this segment of the electorate predate the House impeachment, but the Democrats’ politically motivated impeachment circus is sure to make matters worse for a president who needs this necessary demographic to help him win a second term.
Question: What are these women thinking?
If they voted for Trump in 2016 and are thinking of not doing so in 2020, or, are thinking of voting for Trump for the first time in 2020 but are troubled by his combative style, bellicose rhetoric, past life, or overall character, they must reassess and think again.
We’re not talking here about confirmed leftist Democrat women who would rather date Louis C.K. than vote for Donald Trump. We’re talking about a wide swath of Independent, GOP, and open-minded traditionalist Democrat women who might be winnable by Trump, but who are reportedly so turned off by the president’s tone, his scorched-earth retaliatory mode, or what his alleged past dalliances with women may say about his character, that they may either stay home or vote for the eventual Democratic Party candidate.
Here’s one pre-impeachment [September] analysis of the aggregate bottom line from Jonathan Easley at The Hill:
But recent polling indicates that the same white female voters who propelled Trump to victory in 2016 might send him to defeat in 2020 if current trends hold. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday [in September] found Trump trailing the top five Democratic contenders by between 9 points and 16 points overall, with each leading the president by 23 points or more among all women.
Cue the standard disclaimer about polling. Trump campaign spokespeople have legitimately stressed that polls are often weighted in favor of Democrats. Trump 2020 senior campaign adviser Lara Trump made the case on Fox News last Wednesday that there is a “hidden” factor in the polling data about women who fully intend to vote for the president but who are reluctant to admit it to pollsters. Rush Limbaugh spoke on his Wednesday show about how the polls “always include more women.” Naysayers argue that even given the presumably weighted polls, the deficits Trump apparently has with WSCE women indicate that any hidden vote would have to be abnormally large.
Let’s assume then for the sake of discussion that these naysayers are correct, that Trump does face a potentially game-changing gender gap with this segment of the electorate. Since these women are college-educated and have presumably elevated themselves to a middle-class, upper-middle-class, or affluent standard of living, they should be smart enough to figure a few things out.
We’ve got a great economy going in the United States. The stock markets and concomitant 401Ks are routinely soaring—despite a few dips—to all-time heights. Unemployment numbers for blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are at historic lows. For Trump’s theoretically endangered voting bloc, women, you have to go back decades to find lower unemployment numbers.
The husbands, sons, and daughters of WSCE women are getting hired — and are working and advancing — in an employment marketplace that is expanding. Such a marketplace puts more economic power in the hands of the workforce at all strata. Corporations and businesses large and small are operating in a regulatory environment stripped by the Trump administration of cumbersome and unnecessary strictures that limit their ability to compete and grow.
Though the U.S. military retains a cannily deployed presence in the Middle East’s war-torn quagmires, increasingly, the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and husbands of WSCE women are called upon less and less to place themselves in harm’s way in connection with conflicts for which no vital American interest can be ascertained.
On immigration, though Trump has been challenged and/or ruled against on virtually every one of his proposals or executive orders aimed at preserving the sovereign border, he continues the fight to implement sane immigration policies, more so than any political leader in recent history.
These citations only scratch the surface of the positive governance Trump’s election has delivered to the American people. Thus, the argument for why the nation’s intelligent and freedom-loving WSCE women must reassess any misgivings they have about Trump’s character or style is replete with reasons to vote Trump 2020. Though such women may find the president to be something less than the polished gentleman statesmen they might prefer, at what price would such a “proper” style and traditionally connected presidency come?
These women, who make up the distaff backbone of the middle and upper classes that have so prospered during Trump’s term, must look hard at the reprehensible predations of the Deep State on our nation. They must weigh the implications of such a rogue bureaucratic state going forward under any administration. The assertion that a majority of these woman are in alignment with the un-American goals of individuals like John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Peter Strzok et al. is specious, to say the least.
Educated women need only consider the war hawks in President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex to decide whether to place the national future in the hands of ideologically mercenary lobbyists and strategists who never met a bloody, endless foreign misadventure they wouldn’t sacrifice our fighting men and women to.
On immigration, WSCE women need only countenance the plans of the open-borders Democrats to understand how their family’s economic outlook would be clouded by an influx of cheap, unassimilated non-citizen labor. They need to confront the reality of increased terror and crime risks associated with the porous border that would certainly become more porous should someone like Senator Elizabeth Warren get elected.
Let’s step back and take a look at the downside WSCE women are struggling with from the standpoint of their support or lack thereof for the president.
Allegations about marital infidelity, about women like Stormy Daniels, credible or not, don’t help. Before he became president, Trump confided to Billy Bush some less-than-savory “locker room” details. In the first 2016 presidential debate, he countered Megyn Kelly’s inane Rosie O’Donnell question with the statement that there was “blood coming out of [Kelly’s] wherever.” Post-election, Trump punched down to the bottom of the barrel after strident Trump critics Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski tried to crash an election party. Trump tweeted that Mika was “bleeding badly from a facelift.”
The New York Times weighed in on the Brzezinski incident with a sweeping statement that precisely illustrates the issue at hand:
The tweets ended five months of relative silence from the president on the volatile subject of gender, reintroducing a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appearance and mental capacity.
Rough stuff, and it must be admitted even by Trump supporters that a great many women, most women, especially college-educated women of a certain pedigree, abhor such locker room banter and “fight club-level” political discourse. Many men do, too.
Other women, more down-to-earth women of any socioeconomic status, take in stride Trump’s street-level counterpunches and misogynistic haymakers aimed at women he believes are being egregiously unfair to him.
And so, we must say to WSCE women across America: Think of your sons and daughters and the nation they must thrive and hopefully prosper in. Think of your grandchildren and the nation they will grow up in. How will your community fare under Democratic socialism? How will your faith-based community fare? Think of the homeland and Constitution that a winning majority of citizens still cherish.
The next time Mr. Trump makes a statement or draws an allusion that WSCE women find off-putting, or even reprehensible, they might want to channel some of the pragmatic realism shown by women whose support for Trump has been and remains unwavering. They have shown down-to-earth wisdom about what matters. They know how to process the rough edges of a man like Donald Trump.
They know what’s best for our country.
PJ Media columnist Mark Ellis is the author of A Death on the Horizon, a novel of political upheaval and cultural intrigue. Follow Mark on Twitter.
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