There was one group of voters that Donald Trump couldn’t seem to get off his mind last weekend: women.
In overnight social media posts and at a rally in a battleground state, the Republican presidential nominee said that if elected, he would “protect” and “take care of” women and they will “no longer be thinking about abortion.”
In between, he called MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle a “dumb as a rock bimbo” after she criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during an appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and said Oprah Winfrey, who has endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris in the White House race, wasn’t the “real Oprah” after the television personality interviewed the vice president at a campaign event.
“Women, we love you. We’re going to take care of you,” Trump said at Sept. 21 rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, without offering any policy specifics about how his administration would work to boost women’s economic or social stature.
Though national tracking polls offer an incomplete picture of the electorate, those conducted after the party conventions show that the gender gap in the presidential race is widening, with most now showing Harris with a double-digit lead among women voters. Harris held a three-point lead over Trump with registered voters in a national poll conducted in late August and early September by The 19th News and Survey Monkey, with the vice president having a wider advantage with women voters than the former president did with men.
Hours before the North Carolina rally, shortly after midnight, Trump had written on his social media site Truth Social in an 181-word, all-caps post that women are less healthy, less safe, and more depressed and unhappy than they were when he was president. He offered no data or evidence to back up his claims, which are not reflected in polling or government data. He also again repeated an abortion-related lie that Democrats want to execute babies.
“I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES,” Trump wrote. “I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!”
The post followed a Harris rally in the political battleground of Atlanta, where she blamed “Trump abortion bans” for the “preventable” deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, two women in the state whose stories were reported last week by ProPublica. “And those are only the stories we know,” Harris told the crowd. The day before, she had met with Thurman’s family.
Trump frequently touts his role in nominating three of the conservative justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. He often says that returning the issue to the states was widely supported, though polling showed that a strong majority of Americans disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Trump has declined to endorse a federal abortion ban, saying during a debate earlier this month that “we’ve gotten what everybody wanted” by leaving it up to the states.
Other than support the status quo, Trump has said little about how his administration would approach abortion, offering few to no specifics on two priorities of the anti-abortion movement: undoing the 2000 approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and reviving an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s known as the Comstock Act to prohibit shipping it by mail. The former president has also provided muddled answers on other issues related to reproductive health, saying, for example, he supports in vitro fertilization, without addressing that his party platform’s support for fetal personhood is in conflict with protecting access to the assisted reproductive technology.
Harris, meanwhile, has made protecting abortion rights central to her campaign after replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in late July. Abortion was front-and-center at the Democratic National Convention in August and Harris brought it up in her own primetime speech accepting the party’s nomination. She frequently frames abortion as an issue of essential freedom and her campaign has a Fight for Reproductive Freedoms bus that is touring political battleground states where the future of abortion access is in question. She has declined to say whether she would support any restrictions at all in the final trimester of pregnancy. Harris’ campaign on Sept. 23 released an ad that features an Arizona woman who is undergoing IVF with her husband who serves in the military, and highlights their worry that state abortion bans could block access to the treatment.
Harris is running to be the first woman president and she would also be the second Black president and the first of South Asian descent. She has not focused on her gender or her racial identity on the campaign trail, or the potentially historic nature of the election. Trump and his fellow Republicans, meanwhile, have highlighted Harris’ gender and race while emphasizing a traditional brand of masculinity rooted in physical prowess, strength and dominance. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, would like to roll back aspects of the 1960s sexual revolution, during which the first reliable oral contraceptives emerged and a feminist movement took hold that sent women into the workforce at record levels.
At the Republican National Convention, there were appearances from Ultimate Fighting Championships President Dana White and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. The former president walked out to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Trump has been making overtures to young men in an attempt to shore up support among young people and also make up for declining support from women.
Dozens of women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Several have described him forcibly reaching under their skirts, others have said he kissed them without consent. Courts awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million and $83.3 million after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, though not for rape.
It is unclear what inroads Trump will be able to make with women in the closing stretch of the race. Six weeks out from Election Day, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll showed that women picked Harris over Trump as their likely candidate by 21 points, indicating there could be a historic gender gap this year. In 2020, Biden beat Trump among women by about 11 points; in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump among women by about 16 points.