ONE SINGLE GROUP OF VOTERS EXPECTED TO SWING THE VOTE TO THE WINNER

…The Classic Knitting Circle

 

Trump has a major challenge with many educated female voters.

 

 

OK, it’s one week after the first 2016 presidential debate, and the day of the vice presidential debate, so what kind of week did Donald Trump have?

 

Well, to put it into perspective, here are a few of the latest media headlines regarding Mr. Trump;

 

TRUMP’S BAD WEEK IS A NIGHTMARE FOR THE GOP!

 

DONALD TRUMP’S WEIGHT PROBLEM: HE CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ‘FAT’ PEOPLE!

 

IVANKA TRUMP STARS IN AD TO HELP HER DAD’S APPEAL TO EDUCATED WOMEN!

 

The reality is that both campaigns are scrambling to win over female voters in America’s suburbs.   Well-educated white women have emerged as the presidential campaign’s most pivotal swing voting group.

 

The campaigns are focusing on making direct appeals to female voters in campaign appearances in the suburbs of North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and the other battleground states.

 

With all the noise made by Trump over the Miss Universe brouhaha from the debate, interviews with women in the battleground state of New Hampshire showed that Trump has a major challenge with many female voters.

 

Whitney Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster had the following comment:  “It’s very clear that Trump is doing extremely well among white non-college-educated men . . . but white women with a college degree is a huge impediment to getting where he needs to be.  I’m not sure what he can do about it given all the comments he’s made about women over the last 15 months.”

 

This is all very important, as we now know, more women vote than men.  Women tend to also do more research than men before voting and those comments Trump has made about over-weight women and his personal business demand for hiring only attractive women, it’s not looking very good for Mr. Trump.

 

As an example, in a suburb of Boston, six women in a knitting club were all together knitting in a yarn shop and of course, they were talking about Trump.  They were a combination of all three political persuasions: Republican, Democrat, and Independent.  They all had children and one woman that had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but made it clear how they all felt about Trump.  Her comment was  “You just want to smack him.”

 

One 40 year old woman in the club, Kristen Schwartz, said about her watching of the first debate: “It’s not polite to interrupt people, but if you stop to breathe or think about your point, they just talk over you and the conversation just gets louder and louder and louder.”

 

And that’s exactly how it was with Trump on debate night.

 

The 46 year old owner of the yarn shop, Sandy Zielie, put the whole issue into the club’s perspective: “Women are going to save the country this election.”

 

Both parties are aware that this one group of educated women are almost certain to swing the election to the winner.

 

Even though both candidates are focusing on various election swing groups, the college educated, or even college attended women, are at the top of the list.

 

Yes, more women do vote than men, but one statistic that is today being confirmed is that with households where both married partners are bread winners, and in those families where both adults are college educated, or college attended, the woman is usually the main driver for deciding which candidate gets the votes of the household. 

 

Yes, I said “votes”.  The educated woman usually does the election research.  Then she takes that knowledge and most times, she uses it to indicate who should receive both bread winner’s votes.  Therefore, educated American women probably influence more than their own single votes.

 

If you think back to the debate, many of Clinton’s strikes against Trump were designed to sow fresh doubts in women’s minds.  This was the reason Hillary at the end of the debate mentioned how Trump had shamed the Miss Universe winner, Alicia Machado, for gaining weight.

 

But even Hillary and her team had no idea that Trump would continue the controversy day after day, as he continued to lashed out at Machado.  As usual, Trump couldn’t stop talking and he continued maligning Machado in his erratic series of Tweets starting at 3:20 AM that Friday morning.

 

Needless to say, the Miss Universe episode has not gone over well with the exact female voters Trump needs to win over.

 

Here’s one of the latest examples from from the Washington Post/ABC News poll.  “I have always voted Republican, but I don’t feel like I could vote for Trump this year,” said Rosanna Koehlert, 58, a college graduate and housewife, in Merrimack, N.H. “He shouldn’t be making fun of people and making them self-conscious about the way they look. That’s not what a president should be doing.”

 

Since the debate, and Trump’s subsequent bizarre activities, Clinton has continued to hold a lead in national and state polls among white women with college degrees.

