Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

CARRIE SHEFFIELD: Trump Is Trailing Harris In Key Demographic — But There Is Still Hope He Can Make Up Ground

A woman asks former President Donald Trump a question at a townhall moderated by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi.), Aug. 29, 2024. (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

Various news outlets and polling suggest that former President Donald Trump is lagging behind Vice President Kamala Harris among women, and this could be the decisive factor in November’s election.

Even while Trump enjoys a wide advantage among male voters, Trump still has time to win women, especially since most policies favor him. Trump’s best issues to win over moderate and suburban women are the economy, inflation, immigration and protecting women’s sports and bodily integrity.

Harris’ legacy of economic destruction and out of control inflation are part of why Harris harms America’s seniors, who are disproportionately female. Yet in her role as president of the Senate, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to raid Medicare.

Harris’ support for the Inflation Reduction Act allows bureaucrats to raid the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for reckless spending on other pet projects.

This comes on top of painful, cumulative 20% inflation during the past three and a half years on Harris’ watch. This disproportionately harms senior women, many of whom live on fixed incomes after retirement and don’t have jobs with pay keeping pace with inflation.

Democrats think the only issue women care about is abortion. This is false, especially as Pew found abortion has declined in importance among all voters since the 2022 elections, including Democratic voters. Pew reported that 67% of Harris supporters call abortion very important — nearly double the share of Biden voters who said this four years ago, though somewhat lower than the share of midterm Democratic voters who said this in 2022 (74%). By contrast, about a third of Trump supporters (35%) now say abortion is very important to their vote — 11 points lower than in 2020.

Part of why abortion is dropping in importance is because, as the Monthly Abortion Provision Study shows, an estimated 1,037,000 abortions occurred in the formal health care system in 2023, the first full calendar year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade.

That translates to a rate of 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, an 11% increase from 2020, the last year for comprehensive data. This means that women are still able to access abortion, contrary to the false claims of Harris and others. Indeed, as our Independent Women’s Voice interactive national map shows, abortion is legal in all 50 states, always for the life of the mother, as well as for additional exceptions and timeframes.

The recent KFF Survey of Women Voters found women voters living in the suburbs who are Republican or lean Republican are more supportive of broader abortion access than their rural counterparts, even though more than half of suburban Republican women (58%) identify as pro-life (which is similar to the share of rural Republican women who say the same).

Regarding women’s rights overall, Trump can hammer Harris for her false claims to support women, despite her anti-women policies. Harris speaks with pro-women rhetoric but fails to protect women and girls from assaults in locker rooms. By endorsing a new Biden-Harris administration rule expanding Title IX protections to gender identity and sexual orientation, Harris wants to demand that schools receiving federal funds allow males into female spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms, or into any activity currently separated as male or female.

Polling overwhelmingly shows the public opposes men competing in women’s sports, so Trump should be highlighting this issue. This threatens women’s bodily integrity through this illegal rewrite of Title IX. Harris and the Left are throwing out the traditional definition of male and female, a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. U.S. case law recognizes the difference between men and women, as it has historically, and because of that there are inherent case law precedents that recognize men and women are biologically distinct and thus the law responds accordingly. Harris doesn’t care about that.

Harris also fails to protect women and girls from sexual assault as they seek to cross illegally into America at the U.S. southern border. The sexual assault rate of migrant women coming to the United States is shocking, yet Harris embraces policies that incentivize further illegal immigration and human trafficking.

Harris is effectively silent on the horrific treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban, which recently banned women from speaking in public, exposing any skin or even looking at men not in their family.

Harris even brashly claims, three years later, that America’s bloody Afghan withdrawal was “courageous and right.” It is neither courageous nor right to relegate Afghan women to near-slave status while exposing 13 U.S. service members to death.

Women voters are smarter than to fall for Harris’ lies and will vote accordingly.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.