BLUE BELL, PA.—The road to the White House doesn’t run through the diners of downtrodden Appalachian coal country. It runs through this upscale supermarket selling fancy cheese to the professional women of a wealthy Philadelphia suburb.

It’s simple math. And it’s leading Donald Trump toward a devastating Pennsylvania defeat.

Trump almost certainly needs to win Pennsylvania if he is going to win the election. His popularity in its rural and industrial areas gives him a passing chance. But he is getting trounced in the prosperous suburban communities that are home to far more voters.

Polls show that educated white women, in particular, appear to be rejecting Trump in favour of the educated white woman running against him.

For all the talk of Trump’s toxicity with racial minorities, it is easy to forget that he is poisonous to much of the white population, too. In fact, because he has alienated white women and white people with college degrees, he is actually doing worse with whites than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

His issues are most acute in manicured oases like Montgomery County’s affluent Blue Bell, 40 minutes north of Philadelphia. A summer day spent talking to 37 women at McCaffrey’s Food Market, a store offering artisan pizza and custom cakes, corroborated the basic finding of data from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Colorado: Trump is staring at a suburban whupping.

His problem is people like Phyllis O’Connor, 80, a retiree who worked in patient relations in the surgery department at the University of Pennsylvania. She agrees with Trump on just about every policy issue, but she finds his personality intolerable.

“I’m a Republican, I always have been, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think it’s pathetic,” O’Connor said. “I think he is too in-your-face, I don’t think he deals well with people, I don’t know how he would deal with world powers, and I think he is unable to put consideration into a decision. He just flies off.”

Jen Foreman, an editor for a local magazine, is a 50-something independent who said she might have considered voting for gentler Republicans like Jeb Bush and John Kasich. For Trump, her answer is a flat “no.”

“His views on women and minorities and immigration and everything are way out of control,” she said.

Trump is badly lagging every previous Republican nominee with educated white women. Among white women with a college degree, Romney earned 52 per cent to Obama’s 46 per cent in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee of a major party, is trouncing Trump 58 per cent to 38 per cent, ABC/Washington Post polling suggests.

No Republican has won Pennsylvania since 1988. Trump, behind in more diverse states, needs it desperately. He is trailing by seven percentage points. The four “collar counties” around Philadelphia — Montgomery, Bucks, Chester and Delaware — are a large part of the reason why.

“They’re hugely important. You had 1.2 of 5.5 million votes cast in 2012 cast in four counties,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. “It’s virtually impossible for either party to carry the state if they don’t do well there. In fact, you usually have to win.”

The counties have been trending toward the Democrats for 25 years. Republican voters there, Madonna said, tend to mix fiscal conservatism with liberal positions on issues like gun control, abortion rights and climate change. Trump has staked out right-wing stances on all three.

Blue Bell went narrowly for Obama in the last election. An unscientific sample on Monday was notably lopsided: of 37 women, 22 preferred Clinton versus only eight who said they would vote for Trump or were likely to do so.

Their chief concern about Trump was not policy. They objected most strongly to his behaviour, to his attitudes toward women, and to his disparagement of Muslims, Hispanics and African-Americans.

“I think Trump is disgusting and awful and everything about him makes me sick,” said Stefani Bohm, 43, a psychotherapist.

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“Clinton, because Trump’s a lunatic,” said Miranda Sarwer, 44, who works in the pharmaceutical industry. “He’s a bigot, he’s a racist.”

Five Republicans or Republican-leaning independents said they were unwilling to vote for him or could not yet commit to doing so.

“I feel like this election is like — like they’re kidding us,” said nurse Wendy Stark, 53, who usually votes Republican and now leans to Trump only reluctantly. “It seems like every now and then he gets on the news and you’ll say, ‘Are you kidding? Did you just say that?’ Sometimes we’re thinking it, but he’s gotta control his mouth a little bit.”

“He’s very arrogant, he doesn’t understand foreign policy, and he doesn’t understand this country,” said Maria Maman, 51, an undecided self-employed independent who usually votes Republican.

“He’s a horrible guy. He’s just like a bigot, and so nasty,” said a 63-year-old retired school principal, Joanne, a Republican supporting Clinton who declined to give her last name. “No experience, no empathy, no policies.”

The education-related enthusiasm gap was vividly apparent in the Pennsylvania primary Trump won easily. He carried Montgomery County by 19 percentage points. He carried blue-collar Berks County, right beside it, by 38 percentage points.

The executive director of the Montgomery’s Republican committee, Josh Arnold, said Trump does not have a problem in the county either with women or on the whole. And the latest Franklin and Marshall poll showed a major improvement for Trump in the four collar counties: from a 40-point deficit a month ago to a 14-point deficit today.

“I think it’s going well. Honestly, I do,” said Arnold, who urged Trump in the Wall Street Journal in May to become “a tad” more reserved. “I think people are able to see that if you want some kind of a change, and you want things to turn in a new direction, then he’s definitely the choice for voters. For women or men, doesn’t matter.”

If he is going to win, he has two months to persuade voters thinking like Phyllis O’Connor. She thinks Clinton is a “crook,” and she said she could maybe, possibly, be talked into voting for Trump.

But then, as she rolled her shopping cart away from the rack, she could not help but criticize him some more.

“I really do have to say,” she concluded, “that this election is very disturbing.”

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