Trump Appeals to Suburban Women With Immigration-Focused Message in Final Days of Election
For months, Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to appeal to male voters. His media strategy has focused on podcasts targeting male audiences, and his campaign organization is designed to specifically target them. But three days before the election, the former President returned to a state he has won twice to make an explicit race-baiting appeal to female voters.
“I will protect women,” Trump told a crowd in Gastonia, North Carolina. He wasn’t referring to one of the most prominent issues in this election: reproductive rights. In fact, Trump didn’t mention the word “abortion” once in his 90-minute speech. Instead, he was referring to his plan to seal the southern border and deport more than 11 million undocumented migrants. “The suburban women are under attack,” Trump said. “If they don’t get me, they will have millions of people coming through the suburbs.” He then paused the rally to play a three-minute video of a woman’s harrowing account of her adolescent daughter being kidnapped and strangled to death by immigrants who entered the country illegally.
Trump blamed the tragedy on his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has falsely claimed was the Biden Administration official in charge of immigration and the border; she was actually tasked with investigating the root causes of migration from Central America. The diatribe culminated in one of the event’s loudest applauses—when Trump pledged to pursue capital punishment against murderous migrants. “I am hereby calling for the death penalty for all illegal migrants who kill American people or law enforcement officials,” he said.
By making draconian immigration policies his primary pitch to female voters in the election’s final days, Trump is trying to address his most significant weakness, according to several of his top advisors. A recent POLITICO analysis shows that women have far outpaced men in early voting across battleground states, including North Carolina. This could be detrimental for Trump: multiple surveys—including the campaign’s own internal polling—have indicated that women favor Harris by nearly 10 points there. Trump may be particularly vulnerable with female voters in North Carolina, where he has supported Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s bid for governor, even after CNN reported that Robinson made lewd and racist comments on a pornographic website. Any decline in support could have significant consequences. The current FiveThirtyEight average of North Carolina polls has Trump with a narrow one-point lead against Harris.
Fear mongering wasn’t the only Trump tactic at the Gastonia rally. On the runway of a small regional airport, Trump attempted to capitalize on President Joe Biden’s gaffe earlier this week seemingly referring to his supporters as “garbage.” Many of the MAGA faithful embraced the insult as a badge of honor. Multiple people came wearing garbage bags. “You want to call us that,” says one of them, Jeff Miller, a truck driver from Gastonia. “We’ll go ahead and entertain that.” Terry Pinningtom, a retired construction worker from Hickman, ensconced himself in a garbage can with the inscription “NC Garbage for Trump.”
Trump tapped into the crowd’s feelings of disenfranchisement, anxiety, and resentment. He compared Biden’s comment to Hillary Clinton’s infamous line from the 2016 campaign calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Trump’s aides tell TIME that this strategy may mobilize his base in the election’s final hours, some of whom are not regular voters. On stage, Trump seemed to revel in it. “Garbage is a hell of a lot worse than deplorable,” he said with a smirk.
While Trump projected confidence in his campaign’s prospects, he spread baseless claims of voter fraud by unspecified forces—a sign that he is prepared to claim the election was stolen if he loses. “They wanna cheat,” he said. “They cheat like hell.” It’s a message that even Trump’s most trusted advisors have cautioned against, saying that it encourages his followers to distrust the system and, in some cases, to abstain from voting altogether. But Trump has been unable to restrain himself, his aides say, and has instead attempted to preempt that reaction. “The only way to stop the lies is to swamp them with your vote,” he said Saturday.
Several attendees were anticipating the possibility of a Trump defeat. Some of them were already looking ahead to how Trump might respond if Harris wins. “I think he should call on all of his supporters to stand up,” says Penningtom. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling on them to go out and kill people in the streets. But if the evidence proves Trump is the president, the people who supported Trump shouldn’t obey anybody except Trump.” Others say Trump should do what he didn’t last time and concede gracefully. “We have to accept it,” says Janice Pelonero, who lives a stone’s throw from the rally. “What else are you going to do?”
It’s unlikely Trump sees it the same way. But it’s a problem he’s trying to avoid as he spends the next two days campaigning in swing states. Aides say he will continue to try to appeal to suburban women by focusing on immigration, as well as the economy and crime, while maintaining his campaign’s theory that men under 40 are the key to returning him to the White House. Some in Trump’s inner circle have warned him that it’s a risky gamble with obvious limitations. But Trump has pressed ahead. He acknowledged the strategy on Saturday, suggesting his marathon of fawning frat-like podcast interviews could propel him back to power. “If Kamala can’t handle an interview with Joe Rogan,” Trump said, “then she can’t handle the presidency.”