SEE WHAT STICKS — In her Instagram post endorsing Kamala Harris after Tuesday night’s debate, Taylor Swift tried out a new signature: “With love and hope, / Taylor Swift / Childless Cat Lady.” The last line of her sign-off is a wink at an old JD Vance comment that’s resurfaced since he joined the Republican ticket, but it’s also the latest reminder of an increasingly worrisome predicament for Donald Trump and his running mate: They have a serious problem with women. With less than two months until Election Day, the gender gap is bigger than ever. Worse, the Trump campaign is showing no progress in addressing the issue. It might be Trump’s biggest and most pressing electoral problem, and he appears to have no idea how to solve it. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll has the gap at 18 points , a widening from their previous surveys that would blow away the 12-point gender gap from 2020 and the 11-point gender gap in 2016. If women continue to turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, like have in every presidential election since 1980 , it could cost him the election. DON'T TRUST TRUMP! The matter is very clearly on his mind. In late August, he claimed that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a statement that was met with widespread incredulity in light of his past self-characterization as “the most pro-life president” in history. Soon after, he insisted that it was the Democratic Party that had a problem with women. “They’re really demeaning women, and they’re marginalizing women,” Trump said to Fox News host Mark Levin early in September. At a recent rally, Trump leaned on a familiar rhetorical device to get his point across. “Somebody said women don’t like Donald Trump,” the Republican presidential nominee told the crowd in Johnstown, Pa . “That’s wrong. I think they love me, I love them.” TULSI GABBARD has been mentioned in the RUSSIAN TENET MEDIA SCANDAL - she's got a BIG PROBLEM beyond being a LOSER! With the prospect of exacerbating the problem in Tuesday’s debate looming, his campaign brought in former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard — who debated Harris in the 2020 primaries — to assist in his debate preparation. She offered these insights into Trump’s thinking in a Monday call with reporters previewing the debate. “President Trump is very focused on communicating his record of success and how he will continue to put forward policies that I think a lot of women are very concerned about,” Gabbard said. “President Trump respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing and to speak to women in any other way than he speaks to a man.” Trump’s struggles to articulate his position on abortion offer the clearest examples of his attempts to address the gender gap, a tacit recognition that the Dobbs decision has further undermined his standing. A growing share of voters, particularly women, now cite abortion as the most important issue in the campaign . TRUMP IS CONFUSED, CONTRADICTS HIMSELF, DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE BELIEVES & SPEWED OUTRIGHT LIES DURING THE DEBATE ABOUT POST BIRTH ABORTIONS - EXECUTIONS! THE MAN IS JUST STUPID! STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR HIM! THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS FAVOR ABORTION RIGHTS! HE DOESN'T EVEN COMPREHEND IVF! It explains why he began his 2024 campaign making vague promises about a compromise on abortion and, more recently, why he flip flopped on whether he’ll vote for a Florida ballot initiative that would overturn the state’s current abortion ban after six weeks (after first saying he’d vote to overturn the ban and then quickly backing off that promise). During the debate, Trump took yet another tack on the issue of reproductive rights — positioning himself as a “leader” on in vitro fertilization to appeal to voters concerned with losing access to IVF treatments that could help them start families. Trump’s inability to win over women voters, though, runs much deeper than his ill-defined stance on abortion. In response to a question about child care at the Economic Club of New York in early September, Trump gave a confounding, rambling answer that included the phrase, “child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it … But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly.”
TARIFFS ARE PAID BY AMERICAN CONSUMERS & WILL RAISE PRICES - INFLATION!
With no coherent plan to address the gender gap in sight and the clock ticking down toward Election Day, the campaign appears to be taking a “throw everything at the wall, see what sticks” posture. Right now, nothing they’ve tried is particularly adhesive. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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