Trump's turn towards overt racism is driving away a big part of his base that helped him win in 2016: report

In a column for the Daily Beast, Molly Jong-Fast is reporting that Donald Trump's ramping up of racist rhetoric -- particularly against four female Democratic lawmakers of color -- is hurting him with a key demographic that helped propel him into the White House in 2016.

Jong-Fast begins by noting that white working women who supported Trump in 2016 seem to have found Trump's growing reliance on racism as a focus of his campaign unpalatable and are turning on him.

"The president of the United States has a well-deserved problem with women voters but it may not be for the reasons you’d suspect," she wrote. "It turns out the racism may actually be more distasteful to working class white women than the numerous sexual assault allegations."

In a week when Trump's campaign is making a big pitch for female voters with their 'Women for Trump" push, a pollster said the president not only isn't bringing new female fans into the fold -- he may be losing those he already had.

According to Jong-Fast, "On Thursday, Democratic pollster and political strategist Stan Greenberg released a set of focus groups he conducted in white working-class neighborhoods, and the results should worry the organizers of Women for Trump. 'The white working-class men look like they are approaching the 2016 margins for Trump, but not the women,' said Greenberg in The Atlantic. And Ronald Brownstein wrote that these focus groups 'offer fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.'"

"It turns out that white working-class women do not enjoy the president’s 'turn toward more overt racism,'" the author reports. "A woman from Clark County, Nevada said of Trump during one of the focus groups, 'He totally divides this country, like no one has ever done in history.' Another woman from the focus groups said, 'I feel like whenever he starts hating on Democrats, because he does this often, it really does make him sound ignorant.'"

The author speculates, "It’s hard to know why the racism of a racist president who rose to political prominence on the back of a racist lie, birtherism, is suddenly bothering white working-class women. Perhaps the overtness of his targeting of the Squad is finally a bridge too far. It’s possible that the act of watching the president target women who are just trying to do their jobs is viscerally more upsetting to these women than the many allegations of sexual assault that they did not actually see with their own eyes," before adding, "Maybe the president’s racism, the thing he’s been using to juice his white working class base, will boomerang on him and alienate white working class women. Wouldn’t it be delicious if the racism was the thing that brought down the racist? "

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