The most striking feature of this election will be the huge gender gap when all the votes are counted. Historians will marvel at an election featuring a candidate who has shown such disrespect and antipathy towards American women that many decided to abandon their own political party due to its callous disregard of their dignity in nominating such a person. By elevating an admitted, even obstinately proud sexual assailant to be its standard-bearer, and then looking on in approving silence when he dispatched his surrogates to belittle the victims of his abuse, the GOP may have burned its bridges with American women for a generation.
Jennifer Rubin is a conservative Republican columnist for the Washington Post. Her column titled “Trump’s Party Of Angry White Abusive Males” catalogues not only Trump's base behavior towards women but also the equally repellant behavior of his close advisors, surrogates and supporters, such as Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and Jeff Sessions, all of whom have eagerly risen to his defense:
One-time top surrogate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is notorious for bullying the press, the public — and the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, it is alleged. His underling Bridget Anne Kelly testified in the Bridgegate scandal trial about Christie's explosive temper and recalled an instance in which he allegedly threw a water bottle at her.
Thrice-married, notorious adulterer Rudy Giuliani went to the Republican National Convention and led the call to "lock her up." He has popped up on one Sunday show after another to smear Trump's accusers and argue that language used in the "Access Hollywood" tape is standard fare in locker rooms...[.]
Top policy adviser Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has questioned whether the conduct Trump boasted about is really sexual assault after all.
Rubin is simply disgusted by what her party has been willing to tolerate from Trump in the name of political expediency:
Now, within the Republican Party this behavior is not disqualifying. Its presidential nominee has established a new, grotesque standard for how leaders and their team talk and act toward women. He loses neither the party's support nor the respect of his sycophants (in the right-wing media and elsewhere).
As noted in the New York Times, more women in the GOP have begun to see their party in a different light:
Increasing numbers of Republican women have turned on their party’s male leaders for defending Mr. Trump against accusations that he groped or forcibly kissed more than 10 women. Many are complaining publicly that for years they stood up for the party against Democrats who accused it of pursuing a “war on women.” They are unable to do so any longer, they say, and they see hypocrisy in Republican men rallying behind Mr. Trump...[.]
“These are spineless men,” said Brittany Pounders, a Republican activist...
The gender gap—the sum difference between how men and women vote—expected in this election will be the highest since 1952. Among Republican women likely to vote, the percentage of those who support Mr. Trump is 79%. For Mitt Romney, the percentage was 93%. While that difference may not seem high, it translates into millions of Republican women who are so revolted at their party that they will not support its nominee for president.
Republican strategists with an expertise in reaching women are deeply anxious that Mr. Trump’s candidacy will damage the party’s ability to appeal to them for years to come.
“I think we’ll see a lot of women walk away from the party over this,” said Katie Packer, who was Mr. Romney’s deputy campaign manager. “What you’re seeing is 20 years, 30 years of frustration coming together and really, really compounded in the last couple of weeks.”
The spectacle of such a morally bankrupt specimen as Newt Gingrich attacking Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly over her statements about Donald Trump has apparently been enough to push many of Republican women to reconsider their allegiance to the GOP. Gingrich’s attempts to belittle the sexual assaults of his party’s boastful nominee and paint Kelly as a woman “obsessed by sex” did not sit well at all:
“Being a Republican woman is very different from being a Democratic woman,” said Jennifer Pierotti Lim, who leads a group called Republican Women for Hillary. “This sentiment that Newt Gingrich was speaking to — if you’re a woman you shouldn’t be offended by these things, you just should think about the issues — that’s pervasive.”
The dismissiveness and disregard that the GOP has shown to Republican women who have criticized Trump has also been instructive:
One of them is Wendy Lynn Day, who was pushed out of a leadership role at the Michigan Republican Party last week after refusing to endorse Mr. Trump. She criticized her party’s male leaders, saying that in past years they had proclaimed that morality and character mattered in a president, but that they were ignoring that principle when it came to Mr. Trump.
Democrats, particularly Democratic women, made that assessment years ago. In many respects Trump himself is simply an unfiltered microcosm of the way the entire GOP has treated women for the last several decades. They are treated as second-class citizens on issues ranging from equal pay to child care to reproductive rights. Their susceptibility to violence and harassment by men is minimized, or in the case of particularly susceptible groups of women, ignored.
Indeed, all Trump is doing is putting an ugly face on a Republican Party whose entire platform has always been either oblivious or downright hostile to the interests of women. Now that face has been revealed. And the half-hearted or non-existent response from the men who lead that Party just confirms what many of these women likely knew, but have tried their best not to admit. As Rubin says:
What place is there for women in a party of all white, angry, abusive men, with no one willing to put an end to Trump’s antics? Increasingly, the answer will be: none