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 that Brett Kavanaugh, who has since been confirmed to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.
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?
Story Continued Below
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. My conversations with pollsters, political scientists and a number of women across the country who have recently rejected their lifelong Republicans identities suggested the same—and illuminate why this moment in American politics might prove a breaking point for women in the GOP. 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.
The gender gap began with white men leaving the Democratic Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the civil rights and women’s movements, Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg explains. 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.
These shifts in party allegiance might seem mild, but they matter. As Rutgers political scientist Kelly Dittmar recently wrote, women 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. In 2014, they preferred a Democratic Congress by just 2 points.”
“If these trends continue,” political scientist Melissa Deckman of Washington College told me, “women’s preference for Democrats will be a big contributor to the midterm results.”
And beyond the midterms, too. “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. The 10 women who ended up talking with me—before the Kavanaugh-Ford hearings, it’s worth noting—were all white college graduates, married or widowed, ages 31 to 80, and living in suburban or exurban areas from California to Kansas to North Carolina. Some had voted straight-ticket Republican all their lives; others had crossed the line occasionally but remained proud Republicans until Trump. Some have converted fully to the Democratic Party; others are hoping the GOP will return to the moderate, small-business party they once loved—but even so, can’t imagine going back to being its unquestioning followers. 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. He’s entitled. He’s pompous,” Pate told me.
“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.” Vann is still a registered Republican, but she has been supporting Democrat Theresa Gasper against incumbent Republican Mike Turner in Ohio’s 10th Congressional District.
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. While she said she has voted for Democrats sometimes in the past, it wasn’t until Trump’s election that she changed her registration; she is now backing Democrats in both House and gubernatorial races.
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. Zalmat is married to an engineer who was raised a Muslim in Libya.
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. When others in her family praise Trump’s handling of the economy, her answer is, “At what price? … We no longer have values as a country—except for ‘me first,’ ‘white is right.’ And that’s not right.”
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. “Having had daughters, I wanted them to have opportunities, which is part of the reason I can’t stand Trump, because he’s such a misogynistic jerk,” she says. “If that’s the Republican Party, I’m not part of it.”
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.” She was so furious that she ran as a moderate against Bishop in her state Senate district’s Republican primary and lost. When she realized Trump would be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2016, she threw herself into Hillary Clinton’s campaign, putting a “huge” banner up at her house in a district that’s two-thirds Republican.
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 the president himself. “The Republicans that I knew and held beloved really have disappointed me,” Thrift agreed. “They’ve become such sycophants for power. It’s no longer about what’s right for people in my district or my state; it’s about how do I keep my position.” Or as Lawrence, the Kansas teacher, put it, “The Republican Party to me seems like it’s being run by white, upper-class or wealthy businessmen who aren’t paying attention to the rest of us.”
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.
***
But will they keep going out the door?
Seth Masket, political science professor at the University of Denver, told me, “All my training tells me that party ID is quite sticky.” Only major world events like war and depressions tend to shake up those allegiances. “You’ll sometimes get some pushback against an unpopular politician, but that does tend to be pretty short-lived. At some point, Trump won’t be president, and these women who’ve been leaning away from the Republican Party may return to that fold.” Democratic strategist Celinda Lake says that if “in 2020 or 2024, [Republicans] nominate a woman, if they start to put women in prominent leadership positions, if they nominate someone like [Ohio Governor John] Kasich who has had strong appeal to women—it could change. But it’ll definitely last through 2020 unless the Democrats blow it, because Trump’s going to be the nominee, and Trump’s style isn’t going to change.”
Donovan, the former NRSC staffer, says he wonders how far women who leave the GOP will actually go. Will they call themselves independents who tend to lean Republican, akin to leaving the team’s clubhouse but staying in its yard? Putative independents who aren’t registered with one party but who tell pollsters that they nonetheless sympathize with one party, Lawless explains, tend to vote for that party’s ticket as reliably as those who embrace the party label. That means the big question is whether, as she puts it, “these women who are saying the Republican Party no longer represents them and are eschewing the party label—will they still lean Republican?”
Among the small sample of women I spoke with, several said they are fundraising, campaigning or otherwise organizing for Democratic state or congressional candidates this fall. Dana Fortier of Michigan, a 51-year-old former paralegal who grew up Republican, is now a paid-up and active member of her state and local Democratic Party clubs, while running two local Democratic women’s campaigns for city council. In fact, she said, every single person she is planning on voting for in November is a Democratic woman: Debbie Stabenow for Senate, Haley Stevens for Congress in Michigan’s 11th District, Gretchen Whitmer for governor and on down the ballot. Similarly, Thrift in Texas is fully outfitted with Beto O’Rourke stickers, buttons, signs and pamphlets that she distributes wherever she can, explaining, “I can’t sit still. I can’t keep my mouth shut. I have to do everything I can to try and stop, or at least neuter, this horrible president.” Monaghan in North Carolina said, “This may be the first time in my life, at 58 years old, that I vote a straight Democratic ticket. That’s how frustrated I am.”
“If they are actively working for Democrats this cycle, they may be true independents,” Lawless says, which suggests “they are not beholden to the party label. I don’t know any research that suggests that they are any more likely to flip back” than they are to keep walking away from the Republican Party.
But, with a few exceptions, most of the women I spoke with said they aren’t fully diving into the Democratic Party. Some continue to be registered Republicans, while others are independents. As Thrift put it to me. “I’m going to choose the best candidates for the job.” Even Fortier does not promise to stay a Democrat. “In five years, in 10 years, there could be a set of Republicans whose ideas and values are very close to me,” she explained, “and I’ll vote for them.”
Of course, a lot rides on what the Republican Party does in the years ahead. Certainly, by saying recently that it’s “a very scary time” to be a young man, Trump has “put the pedal to the metal” on the GOP’s appeal to angry white blue-collar men, Donovan says. But as Masket put it, “There are a lot of young women coming of age in this presidency who will vote for the first time either this year or in 2020, with this very stark view of gender relations between the two parties.” He sees the Ford/Kavanaugh hearings as a powerful influence at such a formative moment for social identity: “Those images aren’t ones that go away very quickly.”
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.”
Daily Trends Hunter 