If you happened to miss the GOP/Trump debate Thursday night, you missed a lineup of men who can never get pregnant, tell the rest of us how government needs to control our reproductive decisions, including access to birth control & healthcare. Their collective misogyny and sexism was on full steroid mode as they appealed to their GOP base of white male voters. Their message to women???
===========================================
After Senator Marco Rubio of Florida insisted at the Republican presidential debate that rape and incest victims should carry pregnancies to term, aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton could barely contain their delight at his unyielding stance, rushing to tell reporters at her headquarters that those remarks would hurt Mr. Rubio with female voters.
When Donald J. Trump chose on Friday to stand by his slights against women during the debate, saying the Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly “behaved very badly” as a moderator — and then promoting a Twitter message calling her a “bimbo” — feminists were not the only ones outraged: the chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican Party accused Mr. Trump of chauvinism.
And in response to multiple male candidates saying they would shut down the federal government over financing for Planned Parenthood, the Democratic National Committee emailed talking points to allies within an hour saying that among the losers at the debate were “American women, who were attacked at every turn.”
Republican Party leaders, whose presidential nominees have not won a majority of female voters since 1988, are setting their sights on making electoral gains among women in the 2016 presidential race and trying to close the gender gap in swing states like Florida and Colorado.
But the remarks and tone about women at Thursday’s debate — and the sight of 10 male candidates owning the stage — may have only damaged the party’s standing among female voters in the 2016 general election, according to pollsters and some Republican leaders.
“There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”DONALD TRUMP
“So much of the debate was all about appealing to male voters and other parts of the Republican base, rather than doing anything to help the party’s general election goal of trying to be more inclusive,” said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “By being callous or showing disregard toward women, and then laughing it off with a charge of political correctness or simply saying they’re taking conservative stands, the Republicans could win over some of the older male Republican voters out there. But what about female voters?”
Democrats were gleeful at the tone of the debate, already imagining future campaign advertisements featuring debate cutaways with Mr. Rubio saying that future Americans will “call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies.”
In the short term, however, the political peril for the Republican candidates may not be so grave. They are largely focused now on winning over likely Republican voters who will decide the party’s nomination — an electorate that tends to skew male and older in many key states.
Recent polls of Republican voters indicate that Mr. Trump is performing strongly among men and to a slightly lesser extent among women, though sizable numbers of women also say they would not support him. It remains an open question whether Mr. Trump offended his supporters, or many other likely primary voters, by refusing to renounce his past descriptions of women as “fat pigs” during the debate; indeed, pollsters say he may have struck a chord with some voters by saying he doesn’t “have time for political correctness” when he was asked about his remarks.
With the possibility that a woman could be the nominee of a major political party for the first time, Republicans are facing the likelihood of an even more complicated environment than they have had in recent presidential elections. Gallup polls show that female voters have been favoring the Democratic presidential nominees since the 1990s, often by increasingly large numbers.
The 2012 election was a case in point: Even though Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, won white women with 56 percent of their votes, he lost over all with female voters. A Republican nominee would be hard-pressed to improve that if the 2016 Democratic nominee is a woman, many Republican pollsters believe.
Several prominent Republican women said they were worried that the candidates would only hurt themselves, and the party, if they did not change the substance and style of their remarks at future debates, which will be held monthly this fall and winter. Thursday’s debate attracted an enormous audience of 24 million viewers; the next debate will be Sept. 16 and broadcast on CNN.
“Not one candidate attempted to persuade women voters,” said Margaret Hoover, a Republican consultant and author. “The G.O.P. needs to fight for women votes because it believes our policies are better for women. There’s a difference between pandering and vote-courting: Thursday night, G.O.P. candidates did neither for women weary of the Republican brand.”