 

The big issue here is that in the 2012 election, Romney took this same demographic of women 52% to Obama’s 46%.  Currently, Trump is losing it badly, 32% to Clinton’s 57% according to a late September Washington Post-ABC News poll of likely voters.

 

Among white women without college degrees, however, Trump leads Clinton 52% to 40%. The two candidates are virtually tied among white women overall: 46% for Clinton and 44% for Trump, according to the Post-ABC survey.

 

Even though Trump holds a 2-1 lead among white men, Clinton has substantial leads with the educated women as well as the African American, Hispanic and Asian voters, especially those in the deep south.

 

However, Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster agreed that women have been cool to Trump’s candidacy for several reasons.  “It’s not just about the toxic language he uses towards all the various women he knows publicly, but it’s also his lack of fluency on policy, his lack of understanding about caregiving,” Omero said. “It’s clearly not his comfort zone. He’s got this very harsh tone, in general, that a lot of women respond very badly to.”

 

As one senior Clinton campaign advisor stated, . “We know that white suburban women are critical for both parties . . . and the lowest hanging fruit for expansion among that group is more likely to be college-educated white women.”

 

Trump is trying hard to increase as many votes for un-educated white male & female Americans to offset his losses among blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

 

“Some women have already gone into their respective corners, and they will support Clinton or Trump and not move,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and pollster. “But the persuadable are swinging back and forth because they know there’s always more to learn, more to see, more to know.”

 

You might have noticed however, that for months, Clinton’s campaign ads have used Trump’s own words for undermining his character, and that will continue going forward. The ad spots have been aimed at women of all ages and they evoke deep-down emotional responses. One of the campaign’s recent ads is called “Mirrors”.  The ad depicts girls of different ages and ethnicities looking at their mirror reflections as Trump’s own voice is talking, as he is crudely describing over-weight women’s bodies.

 

The Clinton campaign obviously decided that all Hillary Clinton has to say in these ads is “I approve of this ad”.  Trump has been recorded for so many years at making disparaging comments about women that they decided to, “Let Trump speak for himself.”  The ads are very effective with Trump describing how he feels that women that are over-weight or unattractive are basically worthless.

 

Clinton is laboring to persuade voters who identify as “moderate,” regardless of their party affiliation. In 2012, moderates made up 41% of the electorate, and Obama won them 56% to Romney’s 41%. Many moderates live in suburban areas, and although they cross over into many demographic groups, the Clinton campaign’s data suggests they hold similar values and beliefs.

 

According to Trump’s campaign manager, “If this election is about Hillary Clinton and is fought on the issues, Donald Trump wins,” Conway said. She ticked through the issues she wants Trump to focus on in the final weeks: security, terrorism, opioid abuse, affordability, fairness and ethics.

 

But as usual, Trump just can’t seem to stay on script, and minutes after Conway spoke, Trump in a big rally went after “Crooked Hillary” again, and about her being sick with pneumonia, as if that was her fault.

 

As of today, the Trump surrogates have been told to use the word “genius” in describing Trump because he was able to use the tax laws to pay zero income tax.

 

Of course, the Democrats immediately hit back at Trump.   They then showed on this older Trump tax return, he had paid zero taxes.  They stated that if he is such a “genius” at business, why did that same tax return show that Trump had lost 916 million dollars that same year?   Apparently to the GOP, losing 1 Billion dollars in one year is being a “genius”….?

 

It may be difficult for female voters to tune everything else out.  However. Lisa Faust, 45, one of those yarn shop knitters, was also trained as a chemical engineer and is raising a son with Down Syndrome.  She can’t stop thinking about the time Trump mocked a disabled journalist.  “What’s distressing to me is that Trump has made it socially acceptable to embrace bigotry and racism,” Faust said. “How do you say to an 11-year-old child, ‘That’s not acceptable behavior,’ but the potential leader of our country thinks it’s acceptable? That really gets to me.”

 

Trump’s disgusting comments about women over the last 4 decades, and now about a disabled reporter, does not come near to comparing with Hillary Clinton’s decades of long fights for women and children’s health and well-being.

 

This should all continue to make Tuesday, November 8^th , a very interesting night.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016