Trump Is Losing Educated GOP Women — and Splitting Up Families Along the Way

Photo: Associated Press

Originally published on Politico
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As the election ticks down to the wire, there’s a glaring disadvantage staring the Trump campaign in the face—one that is an explicit slap to his daughter, Ivanka, a Wharton Business School graduate and mother of three who has so often attempted to soften her father’s image and portray him as a champion of equality in the workplace.

For months, polls have shown that Donald Trump will require a white supermajority to offset his historic deficits among African-Americans and Latinos in order to secure even a narrow victory in November. It’s now becoming clear that Trump isn’t hitting the numbers he needs — and that one demographic is standing in the way of the plan. “The main factor behind [Trump’s] underperformance among white voters,” according to a Monmouth poll conducted over the summer, “is his lack of support among white women with a college degree.”

Educated women, it appears, are defecting in droves from the GOP, and the numbers are stark. White men without a college degree prefer Trump over Clinton by a 31-point margin, and he leads among college-educated white men by 11 points. White women without a college degree? Trump wins them, too — by a margin of 17 points, 49 to 32. None of that is surprising: Those numbers are roughly equivalent to Mitt Romney’s advantages in 2012. But Trump is losing educated white women to Hillary Clinton by a staggering 30 points, 57 to 27 percent, according to Monmouth, and other polls have shown similar numbers.

This is a huge change since 2012, when Romney won that demographic by 6 points. “[I]f Clinton can sustain the support of white educated women shown in recent polls,” writes the Brookings Institution’s William Frey, “she can overcome supersized turnout of white working class men.” And that, he concludes, would be “historic” — “by making white college-educated women a lynchpin of a decisive Democratic win.”

What’s happening among these women? I spoke to a number of educated GOP women who say they’re voting for Hillary, seeking to find out not just what drove their decision, but what kind of impact it is having on their lives. What I found was that Trump is splitting Republican households, with wives canceling out their husbands’ votes for the GOP; many will pull the lever for Hillary despite strong resistance and flat-out opposition from their spouses, families and communities. And many are even keeping their decision a secret from those closest to them.

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I spoke to women in New York, New Jersey, Texas and Florida; they don’t constitute a representative national sample, but they offer a window into just how this race is hitting loyal GOP households. One was Sarah, a 35-year-old attorney raised in Alabama in a conservative and religious household who has lived in New York for the past eight years. (The names have been changed at the request of the women in this story.) At Birmingham-Southern College, she served as chair of her school chapter of the College Republicans, and, despite almost a decade in a largely blue state, Sarah has maintained her fiscally conservative values, voting Republican tickets—until this election. She considers equal pay an important issue, as well as parental leave for parents of both genders and adoptive parents. On the candidates’ websites, Sarah said, she noticed a marked difference between their presentation. “How do we know his policies? I don’t think he’s given any,” she said of Trump. “His policy is to make America great again somehow. I don’t think it’s not great.”

But upon sharing her decision to vote for Clinton with her family — including her father, a Baptist minister—Sarah’s relatives have implied that she is no longer welcome under their roof. She hasn’t made much headway trying to discuss the policies of the two candidates with her family, and says she was surprised by her brother-in-law’s fierce devotion to Trump, especially because he is the father of two young daughters. “Any Republican left who still thinks voting for Trump is a good idea, just ask yourself: ‘If you had a daughter, the things that he has said to female journalists, if he said those exact things to your daughter, could you still vote for him?’” she asks. Rather than talking about the economy or foreign policy, she says, her family members would rather talk about their desire to buy guns easily. “I know it’s not a situation where I can speak freely,” Sarah says. (She hastens to add that, despite what she may have been told in the heat of the moment, she is certain she will still be welcome at Christmas.)

The holidays might be tense in Jennifer’s house as well. The 57-year-old recruiter and radio journalist has voted Republican in the past, and her husband is voting for Trump. But this year, she says, she’s frightened by the effect Trump would have on the country. As the campaign has progressed, her husband has consistently tried to change her mind about Hillary Clinton, sending articles about people who have “done her wrong” and died — implying, presumably, the Clintons ordered them to be killed. He turns up the volume when Trump speaks on TV. He cites homeland security as one of the reasons driving his support.

