Kavanaugh dispute risks worsening gender problem

WASHINGTON - The Republican Party's fight to save President Donald Trump's embattled Supreme Court nominee amid allegations of sexual assault has surfaced deep anxieties over the hypermasculine mind-set that has come to define the GOP in the nation's roiling gender debate.

The images are striking: The specter of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee - all 11 of them men - questioning federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh's female accuser. A senior GOP aide working on the confirmation resigning amid his own sexual harassment allegations. A viral photo of 'women for Kavanaugh” featuring more men than women. A South Carolina GOP congressman making a crude joke about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being groped by former president Abraham Lincoln.

And then there is Trump, who as a candidate denied more than a dozen accusations of sexual assault and harassment and sought to silence and retaliate against his accusers - and who as president has defended one accused man after another.

A ‘Pink wave'

The moment brings into sharp relief the gulf that has emerged between the two parties as they navigate America's cultural reckoning on sexual assault. Democrats have embraced the #MeToo movement to galvanize women voters and attempt to lift scores of female candidates to victory in November's midterm elections.

By contrast, strategists in both parties say Trump's agenda and style - and the fact that GOP leadership stands mostly behind him - are undoing years of work by party leaders to court more female and minority voters.

Though the president is not on the ballot this fall, he is framing the midterm elections as a referendum on his presidency, and that has leaders and operatives in the party fearing what GOP strategist Alex Castellanos termed a 'pink wave” of women powering a Democratic takeover of the House, and perhaps the Senate, to deliver a rebuke to Trump.

'The antipathy to Trump from women - college-educated, white, suburban women - transcends anything I've ever seen in politics,” Castellanos said. 'And it's not just against Trump's policies, of course. It's against Trump as the 1960s, ‘Mad Men,' alpha male. It's Trump who grabbed women where he shouldn't.

'Women are coming out to vote against Donald Trump because they see him as a culturally regressive force that would undo the women's march to equality.”

‘Blindness' on gender

The fault lines were evident last week, when Trump spoke out about the Kavanaugh episode by saying the real victim is the federal judge, whom Christine Blasey Ford accused of sexual assault when he was 17, and attacking Ford's credibility. His comments made some Republican elected officials uncomfortable; Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called them 'appalling.”

Inside Trump's orbit, there long has been what one former White House official called a 'blindness” to gender issues as a political liability.

Trump's White House staff and Cabinet are overwhelmingly male, though the president does regularly consult a trio of West Wing women: daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump, counselor Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

'To say that the Republican Party is just a bunch of men is factually inaccurate,” former White House official Andy Surabian said, pointing out that Trump installed a woman to chair the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.

Wider gender gap

The gender gap between the parties has increased since Trump's election.

The percentage of women who say they lean toward the Republican Party now is 32 percent, down from 35 percent in 2016 and an average of 37 percent between 2010 and 2017, according to Washington Post-ABC News polling.

The shifts in partisanship coincide with a gender divide on Trump's popularity. The president's approval rating has averaged 12 percentage points higher among men than among women, 45 percent to 32 percent, in Post-ABC polling since April 2017.

'What we did in the 2016 election is trade fast-growing, well-educated suburban counties for slower-growing, less well-educated small town and rural counties,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. 'That worked for Donald Trump in 2016 ... but it's not a formula for long-term success.”