“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the women's card,” he said. “And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her. Look how well I did with women tonight.”

Tellingly, Mary Pat Christie—the first lady of New Jersey—appeared to roll her eyes as she stood behind Trump and listened him. (Her husband stuck to the weird, vacant stare he uses for Trump rallies.)

First, a fact-check: On a basic level, Trump is wrong. As The Washington Post notes, Trump has beaten his Republican rivals among women in the primary so far, by around 10 points overall; he outperformed that mark Tuesday. But that seems to be mostly a factor of his large lead in the race. To say that women particularly like him would be a vast overstatement. Poll after poll has shown that female voters really don’t like Trump. Gallup found this month that 70 percent of women have an unfavorable view of him. In March, Reuters and Ipsos found that half of American women have a “very unfavorable” view of Trump. Suffolk and USA Today recently found him at 66 percent unfavorable among women. (Unsurprisingly, he does better among Republican women than women overall.)

Do women dislike Clinton, as Trump said? They don’t exactly love her, it’s true. Gallup found her at a net negative-3 among women. (Her standing among women has tumbled over the last year in Gallup’s numbers.) Other polls are rosier. George Washington University found 51 percent of women have a positive view versus 47 percent negative. Suffolk found her at 42 favorable and 48 negative.

In other words, it’s not great. But just as Clinton may be getting a bit of a pass on her overall unfavorables because of Trump’s even worse numbers, the same may prove true among women. An election is a choice. Given the option between Clinton and Trump—with his long history of misogynistic comments, accusations of marital rape, and feud with Megyn Kelly—American women say they’d bite the bullet and vote for Clinton, by a 14-point margin in Reuters’s poll.

Not only is Trump wrong, but as Mary Pat Christie’s negative reaction suggests, he may have phrased his answer in one of the worst possible ways. This sort of attack might well work for Trump, if he could tap into resentments about the increasingly central role that gender has played in her campaign. But accusing Clinton of playing the “woman card” is a risky move, for all the reasons that her zinger in Philly suggested: It’s easily turned around into a positive.

But it also might be a counterproductive move for Trump. After studiously shying away from gender for most of her 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton has made it a more central theme of this year’s run, as I’ve written before. In addition to her cabinet pledge, she has noted that she is considering female running mates, and she’s emphasized her credentials as a grandmother and mother—in addition to as a senator and secretary of state.