That the Republican party has a problem appealing to female voters is not really debatable. In 2008 and 2012, 14 and 12 percent more women, respectively, voted for Obama than his Republican opponents. Before Trump, what was debatable was what the GOP was doing wrong in its approach toward women. I want to briefly deal with Trump’s profound flaws in this respect, then discuss the broader GOP problem.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has been consistently branded by his rivals as sexist, was proved beyond a doubt to be so by a video released Oct. 7 in which he makes obscene comments about women and boasts about his advances on a married woman. Trump has a history of failed marriages, adulterous affairs, and derogatory and sexist comments about women. Trump, while he has substantially changed his political positions in preparation for this run, has failed to change his pervasive sexism. His attitude toward women is not only despicable but it is self-defeating. How can you expect to win an election when you treat half the electorate as sexual objects rather than people? Trump’s sexism, an element of the macho persona that touts his business and relational exploits, has proved strongly attractive to disillusioned white men. Unfortunately for Trump, disillusioned white men do not compose a majority of the electorate.
Trump needs to make serious course corrections if he hopes to win with women. For damage control, he needs to sincerely apologize for his extremely offensive remarks instead of dismissing them as locker room talk. He must at least project penitence and a change of attitude. Hint: Trying to depict your own disgusting comments as not so bad compared to ISIS beheadings is not the way to accomplish this.Anything looks good compared to ISIS. To go on the offensive, showing people Hillary Clinton’s problematic history with women may be a plausible strategy. If he can draw attention to the way she zealously attacked the characters of women her husband allegedly had affairs with, for example, this will damage Clinton’s carefully crafted image of a champion of women.
Trump’s problems appealing to women are personal. But as a whole, the GOP’s problems have more to do with how it is portrayed by the left and perceived by the people. Of course Republicans running for other offices need to distance themselves from Trump’s sexist attitudes. But even so, if the perception cultivated by the left of their being against women remains unchallenged, they will be fighting an uphill battle. The GOP has been branded by the left as waging a war on women. Evidence produced for this claim includes opposition to abortion (usually lumped into the broader and more innocuous-sounding “reproductive rights”) and equal pay bills. Republicans don’t even necessarily have to change their positions on these issues to make a comeback. What they urgently need to do is to make their case with female voters that these touted issues are not proof of sexism.
Republicans have not responded effectually to claims that opposition to abortion is against women’s rights. They seem to operate as if their own assumptions about abortion are understood by everyone. They are not. As evidenced by polling data showing support of legal abortions go up since last year, a majority of Americans accept the narrative that the law should make abortion a woman’s choice. If Republicans operate under this paradigm, then opposition to abortion is always negative, always denying a right. To reset the perception of being against women on reproductive health, Republicans need to frame the issue as not taking away rights but protecting them. People don’t portray child abuse laws as taking away parents’ right to beat their children but as protecting children’s rights. If you can convince people that the fetus is an innocent — if inconvenient — human life, then opposing abortion is not taking away a woman’s right but protecting the child’s. Republicans need to make this shift on abortion to stay ahead of the war on reproductive health smear campaign.
The other major issue on which the left has claimed Republicans are conducting a war on women is their opposition to recent measures to strengthen the Equal Pay Act. What clearer evidence can you have for party-wide misogyny than its refusal to take action about the fact that women only make 77 cents for every dollar men make? Unless Republicans carefully and thoughtfully explain their opposition to proposed bills like the Paycheck Fairness Act, they will continue to lose ground to women voters. The place to start is asserting that they have women’s best interests in mind even in opposing bills that appear to improve conditions for women. A well-known concept in economics is the law of unintended consequences, defined by the Library of Economics and Liberty as “actions of people — and especially of government — always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.” In order to justify opposition to wage equality, Republicans need to demonstrate that possible unintended consequences of a stricter equal wage law, like an increase in the number of expensive civil lawsuits, would indirectly lead to greater inequality or at least cause overall job loss. Republicans should also remind voters that they have proffered their own equal pay bill, which contains some of the same protections with less risk of potentially negative effects.
After Mitt Romney’s failed candidacy in 2012, GOP leadership assessed what had gone wrong and advised a shift to be more welcoming to minorities and women. Trump is the antithesis of that recommendation and represents, not the future of the Republican party, but a regressive populist appeal to fear and anger. Whether or not he gets elected, Republican lawmakers need to reject his divisive outlook and strive to make their party more inclusive.