Trump Is Losing Educated GOP Women—and Splitting Up Families Along the Way
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/gop-women-donald-trump-2016-214318
As the election ticks down to the wire, there’s a glaring disadvantage staring the Trump campaign in the face—one that is an explicit slap to his daughter, Ivanka, a Wharton Business School graduate and mother of three who has so often attempted to soften her father’s image and portray him as a champion of equality in the workplace.
For months, polls have shown that Donald Trump will require a white supermajority to offset his historic deficits among African-Americans and Latinos in order to secure even a narrow victory in November. It’s now becoming clear that Trump isn’t hitting the numbers he needs—and that one demographic is standing in the way of the plan. “The main factor behind (Trump’s) underperformance among white voters,” according to a Monmouth poll conducted over the summer, “is his lack of support among white women with a college degree.”
Educated women, it appears, are defecting in droves from the GOP, and the numbers are stark. White men without a college degree prefer Trump over Clinton by a 31-point margin, and he leads among college-educated white men by 11 points. White women without a college degree? Trump wins them, too—by a margin of 17 points, 49 to 32. None of that is surprising: Those numbers are roughly equivalent to Mitt Romney’s advantages in 2012. But Trump is losing educated white women to Hillary Clinton by a staggering 30 points, 57 to 27 percent, according to Monmouth, and other polls have shown similar numbers....
What’s happening among these women? I spoke to a number of educated GOP women who say they’re voting for Hillary, seeking to find out not just what drove their decision, but what kind of impact it is having on their lives. What I found was that Trump is splitting Republican households, with wives canceling out their husbands’ votes for the GOP; many will pull the lever for Hillary despite strong resistance and flat-out opposition from their spouses, families and communities. And many are even keeping their decision a secret from those closest to them.