Down with the ladies, up with the gents. It’s a balancing act
The Stormy Daniels saga has been dragging on long enough now for it to have sunk into the public perception. Is it having any effect on the nation’s perception of Trump? The Hill wrote about “The Stormy Effect” yesterday in a piece dealing with the most recent approval rating polls. The statistics they quote at the front of the article look grim indeed. Trump’s favorability numbers with women are down since the media began featuring this circus on a daily basis. And it looks like more than just a blip on the radar.
President Trump’s support among women plunged this month as he battled controversies surrounding alleged affairs with the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, according to a new poll.
Support from women fell from 41 percent to 35 percent in the new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, even as Trump’s support among men rose 3 points to 53 percent.
Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll co-director Mark Penn said the growing gender gap in the poll is the result of the “Stormy Effect.”
So Trump is back down to 35% approval among women. That’s not good no matter how you spin it. But how much of that comes as a direct result of the Stormy Daniels story and how much reflects preferences regarding his handling of gun control after the Parkland shooting? Are they more nervous about North Korea and China? Tough to say, though you can’t rule out the idea that a lot of women – particularly the married ones – aren’t wild about husbands who allegedly go waltzing off for a little “executive time” with a porn star or a stripper. (Daniels is both in terms of vocation.)
But right on the heels of that statistic, we learn that Trump has not only gone up in approval among men but is now solidly over the 50% line, coming in at 53%. Since it’s happening during the same period of time, I suppose we could attribute it to some sort of stereotype of a bunch of chest-thumping, high-fiving frat boys saying, “ Dude! You got yourself a porn star?!?! Way to go, brah! ” But does that really make much sense in the real world as opposed to Hollywood frat-life, party movies? Or, in a parallel to what I suggested about the response from women, are the men a bit more hopeful about how things like foreign policy, border control and regulatory reform are going? The “Stormy Effect” might be the more entertaining answer, but I’d like to think we’re a bit more serious about policy than that.
In the end, we need to look at the total numbers, not just the demographics broken down by gender. When you combine them all together, Trump rings up 44%, down only one point from last month in the same survey and up by four from where he was at the beginning of winter. That’s still not the kind of number he’d like to see heading into the midterms (where you’d really want him at least at fifty) but he’s heading in the right direction overall. It’s still far too soon to tell, however. If Stormy Daniels is really going to wind up being Trump’s undoing, her attorney is going to need to up his game quite a bit.
