“The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me,”
Trump said Wednesday on Twitter. “They want safety & are thrilled that I
ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their
neighborhood.”
Trump makes fear-based appeal to women as Biden
picks Harris
With Joe Biden tapping a woman as his running make,
Trump is offering a divisive message to women voters that some Republican
operatives are questioning.
Trump’s bellicose overtures to women are leading even
some Republicans pollsters to question his gambit.
By MERIDITH
MCGRAW
08/12/2020
07:59 PM EDT
Updated:
08/12/2020 08:07 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump is dropping any effort at subtlety with an overt and concerted
last-ditch effort to win back a core constituency that propelled his 2016 win:
white women.
Faced with
a rival, Joe Biden, who just tapped a Black woman to join him on the Democratic
ticket, Trump is trying to stop a defection of women voters — using a flurry of
tweets and 11th-hour policy initiatives designed to play to potential fears
about their families and communities.
He has
altered fair-housing regulations — telling “suburban housewives” the move will
“preserve” their neighborhoods and keep out low-income housing projects. He has
falsely warned that Biden wants to defund the police — insinuating unchecked
crime will soon spread to the suburbs. He has insisted that schools fully
reopen — hoping to win over women struggling to care for their children. And
this week, a bright pink “Women for Trump” bus started a tour across the
country, with planned stops in places like Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“The
‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me,” Trump said Wednesday on Twitter.
“They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program
where low income housing would invade their neighborhood.”
It’s an
existential issue for Trump’s political future. In 2016, Trump won a critical
demographic — white women without a college degree — by 27 percentage points.
But as of May, Biden had closed that gap to Trump to only 6 points, according
to an ABC/Washington Post survey. More broadly in 2016, Trump won suburban
voters, 49 percent to 45 percent, but has since lost that edge, according to
polling data.
Yet Trump’s
bellicose overtures to women are leading even some Republicans pollsters to
question his gambit, particularly his hellish predictions of rampant crime
coming to the suburbs and forced low-income housing driving down suburban
property values. They noted that the suburban women who abandoned Trump’s
Republican Party in 2018 — many of whom had college degrees, earned higher
incomes than average and had previously voted Republican — were unlikely to be
won back with such racially divisive rhetoric that also trafficked in outmoded
gender norms.
“The
campaign thinks it’s fear and they think they can scare people back into the
fold, but the Democratic nominee is Joe Biden and it’s not Bernie Sanders,”
said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who has been critical of Trump.
“There’s very little they can do to say now to say they managed Covid
successfully and the economy is in good shape, because neither of those things
are true. That leaves them with fear of Biden.”
Trump’s
explicit appeals to suburban voters started in earnest during a late June rally
in Phoenix, when he vowed “disunity and discord” would come to “every suburb”
if Biden was elected. In the following weeks, Trump’s suburban overtures became
more pronounced, barbed and specific.
A recent ad
from the Trump campaign features a woman of color and real-life Trump voter
sitting holding cue cards to describe Biden as “weak,” a man who “embraced the
policies of the far left.”
On
Wednesday night, Trump warned at a press briefing that the Democrats were
“going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia.”
“You want
something where people aspire to be there,” he added.
It’s part
of a broader Trump team push to retain women voters that previously was
primarily an economic pitch — before the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment
rates for women had fallen to historic lows, a majority of new jobs were going
to women and there were more women than men in the workforce for only the
second time in U.S. history.
“Whether
you like his tweets or not or his tone or not his policies have been beneficial
for women,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Trump campaign senior adviser.
Those gains
look different in a post-pandemic world, however, with unemployment soaring,
businesses closing and economists predicting a long road back to pre-pandemic
figures.
Biden also
changed the dynamic on Tuesday when he picked Harris. Democrats hope Harris
will help energize moderate voters and women — especially suburban women — in
November. Trump demonized Harris on Wednesday as “nasty” and “angry.”
“She left
angry, she left mad, there was nobody more insulting to Biden than she was,”
Trump said of Harris’s failed presidential campaign. “She said horrible things
about him.”
Over the
past few decades, both parties have aggressively courted suburban voters. The
voting bloc has an above-average education and is evenly divided politically.
In the 2016 election, Trump won suburban voters by roughly 5 percentage points.
But in 2018,
the suburbs and the female voters who live there were key to Democrats’ winning
nearly 30 states and control of the House, according to USA Today.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário