If President Donald Trump loses his bid for reelection this fall, he needs to look no further than women to grasp the root of his demise.
The gender gap – the difference between which party and which candidate men and women support – is at or near historic highs in several new national polls.
In a Monmouth University poll, former Vice President Joe Biden holds a 19-point edge over Trump among women, a margin that fuels the Democrat’s 11-point advantage in the overall ballot test.
And in a new Pew poll of partisan affiliation, 56% of women now identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic while just 42% of men say the same. That 14-point gender gap “is as large as at any point in the past two decades,” according to a Pew analysis of the data.
Then there’s this: In every presidential election since 1984, women have made up a majority of all voters – usually between 52% and 53% of the total vote.
So, because math, Trump simply cannot afford to lose women to Biden by 19 points (or anything close to that number) and expect to win in 2020.
Unfortunately for the incumbent, the trend line of his numbers among women does not look good.
Trump lost women by 13 points to Hillary Clinton in 2016 but managed to claw out an Electoral College victory thanks to an 11-point edge among men.
Two years later, as Democrats took back the House amid a backlash to Trump, women revolted against the President’s party. Almost 6 in 10 women voted for the Democratic candidate for Congress while just 40% voted for the Republican – a 19-point gap. Men voted for the Republican candidate but far more narrowly than they had chosen Trump: 51% Republican, 47% Democratic.
Those gender splits look remarkably similar to Monmouth’s latest findings. Biden has a 19-point edge among women while Trump has just a 3-point margin among men.
Simply put: If these numbers hold, Trump will lose. And given all the water under the bridge between women and Trump, it will not be easy to convince any decent-sized chunk of female voters to cast a ballot for him.
The Point: Don’t overthink the coming election. If the President loses women by north of 15 points, the math just doesn’t add up for him.
