Why? Because Donald Trump is an odious ignoramus and the Republican Party has enthusiastically enabled him every step of the way.
Tim Alberta in Politico writes:
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The president has a problem with female voters. Yes, this has been observed by every pollster, every political professional, in both parties over the past four years. Trump has been briefed on it—time and again—by his team, who warned him that the 2018 Democratic wave could repeat itself without a course correction. But what we’re seeing now, in polling conducted by both parties, isn’t a wave. It isn’t even a tsunami. It’s something we don’t have a name for, because we’ve never seen anything like it. The president’s standing with women voters of every race, every educational background, every socioeconomic stratum, has fallen off. But when it comes to the white, college-educated women who made up a sizable chunk of Trump’s base—he won 44 percent of them against Hillary Clinton—his numbers have collapsed entirely.
The president, seeing ominous signs of this earlier in the year, sought to scare these voters back into his camp, warning of an assault on the suburbs and violence visiting their families and communities. But this tactic appears to have backfired. Recent internal polling from Republicans and Democrats alike suggests that Trump’s law-and-order messaging alienated far more women than it attracted.
This isn’t just a problem for Trump in purple states. Last week, I heard from one of the smartest Republicans alive, a longtime party operator who lives in a state Trump carried by double digits. He told me the polling he was seeing there was something out of a nightmare; these were numbers he never expected to see in his lifetime.
The only thing more dizzying than that? I had another conversation, with another dependable red-state Republican, the very next day, and heard the very same thing. Both of these men were sounding the alarm, alerting me that Trump could actually lose their states, and would at the very least drag down a number of down-ballot Republicans, because women have turned on the GOP at a historic clip.
His bully act isn’t a hit with women. No doubt there are women who like a 74 year old crude brute who wears a lot of make-up and brags and whines and insults everyone constantly. We see them at the rallies. They work in the White House and run for the Senate. But it appears that their numbers are shrinking dramatically.
The Republican party has been a macho, authoritarian party for a very long time. But Donald Trump’s cartoon caricature of masculinity finally exposed what they were about to many women who’d been hoodwinked into thinking they were at least honorable and patriotic. It’s obvious now what they really are.
The question we really have to start asking isn’t why so many women have abandoned Trump and the Republicans but rather why so many men are sticking with him.