On Saturday evening I was watching a movie with my family when a text message made me gasp so hard that it scared them. “What happened?” my husband asked, worried. “Nothing bad,” I said, slightly overcome. “It’s just … Ann Selzer has Harris up three in Iowa!”
All day, political nerds had been waiting for the results of J. Ann Selzer’s famously accurate poll of Iowa. The state hasn’t been swingy in a long time, but the Selzer poll, conducted for The Des Moines Register, can offer clues about broader trends in the electorate. In 2016, when many Democrats were feeling complacent about a Hillary Clinton victory, her survey showing Donald Trump leading by seven points in Iowa was an early indication of his underestimated strength in the Midwest. (He ended up winning Iowa by more than nine points.) In 2020, her poll again showed Trump ahead by seven points, which was both close to the final tally and, in retrospect, a sign that Joe Biden’s margins in neighboring states like Wisconsin would be much thinner than other polls were indicating.
So many of us were anxious to see how big Trump’s lead would be this time, and the fact that Selzer instead found him losing came as a shock. The poll may easily turn out to be wrong; Selzer’s record is as good as anyone’s in the business, but it’s not perfect. Should Kamala Harris win this election, though, the poll will be part of the story of her victory. The reason for Selzer’s anomalous finding is simple: women. If it’s anywhere near accurate, it suggests that conventional political wisdom has been seriously underrating the scale of women’s fury over abortion bans and their revulsion at Trump’s cartoonishly macho campaign.
Selzer’s poll shows independent women backing Harris by 28 points, and women 65 and older backing her by 2-1. Speaking to Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Selzer speculated about what might have driven these numbers. “It was over the summer that Iowa’s six-week ban on abortion went into effect after all the court challenges were taken care of,” she said. Now, she said, people have been “living with it for a while.”
Women’s anger has, of course, been a catalytic force in American politics since the insult of Trump’s election in 2016. It drove the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, and persuaded record numbers of Democratic women to run for office in recent cycles. Female rage was rekindled when, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court picks, we lost Roe v. Wade and women in many conservative states were stripped of control over their reproductive lives. The backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended Roe, is probably why the red wave that Republicans were expecting in 2022 never materialized. It helped Democrats win important state-level victories last year, including the re-election of Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
Some conservative men have assumed that women’s outrage would fade. “As we settle back into what feels like a status quo,” the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini told NPR last year, it will be “tougher to move people and to message on” abortion. Others on the right decided to lean into the gender gap, hoping to galvanize disaffected young men, including men of color, to make up for their erosion among women. “For every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida told the right-wing network Newsmax this year.
This appears to be the strategy of the Trump campaign. In 2016, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, were around to help soften his image with at least some female voters. This year, by contrast, Trump’s most influential relative seems to be his aggro oldest son, Don Jr., who reportedly urged Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate, thus giving us a season’s worth of memes about childless cat ladies.
Trump and his aides made the final night of the Republican National Convention seem like a pro wrestling spectacular. The ex-president has spent lots of time courting young men on podcasts. In place of a traditional door-knocking operation, his campaign has been trying to target alienated men who rarely vote, assuming they’d be natural Trump supporters if only they could be brought into the political process.
Forgoing any significant outreach to women, the campaign has created a permission structure for a carnival of trollish misogyny. In a recent video, John McEntee, a former Trump aide likely to be key to any future Trump administration, said, “When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male: M A L E.” At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, a speaker referred to Harris’s “pimp handlers,” all but calling her a prostitute. (His slur was overshadowed by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrously racist performance.) On Saturday, Trump’s thuggish spokesman, Steven Cheung, called the husband of Harris’s campaign manager a “cuck” — incel slang for cuckold — who is “used to not knowing what’s going on behind his back.” The ex-president himself, in one of his latest demonstrations of contempt for women, last week said that if he’s elected, he’d give the anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. responsibility for “women’s health.”
Maybe Trump’s hyper-patriarchal approach will work. A majority of women will almost certainly vote for Harris, but Trump could win even larger margins with men. With most polls showing a dead heat, the green shoots of Democratic hope could be mowed down tomorrow. Among Republicans, however, you can already see a dawning suspicion that the male voters they’re counting on to replace conscientious suburban women may not be wholly reliable. “The core plot of the Barbie movie was distracting men so they wouldn’t vote,” Gaetz wrote on X on Monday. “Don’t make the Barbie movie come true.”
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