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For all that, it is always dangerous to write off Trump’s chances with women voters. Like most reporters on the Trump beat in 2016, I was convinced his candidacy was dead and buried after the emergence of the notorious Access Hollywood tape, which showed him boasting about grabbing women by the “pussy”. Yet only a month later, he ended up winning more votes from white women than Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire last week, even as he bullied and belittled Haley, he still attracted more female support than she did.
Biden will hope the issue of abortion, and Trump’s role in overturning Roe v Wade by elevating three hardline conservative justices to the Supreme Court, will boost his standing among women. Even in conservative states, such as Kansas and Ohio, voters have decided in referendums to keep abortion legal. Yet despite taking credit for the historic Supreme Court ruling – “I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” boasted Trump – the kind of moderate Republicans who support Haley tend to regard him as a fellow moderate on this issue.
Despite demands from white evangelicals – many of whom continue to deify him – Trump has not called for a nationwide abortion ban at 15 weeks. So, while reproductive rights will doubtless help Biden, they might not be quite the decisive vote-winner with suburban women as the Democrats presume – a repeat, feasibly, of what happened with the Access Hollywood scandal in 2016.
To broaden his appeal, Trump could well pick a female running mate – Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik are names in the frame.
But further court cases will again highlight his misogyny, not least his prosecution in New York over alleged hush payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, whom he often calls “horseface”. Nor does it help that his wife appears to have boycotted the campaign trail, turning “Missing Melania” into a meme.
So while the primary season has demonstrated Trump’s omnipotence within the Republican Party, it has also exposed vulnerabilities within the American electorate as a whole. An unlikely duo of a former New York agony aunt and a one-time red state governor have graphically exposed his woman problem.
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.
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