Donald Trump has a problem with women, and it’s not confined to Megyn Kelly at Fox News.

By his own account, the man who ran the Miss Universe pageant is an exemplary employer of women on his staff.

However, his self-proclaimed love of women is not reflected in the opinions of the most critical group of voters for Republican candidates in any presidential election: white women, particularly in suburban areas.

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Trump may have won the GOP primaries as an unorthodox candidate. But the data strongly suggests that women voters – especially those who traditionally lean towards his party – are not exactly attracted to a former playboy candidate who maligns them at every opportunity.

Back in 1996, when one Bill Clinton was running for re-election, this group of swing voters was memorably – and narrowly – defined as soccer moms. In the later stages of the 1996 election, Clinton was leading by 10 points among married white women in the suburbs, after trailing among them by 21 points in his first presidential contest.

When George W Bush ran for re-election in 2004, the target swing voter moved from a soccer mom to a security mom: a wider group of women who preferred Bush over Kerry on issues of terrorism in the first presidential election after 9/11.

Whatever pollsters and media call the women who will decide the 2016 presidential contest, Donald Trump is performing disastrously among them. He is only one point ahead of Hillary Clinton among white women, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll. That close polling is in line with previous polling that puts Trump variously four points up (Washington Post/ABC) among white women or two points down (CNN). Mitt Romney won white women by 14 points in 2012, and he still lost to Obama. If Trump is not winning white women at all, he’s in deep trouble.

The story behind those numbers is the most significant subtext of the 2016 election: white women simply don’t like Trump’s rhetoric.

According to the Washington Post poll, white women are more likely than white men to say that Trump doesn’t show enough respect for the people he disagrees with (74% of white women compared with 60% of white men). And far more of those white women think Trump’s personality is a major problem (52% of women versus 33% of men).

Underscoring that huge difference in attitudes is the deeply anti-establishment view of white men compared with white women. Around two-thirds of white men (68%) think the next president should be a political outsider, compared with less than half of white women (45%).

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Overall, Trump is trailing Clinton by 24 points among women voters in the Quinnipiac poll. Four years ago, Romney lost to Obama by 11 points among women, who made up 53% of the electorate.

What on earth could be driving away women voters from Donald Trump?

It might be his opinion of a lawyer who wanted to pump breastmilk for her newborn daughter (“you’re disgusting”). It might even be his bizarre attraction to his own daughter (“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”).

Or it might just be his personal attacks on Rosie O’Donnell (“that fat, ugly face of hers”), Arianna Huffington (“unattractive, both inside and out”) and Megyn Kelly (“blood coming out of her wherever”).

Kelly may have patched things up with Trump, but it’s worth recalling that their feud began because the Fox News anchor had the nerve to ask the GOP candidate about his sexist comments in an early TV debate.

Of course, women voters may also be leaning towards Clinton as the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination. That is at least the opinion of white men, who think Clinton has more of an advantage as a woman. (For their part, white women think Trump has more of an advantage as a man.)

For a brief moment on the campaign trail, Trump seemed to be aware of his challenges with women. In mid-April, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and wife Melania began rounds of media interviews with the clear goal of explaining how their beloved Donald was not, in fact, a misogynist.

“I’ve witnessed these incredible female role models that he’s employed in the highest executive positions at the Trump Organization my entire life, in an industry that has been dominated by men, is still dominated by men,” Ivanka told a CNN town hall event with the Trump family.

Of course, her testimonial came soon after her father said he thought women should be punished for having abortions if the procedure is banned in the United States. Trump later clarified those remarks to mean precisely the opposite.

This was around the same time Trump decided to attack the wife of Ted Cruz after an anti-Trump group posted a mostly nude photo of his own wife. Trump threatened to “spill the beans” about Heidi Cruz but then limited himself to just posting side-by-side photos of the two wives. Heidi Cruz was pictured grimacing against a glamor shot of Melania Trump.

Trump’s self-described “very good brain” shows no signs of learning from his past stumbles with women voters. He continues to attack Hillary Clinton for her husband’s infidelity, arguing that she was not a victim but an attacker: “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful,” Trump told CNN last month. The GOP standard-bearer justifies his attacks by claiming that he is himself a victim of Clinton playing what he calls “the woman’s card”.

Instead, the math is as clear as an orange combover: more women vote than men, and far more of them are saying that Trump is not their man.