Is Trump Driving Women Away From the GOP for Good?

Both of my daughters grew up working on Republican campaigns, doing literature drops, working the polls with me, and going to "victory parties" on election nights.  One happily related to me that she voted a straight GOP ticket the first time she was old enough to vote.  What are they doing now?  Using social media to encourage people to register to vote and voting Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections.  What happened?  Two things, in my view: (i) the take over of the GOP base by Christofascists - and now white supremacists - and (ii) the election of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of misogyny within the GOP.   Polls suggest that they are unique and some pundits are now wondering if the GOP has lost the majority of women long term.  A piece in Politico Magazine suggests that what my daughters - both Millennials - have experienced is not unique even among much older one time Republican women.   Here are article highlights: 

President Donald Trump has historically low favorability among women, with the Pew Research Center now reporting that 63 percent of women disapprove of how he is doing his job—compared with 30 percent who approve. That might not be surprising, given the range of things that Trump has said and done that might be seen as offensive to women. There’s the famous “Access Hollywood” tape that gave rise to thousands of pussy hats, the 22 women who have publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault, and the hush money his personal lawyer has admitted to paying to cover up marital indiscretions. There is Trump’s tendency to insult women, from Carly Fiorina to Megyn Kelly to Mika Brzezinski. Most recently, there was his rally in Mississippi, during which the president mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations . . . . 

Trump’s election and performance in office have clearly pushed independent and Democratic women into action, resulting in record numbers of women running for office, and surges of women involved in local political organizing for the first time. But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?
 Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. . . . . According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.
 Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.
 Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.
 [W]omen have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent.
 “Once you give up that party label, you’re less inclined to easily take it back,” says University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless. Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer, notes that the Republican loss of college-educated white women “is not balanced out by a huge spike among white men—on net, that’s a real problem for the Republicans.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, put it more starkly this summer: “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
 In recent weeks, I sought out women who had crossed over from Republican to Democrat, to understand what motivated their shift and how permanent they think it will be. . . . . Some had voted straight-ticket Republican all their lives; others had crossed the line occasionally but remained proud Republicans until Trump. . . . Each woman’s experiences and motivations were different, but some clear themes emerged about their disillusionment with the Republican Party.

First is their dislike of Trump himself, whom these women see as offensive, impulsive and dangerous to America’s standing in the world. “He is just the most amoral person,” said Jennifer Pate, a recently married 31-year-old devoted churchgoer in San Antonio, raised in that city by what she called “very conservative” parents in a church where women still can’t be pastors. “He is everything—I don’t have kids yet—everything I don’t want my kids to grow up to be.

“His honesty is in question,” said Julie Vann, a 68-year-old in Beavercreek, Ohio. She points to Trump’s company’s multiple bankruptcy filings. “That was just his way of doing business,” she says. “And that’s the same way he thinks now. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he wins.”
 Another born-and-raised Republican, Kansas teacher Janea Lawrence, 54, is dismayed because she believes Trump handed out Cabinet positions to unqualified “friends or people who could buy their way in”—because of wealth or, she assumes, campaign donations. She finds that approach shockingly counter to what she calls her Midwestern ethos of working hard and doing right.
 Cate Kanellis Zalmat of Plano, Texas, a 61-year-old grocery store manager and grandmother, has been a Republican since she first voted for Ronald Reagan. “I haven’t felt as angry about politics in my life as Trump makes me,” she told me—angry, among other things, at Trump’s instability, at what she sees as the GOP’s pandering to the religious right, at what she described as Republicans’ anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias.
 That brings us to another reason these women are disillusioned: Under Trump, they say, many Republicans are peddling intolerance and exclusion. “It’s become normal to be a racist and a bigot, and those are not normal things,” said Jennifer Hackel Thrift, 43, a corporate headhunter in Austin, Texas. She had never voted for a Democrat until 2016—and now compares Fox News to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
 Karen Winslow, 66, a former Navy nurse who now lives in Austin as well, worked furiously at her consulting business after her first husband died so that her three daughters would be able to get excellent educations and travel widely. Now she is appalled at how Trump slanders Latinos—a group that includes two of her sons-in-law—and how the party treats women. In Charlotte, North Carolina, 58-year-old CPA Beth Monaghan said that in 2016, when her state senator, Dan Bishop, helped sponsor HB2, the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” she took it as an attack on the entire LGBTQ spectrum and was furious that the government was “telling my son he’s less-than because he’s gay.” Trump alone didn’t push these women to shed their Republican labels; other GOP politicians’ unquestioning support for Trump did that. Several told me they were angry that an all-Republican government has become the party of fiscal waste, deficits, trade wars and rebates for the wealthy. Zalmat said she is angrier at the “spineless Republicans in the Congress” for “enabling [Trump’s] crazy” than she is at [Trump] the president himself.
 Sentiments like those are telling, says UVA’s Lawless. “If the Republicans had stood up to [Trump], not necessarily on substance, but in terms of style and rhetoric,” she says, the reactions among voters might be, “I’m still a Republican, but I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” Instead, she continues, “because the Republicans have been complicit in a lot of what Trump has done,” many women no longer feel they can consider themselves Republican. And that’s a big step out the door.
 Whether or not their mothers drift away from the Republicans for good, in other words, young women might be signing up for the other team. “If millennials vote three times for the same party, they hold that identification their whole lives,” Lake says. “So, this is a very, very critical erosion. The Republicans could pay the price for decades.”

Personally, I am hoping for a massive Democrat turnout next month.  Similarly, I hope educated women - which almost by definition excludes evangelical women - turn out in force to punish the GOP.  Women, racial minorities, LGBT individuals, and  and Millennils have the most to lose if the GOP doesn't experience a bloodbath at the polls. I will be waiting with baited breath to see the outcomie of the November 6, 2018 vote.