When you’re a star, Donald Trump has said more than once, women let you do whatever you want. As president, this meant putting three right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and depriving half the country of a constitutional right so that people like him – their self-appointed “protector” – could have the final say on what a woman did to her do. body.

“I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” the former president claimed during a campaign stop on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”

It turns out that women don’t care about this – at least a large majority of them do. While millions will still vote for the Republican candidate, who may hate immigrants more than reproductive rights, the only certainty at this point is that many millions more will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll, the Democrat enjoyed a 14% lead among women over Trump; among women with a university degree, that number rose to 23%; among female voters under 40, it shot up to 34%.

According to the Brookings Institution, Harris’ strength among women angry about the 2022 Dobbs decision could explain why Democrats, for the first time in a while, are polling better among older voters than Republicans. The think tank’s Michael Hais and Morley Winograd noted that there has been a 10-point swing toward Harris compared to 2020 among voters over 65, according to the ABC News/Ipsos survey.

“Some observers think this shift is being driven by the ‘revenge of Boomer feminists’ among the women of that famous generation, all of whom are now over 65 but who cut their political teeth fighting for equality when they were much younger were,” Hais and Winograd wrote. Younger voters may be angry about the loss of a right they never lived without, but older people have seen hard-won progress reversed. They’re also the most reliable group of voters — and they tend to vote early.

In battleground states, that seems to be exactly what happens. According to an analysis of early voting numbers by Politico, women are responsible for 55% of all votes cast so far in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

That, in turn, is causing some MAGA commentators to abandon their usual posture of feigned confidence and turn to outright panic.

“Early voting has been disproportionately female,” Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who led the campaign to win the election, posted on social media. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.” (Kirk, trying to motivate these voters, suggested Orwellian misogyny: “If you want a vision of the future when you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling forever.”)

The claim that female voters could cost Trump another term could just be a scare tactic designed to motivate other men who hate women. After all, Democrats often raise money and motivate their own voters by warning that an election is about to be lost.

But when he spoke to former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Kirk seemed genuinely angry that women could vote for Harris in large numbers — and lie about it to their controlling husbands.

“It’s so disgusting. It’s so disastrous. It is the embodiment of the decline of the American family. I think it’s so dirty. I think it’s just so sickening,” Kirk said, in response to a new ad produced by a liberal Christian organization in which Julia Roberts reminds women that how one votes doesn’t have to be shared with an emotionally stunted man who has a gets attacked. . (“That’s like having an affair,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters commented on the ad. “That violates the sanctity of our marriage.”)

The over-the-top response to the ad — simply reminding people that votes in a democracy are secret — could be read as something other than total trust. And while the early voting numbers should not be merged with the final numbers, there is data to support the Republican Party’s concerns.

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More than 1.6 million ballots have already been cast in Pennsylvania, according to data collected by NBC News. In a state with more than 8.8 million registered voters, that’s not enough to have decided the election yet. However, it does indicate an early but large divide when it comes to gender: so far, 56% of ballots cast have come from women, a 13% lead over men.

That gap is about the same as in 2020. In 2024, however, Republicans have strongly encouraged their supporters to vote early, a campaign that has closed the disparity between the parties: in the last presidential election, less than a quarter of mail-in votes came from Republicans, compared to about a third today.

Democrats hope that the fact that the same gender disparity persists, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, is a sign of dissension among Republican women and others who may have supported former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican Party primaries (157,000 Pennsylvanians did , six weeks after she won the election). failed).

Mike Cernovich, a pro-Trump influencer, openly panics.

“The turnout of men in Pennsylvania for Trump has been a disaster,” Cernovich wrote on social media. “Unless this changes, Kamala Harris takes PA and it’s over.”