A presidential election with the first female nominee for a major party was always going to be about gender – but the language and behavior of Donald Trump has galvanized women to make sure he never gets near the Oval Office

Moments into the final presidential debate, as the topic turned to abortion, Hillary Clinton delivered an impassioned and unapologetic case for a woman’s right to choose.



Donald Trump had just described in graphic terms his view of the procedure, falsely characterizing Clinton as being in favor of “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb of the mother” just days prior to birth.

An unfazed Clinton suggested the Republican nominee meet women she personally knew who had undergone “one of the worst possible choices” imaginable, or travel to countries where restrictive laws forced women to either undergo abortions or raise children involuntarily.

Clinton went further than any of her predecessors on an issue that often divides the American public. Undecided voters in a CNN focus group conducted that night in October said it was her strongest moment.

But women found it especially poignant. Natalie, one of those undecided voters, said of Clinton’s response: “It was important to me because I don’t think the government should have control over a woman’s body just like they wouldn’t have control of a man’s body.”

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Gender was always going to play a pivotal role in a campaign that could culminate in the election of the first female president in America’s 240-year history and seems likely to a see a historically large gender gap at the polls. But it has been amplified as a consequence of Trump’s language and behavior, galvanizing many female voters to ensure that a man who boasted on tape of sexually assaulting women is not elevated to the highest office in the land.

“I wish I didn’t have to say this, but, indeed, dignity and respect for women and girls is also on the ballot this election,” Clinton told a crowd of 11,000 people, many of them women and students, who came to see her share a stage with first lady Michelle Obama in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the final weeks of her campaign.

Natasha McKay, of Charlotte, left the rally in a state of euphoria. “I’m really uplifted right now. I’m in a daze,” she said. “Hillary is so powerful. Michelle Obama is incredibly powerful. Those two together is an awesome force.”’

McKay noted the sharp contrast between Clinton’s message of female empowerment and Trump’s history of making degrading comments about women.

“Like Michelle Obama said: ‘When they go low, we go high,’” McKay said. “Except Donald Trump just goes lower and lower and lower.”

The gender gap has long favored Democrats. According to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, women favored the Democratic candidate in 2012 by 11 points, 2008 by 13, 2004 by three, and 2000 by 10 points.

But this year Clinton looks set to match or even exceed the historic 17-point lead her husband held among women over Bob Dole in 1996. Ten recent polls taken in October range from eight to 22 percentage points leads, with an average advantage of 17. (In 1980 and 1984 women favored the Republican Ronald Reagan over his Democratic opponents Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.)

Whereas Clinton shied away from the historic nature of her candidacy during her first bid for president in 2008, this time around the prospect of electing a woman to the White House has been a central pillar of her narrative. But the former secretary of state could not have predicted she would be handed an opponent who has in the past referred to women as “fat pigs”, “slobs” and “dogs”, and both bragged about and been accused of sexual assault. (He has denied the accusations.)

A new analysis by the Pew Research Center found that majorities of both men (58%) and women (62%) say Trump has little or no respect for women. Only 38% of respondents believe the Republican nominee has a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of respect for women, compared with 76% who believe that Clinton does.

And so Clinton and her allies have worked hard to target women – from the millennials who easily identify as feminists to the suburban married women who typically swing toward Republicans but may be repelled by the thought of casting a ballot for Trump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama embrace before they address the crowd at a campaign stop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, last week. Photograph: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images

Emily’s List, the group that works to elect pro-choice Democratic women to public office, has targeted its outreach toward millennial women in the key battleground states where they could play a decisive role: New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Nevada. Through a mostly digital, multimillion-dollar campaign, the group has run ads that include a young woman showing her discomfort in reading aloud words spoken by Trump, such as “Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing”, and invested in advertising on social media platforms used by younger voters.

Jennifer Lawless, the director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University, said Clinton had an “unprecedented grassroots operation”. “The minute Donald Trump says something, they’re able to micro-target women,” she said.

The most significant shift, Lawless added, has been among married women – a demographic that favors Republicans and chose Romney over Obama by seven percentage points in 2012. The tape leaked last month featuring Trump boasting in 2005 about groping and kissing women without their consent seemed to give married women a sense that they did not have to vote strictly along party lines.

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“What that tape did was, especially to women who were undecided or felt some sense of party loyalty [to the GOP], the tape gave a lot of Republican political elites ammunition to say, ‘vote your conscience’,” Lawless said, “and that freed up people who might be loyal partisans to reconsider.”

