Dirty Donald
How Revelations of Trump's Lewd 'Tude Flung His Campaign into Freefall
Soon after the Republicans’ 2012 presidential defeat, the party’s national committee released a high-profile political “postmortem.” It concluded, among other things, that the GOP must “improve our brand with women throughout the country.”
How’s that workin’ out for you?
As every schoolchild knows, a bombshell leaked video from 2005, showing Donald Trump lewdly boasting about his taste and techniques for sexually assaulting women, struck and transformed the Republican nominee’s campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton, 48 hours before the rivals met in their second debate on October 9.
During that event, Trump wildly tried to fix the problem by (a) accusing Clinton of scheming to cover up her husband’s illegal ravishments of women; (b) vowing to throw her into federal prison after ordering his Attorney General to launch a Banana Republican investigation of her email practices (first the sentence, then the trial!); and (c) identifying her as “the devil.”
Next up: their third and final face-off on October 19, where the early betting line says The Donald calls for her to be burned at the stake.
THIS JUST IN: By now, the pervvy details of what the vulgarian Trump privately leered about a soap opera actress to the male cast and crew aboard an Access Hollywood shuttle bus, including his own predilection for tongue-thrusting and crotch-grabbing, are old news; check your Google machine, if you’ve just returned from a Tesla visit to Mars.
What is new, however, are just-released survey results demonstrating the full scope of how Trump’s candid pornographic pronouncements have altered the race, just over three weeks before the November 8 election, largely because he has alienated women voters:
• Popular vote: The first major national poll taken after the hot-mike revelations, published by the Wall Street Journal, showed Clinton cracking open what had been a close race, taking an 11-point lead (46 percent to 35 percent) in a four-way race including the Libertarian and Green Party candidates; in a head-to-head match-up with Trump, she leads 52 to 38.
• Electoral College: A Marist survey in Pennsylvania, which is crucial to any Trump hope of winning the Electoral College, shows Clinton ahead by 12 points, fueled by a massive 53 to 33 percent lead among likely women voters; in Florida, which Trump must win to capture the presidency, she has regained a narrow lead, because women voters now support her by 13 points, 51 to 38 percent.
• Key demographics: An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll immediately after the debate showed that the pivotal group of white, college-educated women, by a 66 to 13 percent ratio, said that Clinton beat Trump; more ominously for Republicans, 80 percent of women registered as nonpartisan independents said Trump does not have the personality and temperament to be president.
FUN WITH NUMBERS: Because Clinton stomps Trump among minority voters, he needs to win a huge margin — some estimates put it as high as 70 percent — among whites. Although he still leads substantially among white men, his dwindling support among white women is, to use one of his favorite phrases, a disaster.
In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by four points, 51.1 to 47.2 percent, in the popular vote (resulting in a 332 to 206 Electoral College landslide), because he won women by 11 points, according to exit polls that year.
Romney, however, won among married women, and came close to the White House because he carried white women with a college degree by six points (52 to 46 percent), according to research by the Monmouth University Polling Institute. According to Monmouth, however, Trump already was losing that group to Clinton last summer by 30 points (27 to 57 percent).
That, of course, not only was before the sex-talk tape and his mansplaining performances in two debates but also preceded his bizarre and much-publicized tweet war against beauty queen Alicia Machado over her weight.
“These are fatal numbers,” NBC polling analyst Steve Kornacki said about Trump’s low standing among women.
STRANGE BUT TRUE: Trump prides himself on having a low-overhead campaign apparatus. That may explain why, after all the brouhaha over his foul-mouthed commentary, his handlers failed to think deeply about where they sent him to his first post-debate rally.
As the feminist website Jezebel duly and dryly noted:
“Still recovering from that distant, hazy moment four days ago when he was revealed to enjoy grabbing pussies, Donald Trump hosted his first post-debate rally at Ambridge Area Senior High School in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The first place he went after the debate was Beaver County. Donald Trump is in a place called Beaver County.”
You could look it up.