Jennifer says she understand the case for a Trump presidency: She thinks it’s possible Trump could improve U.S. relations with Russia, an issue that is personal for her family; she and her husband adopted a daughter from Russia. She’s used to hearing about Republicans’ intense dislike for Hillary, but she just doesn’t share it. “I feel like she has, not an abrasive, but a strong personality. She’s a woman and she doesn’t kowtow to people,” Jennifer says. “Some people find that abrasive. If you’re a strong woman, you’re bright, and you express your opinions, a lot of people think that’s taboo.” Though they argue about it, she says, she and her husband have maintained a mutual respect and kept the conversation in the open.

That’s not true of everyone, though. Carol, a 32-year-old graduate of Tulane University and the University of Houston law school, is keeping her decision to vote for Clinton a secret from her husband and her family. As with several of the women I spoke to, the Texas attorney’s concerns weren’t merely for herself, but for the impact a Trump presidency could have on other women. “When you see the leader of your country, his job is to be that leader, and characterizing women in derogatory ways—somebody says something he doesn’t like and she’s a bitch or she’s fat or ugly,” Carol says. “We’re creating an environment where it’s acceptable to characterize women like that. I think it’s scary, and it would really take us quite a few paces back.”

And it’s not just Trump’s attitude toward women that worries Carol. The businessman’s candidacy represents a decline in the standard for politicians in America that she finds incomprehensible. “It’s absolutely a mindfuck that this is even a possibility and that a halfway educated person—not just American, but person — in their right mind can look at this train wreck and think that this is even an acceptable option,” Carol says of Trump. “I can’t even wrap my brain around it.”

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Americans might be used to thinking of politics as an either/or choice, but for the voters I spoke to, breaking ranks is more complicated. Being turned off by Trump is one thing. Voting for Hillary Clinton is another.

Both Sarah and Carol came to their decisions slowly and reluctantly. Carol originally planned to cast her vote for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson; after the Republican primary debates, Sarah thought she wouldn’t vote at all. But the more she learned about both party nominees — including the Republican presidential nominee calling women “naive,” repeatedly commenting on their appearance and referring to women as a “sleaze” and a “bimbo” — the more determined she became to vote for Clinton. She says she was also influenced by a friend’s daily and fact-filled social media posts in support of Clinton.

“To me, this is not a year that a third-party candidate is a vote that I want to — I don’t want to say ‘waste,’ but this isn’t the time to do that,” said Sarah. “This is such a critical, pivotal moment in our nation’s history. I don’t want to waste, even in New York, one vote. It’s not worth it to me.”

Carol, similarly, is motivated by her worries about Trump, but she also sees Clinton as a highly educated and uniquely experienced woman who would do “a pretty bang-up job.” Her husband, however, “absolutely loathes” the Democratic candidate. She doesn’t know or understand where his dislike for Clinton comes from. That conversation is “too infuriating” to pursue, she says, adding, “I don’t think that any of that’s actually based in reality.” She credits his perception of Clinton in part to his constant watching of Fox News.

Trump’s difficulty winning over women isn’t a trivial problem: Women have shown up to vote in higher numbers than men for every presidential election since 1980, with the difference between the sexes totaling up to almost 4 percentage points—63.7 women, 59.8 percent men — in 2012. The gender gap of support for Clinton averages about 11 points, and she won more votes from women than men in every primary.

But it’s not universal, either. Flo Cronican, 66, is a retired tennis instructor and real estate agent in Florida who has voted consistently Republican but is switching to Clinton this year. (She didn’t attend college, making her among the minority of non-college-educated women going for Hillary.) But her decision has been met with shock and disbelief by many of her peers, who are sticking with Trump. “There are some who have asked, ‘How can you do that? How can you vote for Hillary?’” says Cronican.

In response, Cronican sees some of her female friends as being shortsighted. “It doesn’t seem to me they’re looking at the big picture,” she says. “I know a lot of very intelligent women who are voting for Trump. I don’t understand it, and we’ve had long discussions. They’re saying, ‘I don’t want Hillary,’ so they’re willing to accept Donald Trump. To me, that doesn’t make sense. And the women that I know don’t seem that concerned about it.”

When asked which political issues are important to her, she immediately responded by talking about equality, rights, and women and family. She also has a sense of a legacy at stake: Cronican was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and this, she believes, is very likely her last presidential election. A military widow who has traveled the world, she says, “I’ve seen a lot in life. But I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m so completely shocked and, to be perfectly honest, I’m ashamed of my party.”

As a swing-state voter, Carol knows her friends could have an outsize influence on the election, and watching with concern as they dig in on the other side. “I’m just one voice,” she says. “I wish I were many more voices, but I’m not. This is very, very important to me.”