Donald Trump has always been more popular with men than with women. During the campaign, polls indicated that women consistently disliked him more than men did. If only more women had voted in November, Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide. And at the 100-day mark of his presidency, just 38 percent of women approved of his performance, compared with more than half of men.
Now, as the administration careens through crisis after crisis, with the possibility of scandal looming in the future, the Trump gender gap is widening. According to a new poll by PRRI, 47 percent of American women now believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office, compared with just 32 percent of men. What PRRI calls a “gaping gender divide” has grown over the last six months, as women have become much more supportive of impeachment: Back in February, 35 percent of women and 26 percent of men favored Trump’s impeachment.* Since then, men’s support has ticked up by 6 percentage points, while women’s support has risen by 12 points.
The “impeachment gap” has something to do with party affiliation, of course. Women are likelier to identify as Democrats than men, and it follows that they would be less supportive of troubled Republican politicians. In the past, those loyalties have extended to attitudes toward impeachment: In a Gallup poll taken in February of 1999, as the Senate prepared to vote on President Clinton’s impeachment, 38 percent of men favored his conviction and removal from office, while just 25 percent of women said the same.
But the gender gap when it comes to Trump cannot be explained by mere party loyalty. Women’s voices have dominated the “resistance,” and Trump’s victory has inspired thousands of women to run for office themselves. As NPR pointed out this week, women’s approval of Trump is now 14 points lower than men’s, “one of the biggest gender gaps ever seen among modern presidents in their first August in office.” Men don’t love Trump, but their disapproval is not far outside historical trends. Women, on the other hand, express off-the-charts loathing: A recent Gallup poll shows just 29 percent of women approve of Trump, almost 20 points behind the previous record, held by Clinton (48 percent in 1993).
Trump himself, meanwhile, loves to proclaim his huge, tremendous love for women. “I have great respect for women,” he said last fall, after the Access Hollywood tape became public. “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.” How sad that the world’s literal No. 1 respecter of women seems to be having some trouble getting women to respect him back.
*Correction, August 24, 2017: This post originally stated that in February, 35 percent of women and 26 percent of men favored Trump. They favored Trump’s impeachment, not Trump.
