Trump’s got a women problem, but he’s found the culprits – women

From the moment Joe Biden’s precipitous descent into senility became evident during the presidential debate against Donald Trump, until the time he was filmed laboriously mounting the stairs to Air Force One, the upcoming US election was about age, not policy.

Then, from the time when a COVID-struck Biden announced his decision not to run for president again and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris, it became about gender, not policy. Such are the failings of the presidential system; policy runs a poor second to personality.

While the election was about age, the Republicans weren’t mad about the hand they’d been dealt. Now that it’s about gender, they’re faced with a very special conundrum. Women don’t like them. And it seems they don’t like women much either.

The world is teetering on the edge of war. Immigration flows are putting the very notion of a nation state under pressure. People throughout the developed world are struggling under the cost of living; some parts of some cities in America the Great feel like Third World countries. But the election is currently a battle of the sexes.

It seems that US men are from Mars and many Republican supporters – X-owner Elon Musk foremost among them – are striving to return thence. Women are from the Democratic Party.

It took J.D. Vance, then running for the Senate, now for vice president, to say the quiet part out loud. In September 2021, he sent out fundraising emails referring to the “radical childless leaders in this country”. And just to be sure voters were in no doubt that he meant the womenfolk, he went on Tucker Carlson Tonight to specify that “childless cat ladies” are especially reprehensible. “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” he told Carlson, “And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

With those words, Vance both perfectly articulated how many Republicans feel and artlessly explained why the American right is haemorrhaging female support. The Republicans have a woman problem because they look at the declining marriage and birth rate in the US and decide that only one-half of the population should shoulder the blame.

It’s no mystery why they’re concerned. Pew Research finds that married men are the most likely to vote Republican and that the less married people are, the further they lean to the left. Having children brings people a little closer to the right. Never-married women are the most likely to vote Democrat, with a whopping 72 per cent of this demographic leaning towards the Democratic Party. And a quarter of women under 40 years old have never been married. Add that to the 44 per cent of adults between 18 and 49 who say it is “not too or not at all likely” that they will have children someday, and you can see why the Republican Party is especially keen to get family formation back on track.

But instead of thinking about why some women who might like to be married are not, and why some people who might like to have children don’t have them, those Republican masterminds have decided to treat women who aren’t or don’t as a canker on society. And that means that, at a time when every woman who does lean Republican should be individually precious to the Republican cause, they can’t seem to do enough to chase them out the door.

For instance, through Vance’s comments, which cut women who are less married or less childful than they might wish to be to the quick. His attack completely missed its intended target of people who are childless and unmarried by choice – why would they care what he thinks – and plunged into the hearts of women who want exactly those things but have been deprived them by a society of skewiff incentives.

The US (much like Australia) is pretty askew for many women. Men are increasingly dropping out of education and the workforce, making them unreliable breadwinners. Which is, incidentally, why studies find that low-income women decide to eschew marriage altogether, even to the father of their children – after all, a demotivated man without an income is too often just another mouth to feed. Republicans, of all people – focused as they are on the effect free trade and open borders have had on the working class – should be attuned to how male unemployment has impacted women.

So modern women get an education, if they can, and spend years establishing a career, to ensure they don’t get stuck in the underemployed underclass, or relying on a man who is. But setting yourself up burns hungrily through a woman’s prime reproductive years. Perhaps in that time she’s been partnered with one of the many feckless and fancy-free men created by the sexual revolution, who see no reason to be burdened by the product of unprotected sex when they can shilly-shally around wondering what they really want throughout a woman’s 30s. They agonise over their youthful freedom, while her fertility inevitably expires.

But somehow the Republicans don’t realise that their nuclear family fantasy is failing because there isn’t a cavalry of decent, mature and responsible men coming for these women. Instead, Trump’s team appears to be encouraging and revelling in an extended male infancy by talking to its voters like they’re 10-year-old boys. The choice of pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan to launch Trump’s campaign, the Trump as superhero memes, and Dukes of Hazzard fan edits say it all.

Right now, the US election is between kidults and cats. If White Dudes for Trump don’t grow up quickly, America better stock up on Snappy Tom.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.