It might be too little and too late for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
Trump has been begging suburban women in Pennsylvania to vote for him, but polls are showing they have no plans to do so.
At his Johnstown, Pennsylvania, campaign rally on Tuesday, Trump went on a bizarre rant about someone who told him suburban women do not like him because of how he talks.
"I'm about law and order. I'm about having you safe. I'm about having your suburban communities. I don't want to build low-income housing next to your house, OK," he bragged.
"So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me, please, please? I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" he continued. "The other thing, I don't have that much time to be that nice. You know, I can do it, but I gotta go quickly. We don't have that much time."
Trump predicted his request would work: "I think we're gonna see that the women really like Trump a lot. That's what happened last time, remember? Remember last four years ago? Four years ago, they said women will never vote for him. I said, Why, am I so bad? They said the women will never vote, then I got 52%."
An exit poll in 2016 showed that Trump won 52% of white women — he got just 41% of the vote from women overall) — but Trump has often made this dishonest claim, seemingly pretending nonwhite women do not exist.
But Trump is struggling mightily among all Pennsylvania women this time around, and that is why he is trailing badly in the state. FiveThirtyEight's polling average indicates that he trails Joe Biden by more than 7 points overall in the important swing state.
But a closer look at recent polls shows that Trump's doing much worse than that with women.
A Quinnipiac University poll from October gave Biden a 30-point lead among likely Pennsylvania women voters, 63% to 33%.
Another poll published in October by Monmouth University found that 61% of women in the state support Biden and just 35% support Trump — a 26-point Biden edge..
A Washington Post/ABC News poll from late September found that, among Pennsylvania women voters, Biden had a 23-point advantage: 61% to 38%.
Several of the state's women told CNN this week that they had voted for Trump in 2016 but were backing Biden this time around.
"I think he's a bully," one explained. "He represents everything that I don't want my children to grow up to be." She cited Trump's botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic as "the absolute last straw."
Asked about Trump's claims that he is preserving suburban neighborhoods, another rolled her eyes.
"It irritates me that he thinks that I and other people like me are stupid enough to believe that. It's insulting," she told the network.
A third noted that she had incorrectly believed Trump would take the job seriously.
"I honestly thought that if elected, he would calm down, and act presidential. I really thought that was the case," she recalled. "But from the gate, it wasn't. He lied about his inauguration parade and the attendance right away."
Trump won Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes by less than 1% in 2016, with a margin of fewer than 45,000 votes. Exit polls showed Democrat Hillary Clinton won the state's women by 13 points, 55% to 42%.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
