US Election 2016: Republicans' women problem back with a vengeance after Trump abortion remarks

Donald Trump often says one thing when he is getting at something quite different. So when midway through a speech in a hotel ballroom in Janesville, Wisconsin, one afternoon last week, he said he felt guilty about the thousands stuck outside, he was really boasting. So many people who love me!

Then, as he does, he veered into another theme. “I feel so bad, we are going to come back to the area,” he offered. (The Wisconsin primary is on Tuesday.) “You guys cannot come. Okay? All of the ladies can come, but the guys can’t.” Translation: I realise I have a “lady problem” and flirting might help.

After their 2012 election loss, an autopsy by the Republican Party emphasized exactly that issue. Mitt Romney had lost women to Barack Obama by eleven points, partly because the Democrats had been able to depict the Republicans waging a “war on women”. That was thanks to people like Todd Akin, a US Senate candidate in Missouri, who, you may recall, stood by banning abortion in cases of rape, because, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

This year, they would have to do better. Advice in the report included, “make a better effort at listening to female voters, directing their policy proposals at what they learn from women, and communicating that they understand what a woman who is balancing many responsibilities is going through”.

You would think they would have something else to worry about: if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democrat nominee female voters would rush at the chance of electing America’s first woman president. But you might be wrong. Bernie Sanders, disheveled at 74, is doing just fine attracting female voters.

The morning after Mr Trump’s Janesville appearance, his closest rival in the race for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz, was settling into a more intimate campaign event forty miles north in the state capital, Madison. Seated in comfy chairs around him were his wife, Heidi, his mother and also Carly Fiorina, the only woman in the Republican nomination race until she dropped out a few weeks ago.

Mr Cruz is as unctuous as Mr Trump is chauvinistic. “We’re here because we love our families,” he averred smoothly. "Women are not a special interest. Women are a majority of the United States of America. And every issue is a women’s issue.”

It is not just that there are more women than men in the country, they are also much more likely to vote. In 2012, there was a gap of four percentage points in turnout. While 63.7 percent of women went to polls that year only 59.8 percent of men did. So Mr Cruz is right. We are not talking a niche constituency here, we talking about the biggest single constituency that there is.

Also in Madison later that same day, Senator Sanders addressed a full house in the musty Orpheum Theatre that sits in the shadow of the State Capitol. The orchestra, where this reporter was sitting, was packed with men and women with a median age, I am guessing, of about twenty nine. (I am not counting the few babies who had been smuggled in.) It turns out that so far in this race women under forty five are siding with Mr Sanders over Ms Clinton by a difference of nearly thirty points.

“I would love to see the first woman president, but Bernie just more clearly articulates everything that I stand for,” Erin Loiselle, 41, a Montessori teacher, explained. “I think Hillary has devoted her whole life to moving forward in politics and I honour that, but I think she had to make certain sacrifices as concerns her beliefs. She has compromised.”

The gender of the candidates “has nothing to do,” with who she likes or doesn’t like, Linda Arndt, 63, a retired veterinarian also in the Orpheum, said, adding that if Ms Clinton becomes the nominee, she may or may not support her in the general election. “I think Bernie has pulled Hillary some way to the left and depending where she ended up landing on some of the issues, I would have to think about that.”

Ms Arndt, sitting with her husband, Jack, a retired police officer, is certain of one thing: her utter disdain for Mr Trump. “Am I allowed to say this?” she asks him, almost rhetorically. “We have discussed moving to Canada” if Trump were elected president. It’s a short skip from Wisconsin.

It was almost surreal to witness how swiftly and completely Mr Trump dug his hole with women in just two days in Wisconsin this week. He had started the process a week earlier when he posted an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz next to a flattering one of his wife, Melania, a Slovene-American who was once a model on Twitter with a threat to “spill the beans” on the Senator’s wife.

Mr Trump’s Janesville rally began just hours after his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, had been charged with battery for allegedly grabbing a female reporter, Michelle Fields, at a campaign event in Florida and bruising her. He did not apologise, he did not offer to fire his aide, but rather Mr Trump implied that Ms Fields had overblown the whole thing. Video of the altercation released by police proved it, he said, because at the moment in question she hardly seemed to flinch.

“Wouldn’t you start screaming or something? Did you see a change in her face?” he asked the crowd, to which one women cried she hadn’t seen any reaction from Ms Fields either. “I ran it on wide screen,” she yelled to the candidate from the back of the room. “There was nothing!” The crowd roared.

But then it got much worse. Taping an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, Mr Trump suggested that in the event that abortions were made illegal in America women who had them would have to face “some form of punishment”. He later walked the comment back, saying it was the doctors who would have to be punished and not the women, but the damage was already done. By Friday some commentators were likening Mr Trump to the aforementioned Mr Akin (who was not elected).

The women who already support Mr Trump are unlikely to be fall out of love him even now, but after a week like this one, it is hard to see how he could win over those additional female voters he will need if he has any hope of building a coalition broad enough to win in November, including independents.

Three quarters of all women voters view him negatively, according to a new ABC-Washington Post poll, as well as two thirds of all independent voters. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found half of all female Republican voters unable to imagine voting for Mr Trump. His standing with women is also bleeding into perceptions of Republicans as a whole. A CNN survey found that while 51 per cent of women had a negative view of the party in January, it had climbed to 62 per cent by mid-March.

This is a single, but huge component of the nightmare that Donald Trump has become for the Republican Party. (How is he doing with that other crucial constituency, Hispanics?) The one who will benefit, of course, will be the Democrat nominee, regardless if it is Ms Clinton or Senator Sanders.