There is one noticeable weakness in Vice President Kamala Harris’ powerful wall of support among female voters. That opportunity may offer former President Donald Trump’s best chance to influence the states that are most likely to decide the razor-thin presidential election.
Even while Trump struggled with other groups of women in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, exit polls and other analysis revealed that he maintained a significant edge among White women without a college education.
These working-class White women are expected to play a major, if not decisive, role in Trump’s third presidential campaign. According to polls, many of them are caught between personal dislike for Trump and dissatisfaction with the results of Joe Biden’s presidency, particularly on inflation and the border.
But it’s also because these women are particularly prevalent in the three old “blue wall” states that remain Harris’ most likely path to an Electoral College victory: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Harris does not have to win the majority of those women to win those states, which she is barnstorming every day this week – Democrats rarely never do – but she must remain competitive with them.
“They are really tired of Trump, and they’d really like to move on, but they are also nervous about moving on, and they do think the economy was better for them under Trump,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic polling specialist, said. Lake praised Harris for her ability to unite people and demonstrate empathy. But they don’t believe they know her very well.” The sum of these opposing drives is, “They are really torn,” Lake stated. “They feel very insecure about these choices.”
The enormous voter contact effort targeted at blue-collar White women by American Bridge 21st Century, a party super PAC, demonstrates how much Democrats prioritize them. The group is spending approximately $140 million to reach 3 million women, primarily White women without a college degree, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three states that Trump knocked out of what I dubbed the “blue wall.”
“In general, the blue wall states are still the path of least resistance to 270” for Harris, according to Bradley Beychok, co-founder of American Bridge 21st Century. “But I think it’s pretty clear that women are the determinative demographic of this election cycle, and they have been the last few election cycles, so it’s not rocket science.”
American Bridge has pursued these blue-collar women over an exceptionally long period of time, beginning in 2023 with regular mailings of newspapers created by an allied entity. Multiple rounds of contact and testimonial advertising from former Trump voters have been delivered via every accessible media, including broadcast, digital, postal, and streaming platforms. According to Beychok, one of the group’s best messaging is to remind people of the uncertainty and volatility associated with Trump.
“If you show people that putting this guy back in the White House will cause unrest and disorder in your community…” “People say, ‘I don’t want that,'” Beychok explained. He continued: “If Donald Trump is proud that he made good on his threat to ban abortion, and overthrow Roe v. Wade, and you know he’s an agent of chaos, then what [rights] will” follow his remarks?
Beychok stated that the group’s basic principle is that even minor wins among these women can be significant in finely divided states. “We may not get to 50.1 with them, but if we run a program to get what is available to us … it can be just as effective,” he told me.
In fact, Democrats have long seen gaining a majority of these women as an unrealistic ambition. In exit polls dating back to 1980, the only Democratic presidential contender who carried even a plurality of White women without a college degree on a national scale was Bill Clinton in 1996. In the razor-thin 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Democrats remained competitive among these women. However, while White women with a college degree have tended to support Democrats in presidential elections since then, White women without a college degree have shifted drastically in the opposite direction.
According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including HEADLINESFOREVER, Republican presidential nominees won just under three-fifths of these working-class White women in 2004, 2008, and 2012, while Trump increased his share to more than three-fifths in both 2016 and 2020. Other well-respected analyses of the 2016 and 2020 elections also showed Trump winning roughly three-fifths of these women, with the Democratic targeting firm Catalist putting Trump just below that threshold each time, and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study putting Trump just below it in 2016 and slightly higher in 2020.
The GOP’s advantage in those national figures is exacerbated by its commanding lead among these women in Southern states, where many are culturally conservative evangelical Christians who overwhelmingly favor the GOP.
Critically for Democrats, in the key battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they have typically performed slightly better with these women than nationally. In Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory, for example, he only won approximately one-third of these women overall, but he carried around 45% of them in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a narrow majority of them in Wisconsin, according to exit poll results. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls, stopped at around 40% support in all three states, contributing to her loss of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined margin of approximately 80,000 votes – and hence the president.
Exit surveys found that, compared to Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 showed a minor but significant improvement among these women in Michigan and Wisconsin, which contributed to his victories there. Biden performed just slightly better than Clinton in Pennsylvania, where he flipped the state chiefly by widening her edge in Philadelphia’s heavily college-educated suburbs.
Working-class White women in erstwhile blue wall states may be more important to Harris’ fate than they were for Biden. Even most Democrats admit Harris may struggle to duplicate Biden’s performance among nearly all significant groups of male voters, particularly White males without a college degree, Black, Latino, and younger men.
Because Biden won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined margin of over 260,000 votes, Harris has enough buffer to withstand some male vote erosion. However, Lake, like many other Democrats, feels that in order to win the three major Rust Belt battlegrounds, as well as any of the swing states, Harris will need to outperform Biden among women. “She is going to have to do better with women,” Lake stated bluntly. “She has to make up for the fact that she won’t do as well with the men as he did.”
That was just one salvo in Trump and his allies’ barrage of messaging – in speeches and advertisements – that seeks to simultaneously instill fear of undocumented immigrants committing crimes, portray Harris as too weak and too liberal to protect people from it, and present himself as the strongman, in all senses of the word, who can provide that protection.
Jackie Payne is the creator and executive director of Galvanize Action, a liberal organization that examines moderate White women, mainly those without a college education. She recognizes that Trump’s warnings have resonated with working-class White women, particularly older ones. These females, she explained, “express some of the fear around the border crisis; safety and security of their family is a top priority, and they identify the border crisis as a threat.”
However, Payne stated that for many of these women, the vehemence and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigration – the dehumanizing language and salacious charges – are also provoking their greatest anxiety about him: that he is too divisive, disruptive, and chaotic.
According to Payne, Trump is “making the bet” that people who are concerned about their safety will accept “ugly” language and threats from him about immigration if they believe such vehemence is “the price of strength and protection.” However, she stated: “At the same time, we see a revulsion and disgust at the way we are talking about other humans.”
How a few thousand troubled and ambivalent working-class White women in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin sort through these opposing viewpoints may determine which states remain most likely to elect the next president.