'Utter antipathy': GOP insiders sweat that Trump has lost Republican women
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been targeting moderate Republican women who backed Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican primary as a key voter bloc — and reporter Marc Caputo of The Bulwark argued Thursday why that might be a smart bet.
In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Caputo described conversations he had with Republican operatives about focus groups they've watched with traditionally Republican women voters.
"The problem that Republican data guys, when they hold these focus groups with women, are encountering is the utter antipathy that they have for Donald Trump," he said. "One told me that, invariably, when you see these women being interviewed, a word that will always come up is either ‘disgusting’ or ‘pig’, or sometimes both, to describe Trump."
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Caputo then added that Trump's campaign isn't banking on winning all of these voters, and instead is betting it can turn out male voters who have traditionally not voted in presidential elections.
Later in the interview, Caputo reported how the Harris campaign is using Republican voices who served with Trump to persuade voters to her side.
"The Harris campaign has been very clear about their intentions of using these Republican surrogates — these former Trump appointees and his running mate, former vice president, the former secretary of defense, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump — using all of them as part of a broad narrative in a campaign to frame or portray or show or whatever the verb is: Donald Trump is unfit to lead," he said.