President Donald Trump tried begging suburban women to vote for him. Then he tried wooing them with a weird Don Draper, time-warp strategy, telling women at a Lansing, Michigan, rally last week: “We’re getting your husbands back to work.” Because, really, all suburban women care about is whether their husbands are employed and fulfilled.
Recent flubs aside, Trump’s steep popularity slide with suburban women has been years in the making. Polls indicate those women have been paying close attention to lots more factors than male employment rates. They look at Trump’s attitudes toward women, his coarse language, his approach to racial issues, how public education has fared, and perhaps most impactfully, how he has managed the coronavirus pandemic.
It turns out the more they see, the less they like. And the more they look at his enablers in Congress, including suburban Republicans like Rep. Ann Wagner of Ballwin, the less inclined they are to send them back to Washington.
At least two congressional races in the St. Louis suburban radius are attracting national attention, with the women’s vote likely to sway the outcome. Trump’s toxicity emerges as the main source of headaches for Republican incumbents like Wagner struggling to keep their seats.
Among suburban voters nationwide in 2016, Trump held a 2 percentage-point advantage over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. By 2018, Democrats held a 7 percentage-point advantage in the suburban vote, according to Pew Research. Men are holding steady in their support for Trump, but according to the polling-analysis firm Fivethirtyeight.com, the numbers have flipped because white suburban women are abandoning the GOP in droves.
National Public Radio recently spoke to a group of women, Republicans and Democrats, in the Ohio suburbs to ask why. The women interviewed were part of a vast network of Trump-themed social media groups.
They cited turnoffs that are echoed in national polls: Trump’s harsh treatment of immigrants and his policy of separating migrant children from their parents. They don’t like the effect Trump has had on their own children’s language and behavior, or the example set by his lax attitude toward pandemic precautions. They’re concerned about growing racial divisions. And they don’t like Trump and male-dominated lawmakers telling them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.
These are among the reasons why Wagner and Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville face an uphill struggle on Tuesday. Davis has been blunt in stating that Trump hasn’t helped. The same calculations could even affect the outcome of the tight contest between Republican Missouri state Sen. Andrew Koenig and his Democratic challenger, state Rep. Deb Lavender, for the 15th District seat in southwest St. Louis County.
The GOP’s biggest mistake was taking the suburban women’s vote for granted. Tuesday’s election result promises to serve notice that every vote must be earned instead of assumed.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
