We're talking past each other. Hillary doesn't nee

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The woman's card? Hillary Clinton is playing it — and Donald Trump is helping her.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/e.../86793244/

As the Democratic National Convention prepares to make history by nominating a woman for president, women in national polls are giving Clinton the highest level of female support of any candidate in more than four decades and the widest gender gap ever recorded. Clinton's lead of a yawning 24 percentage points in the latest Pew Research Center Poll — not only among Democratic partisans but also from women who typically vote Republican — is an electoral challenge for the GOP that imperils Trump's ability to win the White House.

In interviews with women across the country by the USA TODAY Network, some supporters are elated by the prospect of shattering what Clinton has called "the final, hardest glass ceiling," electing the first female president. "It's about time," says Stephanie Parra, 31, an education consultant in Phoenix. The Latina says Clinton is "breaking barriers for us.


But other women are driven less by support for Clinton than by antipathy to Trump. That's particularly true among Millennials, voters 35 and younger who were part of the Obama coalition but haven't warmed to Clinton, at least not yet. While seven in 10 younger women support Clinton, they say by more than 2-1 that their choice is more a vote against him than for her.

Lauren Rolwing, 32, an illustrator from Nashville who was interviewed at a downtown pet-shop-turned-coffeehouse called Fido, is still sporting her Bernie Sanders campaign button though she acknowledges he's not going to be the Democratic nominee. She's undecided between voting for Clinton or a third-party candidate.

"At this time, I'm not going to take anything off the table other than voting for Trump," she says. "That's off the table."


Alarm over Trump's provocative policies and rhetoric also is costing him support among some white women who typically vote Republican.

White women without a college degree have backed GOP nominees by double-digits in each of the past three presidential elections, but in the Pew survey they support Trump over Clinton by just three percentage points, 48%-45%.

The reason? Clinton's supporters in this demographic group say they are voting against him rather than for her (28%-17%). Even most of Trump's supporters indicate they are choosing the lesser of two evils: They are more likely to say they are voting against Clinton than for him (27%-19%).

The Pew poll of 1,655 registered voters, taken June 15-26, has a margin of error of +/-2.4 percentage points.

Of course, some female voters support Trump, and enthusiastically.

"Trump is our only hope to gain our country back," Teresa Willis, 60, a massage therapist and hairdresser from Mason, Ohio, declared in an interview at a raucous Trump rally last week in nearby Sharonville, outside Cincinnati.

She is most concerned about national security and about restoring religion in American society and schools. "I believe this election is our last chance.

"I'm very concerned about the economy and things like that," says Alyssa Weisser, 43, a small-business owner from St. Clairsville, Ohio, who went to a Trump rally there last month. "Obviously, Trump knows a lot about creating jobs and owning a business and running it — which Hillary has not run anything."

That said, Trump trailed Clinton among women in the Pew poll by 35%-59%. He led among men by six points, 49%-43%. If that held to Election Day, the 16-point difference in Clinton's support among women and men would swamp the record 11-point gender gap set in 1996. Then, female support for Bill Clinton gave him his margin of victory over Republican Bob Dole.

"Sixteen points? That's gigantic," says Susan Carroll, a professor at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and co-editor of Gender and Elections: Shaping the Future of American Politics. "That's off the radar screen."

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