Meghan Milloy, a lifelong Republican, reached her breaking point with Trump well before he became the party’s nominee and courted controversy with allegations of sexual assault.

Milloy said she was appalled when Trump sparred with Megyn Kelly and insinuated the Fox News anchor asked tough questions during the first Republican primary debate because she was menstruating.

“That’s when I decided he wasn’t fit to be president,” she said. “I don’t even think he is fit to manage a local Papa John’s.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People gather in front of Trump Tower last month to protest against Donald Trump’s treatment of women. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

When Trump won the nomination, Milloy helped launch Republican Women for Hillary. Though she still considers herself a member of the Republican party and a strong conservative, Milloy is disappointed with her party for not disavowing Trump.

“If the party comes back from this and recognizes that it went crazy this year with Trump and the platform … then I would certainly stick around and do my best to help them rebuild after this year,” Milloy said. “But if they double down like Trump has done, then I certainly won’t be a part of that.”

Seeking to weaponize Trump’s rhetoric against him, the Clinton campaign has aired a powerful ad in which young girls look at themselves in the mirror against the backdrop of the real estate mogul’s bullying words. The commercial aimed to target, in particular, married women in the suburbs of swing states Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

As the sexual assault tape came to light, Clinton intensified her pitch against her opponent’s treatment of women.

Addressing a “Women for Hillary” a conference call, one week before the election, Clinton appealed to supporters on a personal level.

“I know that parts of this election have been painful to many women, especially hearing about Donald Trump’s behavior towards women over the years,” she said. “He relishes making women feel terrible about themselves in every possible way. He thinks belittling women makes him a bigger man.

“We need to make sure that he and his attitude – what he says, what he thinks, what he does to women – never gets him near the White House.”

Clinton also appeared with top female surrogates, from Michelle Obama to prominent women’s rights leaders such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund president, Cecile Richards, and Emily’s List president, Stephanie Schriock, to make a final pitch to women in must-win battlegrounds.

“To be elected as a woman, you have to be 20 times as good as your opponent,” said Richards, whose late mother Ann Richards was herself a pioneer and as state treasurer of Texas became the first woman elected statewide in nearly 50 years in 1982.

“We are not comfortable in this country with women who are powerful. It is extraordinary that this woman, as our own president says, has more experience, more preparation to go into the Oval Office than anyone we can remember, and it was just always going to be hard.”

But the gendered circumstances of Clinton’s battle, according to Richards – from the focus on her clothes to her speaking style to whether she smiles enough – is what motivates women voters to make their voices heard on 8 November.

“Women feel this is about much more than Hillary, this is about work that has been going on for decades,” she said. “These women feel an enormous sense of pride and ownership in this election.”

Perhaps few moments crystallized that sentiment better than when Trump leaned into his microphone during the final presidential debate and snarled: “Such a nasty woman.”

Women supporting Clinton immediately reclaimed the phrase and turned it into a rallying cry, and it became a recurring theme at campaign events to see women with “Nasty Women” shirts. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and influential Clinton surrogate, issued a fiery rebuke of Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire late last month: “Nasty women vote.”

It is not simply a distaste for Trump driving prospective turnout among women, according to longtime observers of the intersection of gender and politics.

“There’s a policy argument for why unmarried women in particular are more drawn to a Democratic platform,” said Rebecca Traister, author of the book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.

“They are no longer the class of Americans who are living economically, socially or professionally dependent on men in the way that they used to be.” Barack Obama drove the Democratic advantage among unmarried women to historic levels in 2008, with 70% support to John McCain’s 29%, while in 2012 single women preferred the president over Mitt Romney by a whopping margin of 36 percentage points.

With women now holding jobs, and serving as breadwinners – be they unmarried, married, or same-sex partners – in larger numbers, as an electorate they are increasingly moved by policies that address their concerns, Traister added.

This is why unmarried women have especially been drawn toward Clinton’s platform of equal pay for women, easing the burden of student loan debt, paid family leave and protecting reproductive rights, she said. Clinton has emphasized her commitment to such issues since launching her campaign, and also focused on raising the minimum wage, an issue inextricably tied to gender in that women make up two-thirds of minimum wage earners.

Jess O’Connell, the executive director of Emily’s List, said Trump was simply vocalizing in politically incorrect terms what Republicans have long advocated in more veiled language.

“Single women are afraid the Republicans are going to turn back the clocks on them,” O’Connell said. “Ignoring the gender gap in wages or wanting to punish women for having an abortion shows a real lack of understanding about women and their lives today.

“This is when women’s voices are going to be heard.”



