Gender gap

Donald Trump's gender gap

A deeper look at the billionaire businessman's polling numbers show he could suffer with female voters in a general election.

By Steven Shepard

Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on women have done little to dent his meteoric rise, but a deeper look at his polling shows the threat of a gender gap ripping open if he becomes the GOP nominee.

The billionaire businessman outdid himself during a rally in Michigan on Monday night, mocking Hillary Clinton for a “disgusting” bathroom trip she made during the most recent Democratic debate and commenting that Barack Obama “schlonged” her in the 2008 primaries.

While it marked a new low for Trump, he’s no stranger to accusations of misogyny, with Fox News host Megyn Kelly sustaining vicious attacks after she pressed Trump on whether he was part of the “war on women” because of his past references to females as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

On the surface, it doesn’t appear that Trump’s gendered attacks have damaged his candidacy throughout his 6-month-old presidential campaign. Trump remains not just the national front-runner — he’s also ahead in many of the key early-nominating states.

But Trump’s current coalition in the primaries relies heavily on male voters — especially less-educated men. The female vote is less important in Republican primaries — where, because women are more likely than men to be Democrats, they make up a minority of the electorate — and a candidate who appeals mostly to working-class males can emerge in a fractured field. Once that field is whittled to only the top candidates, however, the 40 percent to 50 percent of the GOP primary vote represented by women will become crucial.

And with women expected to comprise between 52 percent and 54 percent of the November electorate next year, Trump or any other Republican can ill afford to lose ground among female voters. (President Barack Obama won women in 2012, 55 percent to Mitt Romney’s 44 percent, according to exit polls.)

This all doesn’t mean that Trump doesn’t have female supporters — or that those women aren’t integral to his overall, national lead.

In both national polls conducted after last week’s GOP debate, Trump led among both men and women on the Republican primary ballot. A Quinnipiac University poll out Tuesday shows only a modest gender gap. Thirty percent of male Republicans back Trump in the poll, compared to 27 percent of women.

Trump’s gender gap is larger in the other national poll conducted after last week’s debate — a Fox News poll that showed him in a stronger position overall. It had Trump at 46 percent among men and just 30 percent among women.

But Trump is clearly relying heavily in the primary race on less-educated men. According to unpublished crosstabs for Tuesday’s Quinnipiac poll, provided to POLITICO, not only is Trump’s highest score on the ballot test among men without a college degree — 33 percent — those Republicans are also most likely to have a favorable opinion of him.

Fully 74 percent of non-college men who identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents have a favorable impression of Trump, compared with 57 percent of male college graduates.

Those numbers drop off among women. The poll found that 50 percent of female college graduates have a favorable view of the real estate mogul. And there’s less of a difference across the education level — just 51 percent of female non-college graduates say they look upon Trump favorably.

While Trump has been the most bombastic among the GOP contenders with inflammatory comments about women — there was also the Carly Fiorina “that face” controversy — the billionaire businessman is not alone with a lurking potential gender problem.

A similar gender-and-class gap exists for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the second-place finisher in the Quinnipiac poll, who has been gaining momentum nationally and in the early states over the past month. Cruz — who, at 24 percent overall, was 4 points behind Trump — earns 30 percent of the male non-college vote and 21 percent of the female non-college vote. Among college graduates, Cruz is at 26 percent among men, but just 14 percent among women. (The Fox News poll showed no gender gap for Cruz, however, pegging him at 18 percent among both men and women.)

And there’s also a counterargument — that Trump may actually be doing better in the polls, especially telephone surveys, because voters may be reluctant to admit to an interviewer that they love Trump.

A study released this week by Kyle Dropp, the executive director of polling and data science at Morning Consult, found a significant difference in his study between Trump’s performance among respondents who completed the survey online and those questioned by a live interviewer — a phenomenon he attributes to social-desirability bias.

Some Republicans who support Trump, the theory goes, are unwilling to tell a live interviewer that they would vote for Trump — perhaps because of some of his past controversial comments, like his statements about Mexican immigrants, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Kelly or his proposal to halt Muslim immigration to the United States. But given the anonymity of an online interview, which more resembles a secret ballot, poll respondents are less inhibited.

The study detected a difference across education level — among college-educated Republicans, Trump performs about 10 percentage points better in online surveys than in live-telephone polls, the study indicates. And while effects for gender were limited, the study was conducted prior to Trump’s remarks about Clinton on Monday night.

Trump, for his part, has publicly stated he’s not concerned about troubling signs in the polls among female voters. Pressed about whether it’s a problem that 6 in 10 women said they don’t believe Trump represents them on their issues, the businessman told CNN in August that he’ll do “great” with women.

“I will be the best thing that ever happened to women,” he said. “I cherish women.”