Art of the Sale: Inside the Room Where Women are Pitching Women on Trump 2020
By Tessa Stuart
Early on election night 2016, I swiped a hot pink “Women for Trump” poster from the Midtown hotel where the reality TV star was scheduled to accept a magnificent, national-stage humbling. Almost everyone agreed a trouncing was coming, including, reportedly, Kellyanne Conway. The first woman to lead a major-party campaign, Conway reportedly spent Election Day planning for Trump’s inevitable loss, and her own equally inevitable pivot to cable-news punditry.
Throughout his campaign, Trump had barely hidden his contempt and revulsion for, if not all women, then any specific woman who was not explicitly supportive of him — Heidi Cruz, Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina, Alicia Machado, Katy Tur, Hillary Clinton. The poster, I figured, would be an ironic keepsake, a Dewey-Defeats-Truman front page for our time, memorializing the night Trump’s defeat was handed to him by the same people he’d spent his life mistreating, degrading and, according to his own boasts, sexually assaulting.
My assuredness that Trump was cruising toward defeat, propelled by a dearth of female support, came in part from the fact that the only Women for Trump event I’d covered that year was attended by exactly eight women. It was a panel at the Republican National Convention titled “What Women Problem?,” and the audience was outnumbered more than two-to-one by the combination of panelists (seven) and journalists covering the event (eleven). And that panel, with its poor showing, took place months before the release of a tape featuring the candidate chortling that when you’re famous, “you can do anything” you want to women — including “grab ‘em by the pussy.”
I was wrong. In the end, American women did choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, but not by a large enough margin to keep him out of the White House. (Fifty-four percent of all women supported Clinton, compared to 41 percent who backed Trump. The Republican did win a majority of white women — 52 percent.) Those numbers, enough to secure an Electoral College victory, have weakened only slightly since. One recent survey found 38 percent of registered women said they would support Trump in the next election. The margin of error was +/- 3.1 points, so there is a chance the president may have even improved on his 2016 numbers by .1 percent.
But after Democrats saw huge gains in the 2018 midterm elections, largely driven by female voters, the Trump campaign is not taking any chances. In late August, it hastily arranged a slate of events across the country to celebrate the 99th anniversary of the 19th amendment. More than a dozen gatherings took place in battleground states like Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, each hosted by a different set of female Trump surrogates — ex-Fox News personalities, a former Apprentice contestant, and at least one mother of a child killed by undocumented immigrants. It’s all part of a strategy to win women back — or, in most cases, win them for the first time.
In 2016, it was hard to find a woman, outside of paid Trump campaign staff and surrogates, who would talk openly about their support for the candidate. Conway herself coined a term for the phenomenon: “the hidden Trump voter.” Those people, she said, kept their support quiet because they were “just tired of arguing with other people in their lives.” That quality created an element of surprise in ‘16 that Conway (and Trump) still relish. But the campaign appears determined to take a different tack in 2020, staging events like this one to encourage the president’s female backers to be more vocal about their support.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-women-voters-kellyanne-conway-pam-bondi-empowerment-878327/