The battle for the White House – Trump’s fight to retain the female vote
It is that gap with women that’s so tough for the incumbent
One of the great things that happened in the early days of PB (before GE2005) was the creation of the British Polling Council which placed requirements on pollsters to make available certain key data within a fixed time period after the publication of a poll. This is voluntary but political pollsters know that they will struggle to make an impact unless they are BPC compliant.
We now take this for granted in the UK and it has been really frustrating during the current White House campaign to find that US pollsters are under no such obligation and often it is hard to find basic information like the gender splits.
Fortunately some US pollsters, such as Morning Consult in the Tweet above, do make key data available and this gives substance to what is the key dynamic of this campaign – Trump’s struggle to retain the female vote. For if this election was going to be decided by just men he would be in a reasonably strong position.
As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling—she lost some key constituencies, including white women, 53% of whom cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
My guess is that he’s going to really struggle. Many women who backed him last time appear to have made their minds up. In any case many of them have already voted. The latest data is that 11,905,537 votes from both women and men have already been cast. It is too late now to retrieve any of these.