Reuters poll: Half of US women have “very unfavorable” view of Trump

If this poll accurately reflects the US electorate, get ready for the mother of all gender gaps (so to speak) in November if Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. The frontrunner has a major problem with women, according to this Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted over the first half of March, and it has gotten worse rather than better over the last six months. Half of all women have a “very unfavorable” view of Trump, in an election that could pit him against the first female major-party nominee:

In head-to-head polling, Reuters puts the gender gap between Trump and Hillary Clinton into double digits:

It’s an interesting result, especially since the same polling data for Reuters’ national tracking poll suggests that Trump does better among women at the moment than his Republican rivals in the GOP primaries, at least. Filtering down to March 1-15 and selecting women only across all political affiliations, a third of 1,997 respondents support Trump for the GOP nomination, while only 16% support Ted Cruz. Nearly 30% wouldn’t vote at all. When narrowed further to only Republican and independent voters (1,632 respondents), Trump gets 39%, Cruz gets 18.3%, and 18.9% wouldn’t vote at all. (Note that this poll included Marco Rubio and Ben Carson for at least part of the period.)

Even without the gender gap, Trump has major favorability issues in Reuters’ tracking polls. Once again filtering for those who participated in 2012, 39.5% of respondents view him very unfavorably, 6.9% somewhat unfavorably, and another 9.2% lean toward unfavorable, for a total unfavorability of 55.6%. He gets only 18.2% for “very favorable,” with a total favorability of 44.4%.

However, when it comes to the head-to-head matchup, the tracking poll shows Trump a distant second to Hillary, 41.1/34, with a quarter of respondents declaring that they’ll skip the election altogether. That narrows slightly when filtering out all those who didn’t vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in 2012, but Hillary still leads 46.2/39.7, and 14% of those who voted in 2012 say they won’t be back in 2016. Among men who voted in 2012, Hillary only has a slight edge, 44/43.5, but among women who voted in 2012, it expands to 48.5/35.8.

Don’t forget that the gender gap in 2012 was much narrower. Women made up 53% of the electorate and broke 55/44 for Obama, while men went for Romney 52/45 for a net gap of -4 for the GOP. Right now, we’d be looking at a net gap of -13.2 among those who voted in 2012. That has the makings of a disaster for Republicans in November if it doesn’t change, one that could roll well down the ballot.

There is certainly time to fix this, and head-to-head polling is still somewhat fraught at this stage with other emotional baggage from the primaries. Also, Reuters does not have similar data readily available to compare Trump against Ted Cruz or John Kasich, which makes it a little tough to argue on a data basis that either would substantially improve the GOP’s chances in the fall. However, this is still a big red flag for Republicans, especially given that they will likely face off against a woman at the top of the opposing ticket.

when my wife went to vote, there were a couple of women with clipboards outside the polling place. She said they were busy talking to people when she entered, but on her way out, they were asking if anyone voted for Trump, and if they would answer a few questions.

Thinking this was a chance to speak her mind, she walked over and agreed.

She said the questions were so outrageous, and I’m going to paraphrase a few she mentioned:

“Given that Trump has repeatedly attacked women, called them pigs, talked about how breast size was important (the list went on my wife said) could you see yourself voting for Trump in the general election?”

“Now that Trump has been promoting violence at his rallies, and a female reporter has been shoved to the ground and hurt by his campaign manager, do you think most women will agree that this is acceptable behavior of a president?”

My wife said she walked away at that point, but the woman started getting louder as she followed my wife a few steps asking another question, so that all around could hear.

She thought the woman was going to follow her to her car, but she didn’t, she said she only followed about ten feet.

I am guessing this is where this sort of polling is coming from.

Y'know, 'cause it's really all about electing Hillary, who's always on the lookout for women's rights, and also assures us that the many heads of states who phone her (no email!) every day thing Donald Trump is some kind of maniac. And Megyn Kelly, she's a reliable source of news...

Since the first, and through topic #3410362, we've had 425 Clinton/Hillary (and FBI, which includes some Apple iPhone and LaVoy Finicum topics), approximately the number of generally-repetitive Trump-bashing topics we have over a period of three or four days.

That 425 is just over 6.5 percent of all surviving topics from March (and that's with those additional non-Hillary FBI topics).

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has skipped the extra proposed debate on Faux News and it was cancelled -- and Trump turned toward the Fall race and destroying Her Thighness.

Here's a selection:

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