This election has had a lot of lines drawn in the sand, and people standing firmly on either side of them. From the Never Trump rebels, the MAGA empire, and every political split in between, this election has served as one of the most divisive things to happen in America since…well, Barack Obama.
But one more clear cut line has been discovered in a recent poll, which famed analyst and statistician, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, couldn’t help but pay attention to. According to information released by The Atlantic, support for Hillary and Trump is divided starkly by sex.
In fact, the difference is so stark, that the one sidedness of how much women are staying away from Trump is incomparable to anything previously seen in our election history.
That was from a Public Religion Research Institute poll conducted on behalf of The Atlantic. It showed a massive gender split, with Clinton trailing Trump by 11 percentage points among men but leading him by 33 points among women. To put those numbers in perspective, that’s saying Trump would defeat Clinton among men by a margin similar to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1952, while Clinton would defeat Trump among women by a margin similar to … actually, there’s no good comparison, since no candidate has won a presidential election by more than 26 percentage points since the popular vote became a widespread means of voting in 1824. To get to 33 points, you’d have to take the Eisenhower-Stevenson margin and add Lyndon B. Johnson’s 23-point win over Barry Goldwater in 1964 on top of it.
Illustrated, the map would look like this:
The punchline here is that women dislike Trump so much, that if and when Trump loses this election, it will be in large part because they, as a majority, did not want to see him near the Oval Office. It’s a belief Silver shares.
But it seems fair to say that, if Trump loses the election, it will be because women voted against him. I took a look at how men and women split their votes four years ago, according to polls conducted in November 2012. On average, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 7 percentage points among men, about the same as Trump’s 5-point lead among men now. But Romney held his own among women, losing them by 8 points, whereas they’re going against Trump by 15 points.
And women have every reason to want to keep Trump out of any position of power. His recently revealed scandal about how he views women, and especially those scandals and beliefs that have already been released to the public have been swaying women away from Trump for some time.
As I stated back in April after looking at some poll numbers vs Trump’s actions, Trump’s attention towards women seemed to be nothing but an afterthought. I warned that Trump shouldn’t discount the power of women in any election. Now it would seem his chickens are coming home to roost.
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