Preliminary exit poll results show that while she won women by 12 points overall (Trump won men by the same margin, a historic gender gap),1 Clinton lost the votes of white women overall and struggled to win women voters without a college education in states that could have propelled her to victory. I wrote Tuesday night about Clinton’s collapse in the Midwest — she saw Ohio, Wisconsin and probably Michigan slip away, all states President Obama won in 2008 and 2012 — and this appears to be in part because of her performance among voters who don’t have a college degree, including women. In Michigan, Trump won those women along with white men, their support for him drowning out white, college-educated women’s votes for Clinton. She won that demographic by 10 points, but these women account for only two in 10 Michigan voters. [...]
While Democrats were banking on the hope that Trump’s crass comments and myriad allegations of sexual harassment would turn off women, there were glimmers of the coalition of women supporters that we saw forming last month after the release of the “Access Hollywood tape” in which he made lewd comments about groping women. At the time, a Morning Consult poll found that Trump had nearly equal support among Republican men and women, and numbers showed that the Republican faithful — men and women — were supporting their nominee at rates similar to what we’ve seen in past presidential elections. In other words, they were treating Trump like a run-of-the-mill Republican nominee; Republicans, men and women, wanted to see their guy win.
The issues raised by Trump’s conduct toward women did not seem to drive women to the polls in unusual numbers. Overall turnout among women was only 1 percentage point higher than in 2012.
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