Doesn’t add up

Trump’s appeal to female voters doesn’t add up

Not only do the GOP nominee’s new proposals run counter to his past statements, his plan to pay for them strains credulity.

By Eli Stokols

Donald Trump’s parade of policy speeches will continue on Tuesday night outside Philadelphia, where he’ll roll out a proposal for paid family leave and hope to win over a key group of swing voters, suburban women, who continue to elude him.

But for that appeal to succeed, Trump’s female critics will not only have to forgive the GOP nominee's litany of crude, misogynistic statements, they’ll also have to pocket their calculators. Because Trump’s proposal to pay for his plan without increasing the budget deficit doesn’t add up.

Trump is suggesting the federal government guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers and is fleshing out the child-care tax cut plan he put forth last month. A campaign adviser said the new leave benefit would be funded by “eliminating fraud” in unemployment insurance, which one 2013 Federal Reserve study estimated to be $3.3 billion a year — but even the most bare-bones family leave program would likely cost three times that amount, according to independent budget analysts.

It’s the latest in a string of Trump's high-cost promises to voters that have been vague, or misleading, on how he plans to fund them. Mexico says it won’t give a dime for Trump’s border wall, but Trump says it will pay for all of it. Trump also says he’ll triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, preserve entitlements, grow the military and make child care tax-deductible, all while sweeping in large-scale tax cuts.

“Promising the electorate the world in the campaign with every intention of working out the details after the election is hardly a new phenomenon, but it used to be one that Republicans rejected,” Noah Rothman, a conservative columnist, wrote Tuesday in Commentary Magazine. “Today, under Trump’s corrupting umbra, the GOP has become the party of wild assurances and cascading spending proposals with no intention of ever making good on them.”

By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s proposal to have the federal government cover 12 weeks of paid leave, with workers earning two-thirds of their salary while away, carries a price tag of $300 billion over 10 years — but she’s proposed a specific means of absorbing that cost: raising taxes on the rich.

Beyond the budget hole, Trump’s outreach to women is plagued by a history — both during his campaign and long before — of derogatory statements about women. He once told a female lawyer she was “disgusting” when she left a deposition to pump breast milk, and he described his second wife to Howard Stern as “nice tits, no brains.” He has disparaged female journalists multiple times, from saying “bimbo” Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” to referring to an NBC News correspondent as “little” Katy Tur.

Trump’s outreach to women, and particularly his use of paid leave to do it, is complicated by reports that he has in fact failed — despite his own statements to the contrary — to provide paid maternity leave or child care for his own employees.

The GOP nominee plans to use his daughter Ivanka, who will appear with him onstage Tuesday night, to sell the plan that she encouraged and helped craft, as Trump told supporters Tuesday afternoon during a rally in a Des Moines suburb.

"'Daddy, Daddy, we have to do this,'" Trump said, crediting his daughter's insistence on the subject. "Very smart, and she's right." But the Trump Corp., which Ivanka runs, does not appear to provide paid maternity leave or child care to its employees.

Trump has been resistant to giving any information about the leave policies at his companies. He told Fox News’ Stuart Varney last year that paid leave is something “to be careful of” in order to keep the “country very competitive.” In 2004, he said in an interview with NBC’s "Dateline" that pregnancy is “certainly an inconvenience for a business” and suggested that a former employee should have felt pressure to come back to work after maternity leave.

For private companies, it can be nearly impossible to uncover paid-leave policies because most don’t make that information public, and only 12 percent of private-sector workers in the country have access to paid family leave from their employer, according to the Labor Department. Trump’s employees are also bound by strict non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements.

Ivanka Trump has said she offers eight weeks of paid maternity leave at her company, but the same is not necessarily true for companies she contracts with. The Washington Post reported last month that she uses a contractor to design her clothing line that doesn’t offer any paid leave maternity leave for its workers.

In addition to the maternity leave proposal, Trump will update his plan to allow families to deduct child-care expenses, something else he has failed to provide for his own employees, despite misleading statements that he does. The two programs he cited, "Trump Kids" and "Trumpeteers," cater to patrons of Trump's hotels and golf club, not his employees.

The Trump campaign has been looking for ways to make its tax-reform plan more focused on the middle class and will allow parents to deduct child care up to the average cost in their states from their income taxes. Individuals with incomes up to $250,000 and couples who make less than $500,000 would be able to qualify for the deduction, which would exclude the wealthiest American families but still provide benefits to large numbers of high-income people. Poorer families that don’t pay income tax would also get assistance, but it would generally be smaller in value.

The tax code already offers a number of subsidies for child expenses — a dependent care credit, the child tax credit, flexible spending accounts — and it’s unclear whether Trump’s proposals would replace or augment those provisions.

Inconsistencies aside, Trump’s pitch to female voters is understandable, given Trump’s continued struggles to overcome the gender gap: The Republican trailed by 15 points among female likely voters in last week’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, and led Clinton by only 5 points among white women. Mitt Romney won the votes of white women by about 14 points in 2012, according to exit polls.

Among white women with a college degree, Trump was 10 points behind Clinton, 40 percent to Clinton’s 50 percent. Trump was stronger among white women without a degree, leading by 17 points, 51 percent to 34 percent. But that lags behind Trump’s stronger support among male non-graduates: a gaping 40-point advantage over Clinton in the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

And as Trump tries to make inroads with women, the Clinton campaign will be taking aim at his proposals — and wasted no time ripping his family leave policy on Tuesday.

"We’ve got 56 days left in the campaign and he’s finally decided to talk about policy, and it's everything we would have expected it to be,” Clinton’s senior policy adviser Maya Harris said in a campaign-organized conference call on Tuesday evening. “It’s completely out of touch, it’s half-baked, and it’s out of touch with how Americans are living today."