Midterms will show whether they will affirm their support of the president or if they’ve had enough of his controversy

Sabrina Motes did not plan on voting for Donald Trump.

Raised in a household of Democrats, Motes characterized herself as a Republican with moderate views. But her support for the president hardened, she said, by being asked constantly how she could possibly back Trump as a woman.

“There’s lots of things he says that I cringe about – not just with women,” she said. “But I don’t really feel like he means it.”

“I’ll also watch an entire speech of his and I’ll see the reporting go out and it’s not accurate at all.”

Motes, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative in Lake county, Florida, recently voted early for Republicans across the ballot ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The hyper-partisan climate in Washington, and groundswell of opposition to Trump, served as extra motivation for her to go to the polls.

Tuesday’s election, which will determine if Republicans maintain their grip on both chambers of Congress, has been billed as the Year of the Woman. There are not only record numbers of women seeking public office, but also a notion that women will turn out in droves to protest Trump at the ballot box.

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But the question of conservative women, and whether they might finally break with the president, has remained somewhat of a mystery.

Trump’s continued penchant for stoking controversy through inflammatory comments about women, immigrants and other minorities, has raised fresh questions over whether the 2018 midterms might mark the moment when at least a faction of Republican women have had enough.

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The contentious confirmation battle for supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was nominated by Trump in July and subsequently accused of sexual misconduct, caused a sharp decline in the president’s approval rating among women, including those who identified as Republicans.

But as early voters went to the polls ahead of election day on Tuesday, data has shown a majority of the Republican party still firmly behind Trump.

“There doesn’t seem to be any significant move away from Trump since his election. Like his male supporters, women who backed him early on seem to be largely sticking with him,” said Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor at the University of Rutgers - Camden and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.

“This makes sense in part because nearly everything he has said and done that many think would dissuade women from supporting him was revealed well before election day 2016. It’s not new to the past two years.”

In 2016, a slim majority of white women – 52% – helped propel Trump to the White House even after he faced his own allegations of sexual assault and bragged on a leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape about groping and kissing women without their consent.

During the course of the campaign, Trump had also hurled a slew of insults toward women, which included mocking the appearance of Carly Fiorina, the only woman to run against him in the Republican primary, suggesting then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was hostile to him during a debate because she was menstruating and repeatedly calling for the jailing of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Since taking office, there has been little shift in the president’s tone. He has used Twitter on multiple occasions to deride prominent women, referring most recently to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who said she was paid hush money to hide an alleged affair with Trump, as a “horseface”. Trump has also repeatedly sided with men accused of sexual assault, including former Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations of molesting underage girls.

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But some Republican women insist the president’s comments are either exaggerated or taken out of context by the media and his opponents.

“I think that he makes comments that can easily be taken the wrong way,” said Lei Ann Gleaves, a resident of Franklin, Tennessee, who served as a delegate for Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

“A lot of elected officials are trained to not talk like that, but he is not. Trump is on his own, he’s not a trained, sound-bite person,” she added.

“And there’s a part of him that just doesn’t really care.”

The drama that engulfed the Kavanaugh nomination reflected yet another instance in which Trump struggled to stay on message after initially striking an unusually cautious tone.

When Dr Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist in northern California, first came forward to allege that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when the two were teenagers, Trump suggested he would listen to her testimony on Capitol Hill with an open mind. It took a matter of days for the president to adopt a far more aggressive tone, mocking Ford at a rally before thousands of cheering supporters.

Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed to America’s highest bench by the Republican-led Senate, prompting an outcry among progressives who vowed that women across the country would respond at the ballot box on 6 November.

Susan Del Percio, a New York-based Republican strategist, said it was hard to gauge what the so-called “Kavanaugh Effect” might look like at the polls. But she said the impact would most likely be felt among “strong left- or strong right-leaning people”.

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“It’s a voting issue for strong pro-choice women, because they saw what the supreme court represents and why it’s more important that you go out and vote,” she said. “For many it was their worst fears come true.”

“But if you were a strong, hardcore Republican woman, you were disgusted and think that Kavanaugh was treated abhorrently.”

Both Motes and Gleaves expressed dismay in the Kavanaugh controversy, echoing Republican complaints that Democrats had used the moment to try to thwart the confirmation process and deny Trump a second supreme court justice.

“I have two sons. To think someone can just come out and say something, that terrifies me,” said Motes.

Gleaves said she did not doubt “something did happen” to Ford; but she did not believe it was Kavanaugh and took issue with the unprecedented backlash to his nomination.

“The women speaking out and protesting … they were almost in a feeding frenzy. That’s not the country I want to be in.”

There is, however, evidence to suggest Trump and Republicans were hurt by the Kavanaugh episode. One survey taken at the height of the controversy found that 63% of all women disapproved of the job the president is doing, while just 30% approved.

“I think that any effect is more of a mobilizing one on both sides of the aisle than it is about shifting voters from one candidate or party to another,” said Dittmar.

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While the fight for the House of Representatives is primarily being waged in competitive swing districts where the president is unpopular, control of the Senate will hinge on reliably red states that overwhelmingly voted to send Trump to the White House in 2016.

Del Percio said the difference would be made not by steadfast conservative women, but by the suburban Republican women who held their nose and voted for then-candidate Trump in the hopes the gravity of the office might change him.

“It’s very hard to talk to your children in the age of Trump and not see that as a troubling situation,” she said. “He never showed up to be presidential. That moment never came.”