More than 60 percent of voters don't think that Donald Trump respects women, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey.
During the 2014 midterms, the "war on women" became a partisan battle, pitting Democrats against Republicans. In this year's presidential election, however, the problem seems limited quite specifically to Trump, who's practically managed to make insulting women a plank of his campaign.
A 62 percent majority of voters across both parties say that Trump isn't respectful of women. In contrast, a third or fewer say the same of any other candidate, Republican or Democratic, who is still in the race.
Female voters are actually less likely than male voters to see the four other candidates -- Sanders, Clinton, Kasich and Cruz -- as disrespectful of women, instead often saying they're unsure.
Trump, though, is an exception. Two-thirds of female voters, compared to 57 percent of men, see him as disrespectful.
There's a gender gap among GOP voters as well. While female Republican voters say by a 6-point margin that Trump is respectful of women, male GOP voters say the same by a far wider 20-point margin. In contrast, Republican men are not significantly more likely than Republican women to view Cruz and Kasich's records in a good light.
On the Democratic side, despite periodic accusations of sexism directed at Sanders by the Clinton camp, both candidates are seen as having regard for women. Just 4 percent of male Democratic voters and 3 percent of female Democratic say that Sanders doesn't respect women. For Clinton, those numbers are 5 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
Trump's standing with women has earned extra scrutiny in recent weeks, after he argued for punishing patients who have abortions and attacked the looks of Cruz's wife -- the latter prompting a rare apology.
It's not clear that those specific events have done any harm to his image among women. As The Washington Post notes, Trump won the same percentage of the vote among both genders in Wisconsin, and there's no sign his favorability rating has declined in the last few weeks among women nationally.
The fact that these recent controversies don't seem to have made much of an impact may show how much damage Trump incurred even before the most recent news cycle. Nearly half of female Republican voters say they can't see themselves supporting Trump, and the candidate has even lower support among all female voters.
"There was a sizable gender gap in Americans' views of Trump as early as last July. But even as his overall image has worsened among both genders in recent months, the size of the gender gap has been fairly steady," Gallup's Frank Newport and Lydia Saad wrote at the beginning of the month. "[E]ven before these remarks, fewer than one in four women viewed him favorably, suggesting he may already be down to a core of rock-hard supporters whose opinions aren't likely to change."
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted April 1-3 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
Before You Go
