A significant voting bloc in the 2024 election views former President Donald Trump in an extremely negative light, which may prove costly in the November election.
That's according to Marc Caputo, a Politico journalist who also writes for the conservative anti-Trump publication The Bulwark. Caputo recently joined New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent's podcast to share his thoughts on how the final weeks of the 2024 election cycle may shake out. In their interview, Caputo said Trump is particularly lagging behind not just with women voters, but also with Republican and independent women.
"The problem that Republican data guys, when they hold these focus groups with women, are encountering is the utter antipathy that they have for Donald Trump," Caputo said. "One told me that, invariably, when you see these women being interviewed, a word that will always come up is either ‘disgusting’ or ‘pig’, or sometimes both, to describe Trump."
"Some of these people very closely align with or did vote for Nikki Haley, and that is a significant portion of this base of supporters we’re talking about," he added.
Caputo's argument about Republican women jibes with actual hard data from Republican primary elections — particularly in several pivotal swing states. In the Pennsylvania primary earlier this year, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley still managed to win 156,000 votes, despite her suspending her campaign more than a month prior to the Keystone State's GOP primary. This means more than 16% of Republicans in Pennsylvania were not enthusiastic about the former president representing their party in the general election.
This same phenomenon happened in both Georgia and Wisconsin as well. In Georgia's Republican primary, which took place the week after Haley suspended her campaign following the "Super Tuesday" spate of primaries and caucuses, Haley still won 77,000 Republican votes. She also garnered over 76,000 votes in Wisconsin, which made up nearly 13% of all ballots cast. This suggests Vice President Kamala Harris has an opening with Haley supporters in those must-win states, whose electoral votes may very well decide the election.
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Even if Harris only peels off a fraction of those Republicans, it could make the crucial difference. President Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by the narrowest of margins, with an advantage of less than 11,000 votes in the Grand Canyon State, just under 12,000 votes in Georgia and fewer than 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. Trump had a similarly close victory in the so-called "Blue Wall" states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016, winning those three states with just around 78,000 ballots combined.
Trump's deficit with women is likely made even worse by his pick of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) to join him on the Republican ticket. The Ohio senator has a long history of making disparaging remarks about women, like when he suggested "childless cat ladies" were pushing a progressive agenda on Americans.
Reproductive rights has also been singled out as one of the defining issues of the 2024 campaign. While Harris is running on restoring abortion rights the Supreme Court took away by codifying Roe v. Wade, Trump is walking the fine line of appeasing his evangelical base and branching out to be more inclusive to women. T
The former president has simultaneously defended his appointments of three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe, while also demurring on the question of a national abortion ban. However, some Republicans have pointed out that enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873 would prohibit the mailing of abortion drugs, making medication abortions — which make up the bulk of abortions in the U.S. — much less accessible.
Click here to read the full transcript of Caputo's remarks on the New Republic's website.