By Dr. Carmen Schaye, NWPC Vice President of Diversity

Last Friday FOX News released its latest poll of Presidential approval and the results made for dire reading for Donald Trump. In short, and to lapse for a second into vaguely Trumpian wording, “his numbers are underwater.” According to FOX, his overall approval sits at 43%. To give that some context, his predecessor’s never dipped below 40% and, at a similar stage in his first term, sat at 46%, according to Gallup.
These readings are particularly interesting given that FOX is a news outlet which, in general, skews in his favor and that he would expect to poll more favorably. We know that FOX is the President’s network of choice, a network that he, as well as many on the left, have viewed as a presidential ally. For a President who values unquestioning allegiance, his reaction to these numbers has been predictably hostile. “My worst polls have been coming from FOX. There’s something going on at FOX and I don’t like it.”

Before we dive into a breakdown of the FOX results, let’s take a second to analyze the President’s claim. He has a tendency toward conspiracy theory that often encourages a dismissal of comments like these without proper examination; a dangerous place to sit given that he has over 63 million followers on Twitter- if you’re not taking his comments seriously, there’s a vast proportion of the country that is.

A quick look at competing pollsters shows us that, in fact, FOX is one of his better polls. The Gallup poll has him at 41%, NBC, traditionally left-leaning, has him at 43% and Fivethirtyeight, a poll that supposedly adjusts for bias puts him at 42.1%. One explanation for his indignation is that it is perfectly possible that the President, who famously reacts badly to bad news, is only shown favorable poll numbers by his advisors, meaning that the only time he sees realistic poll results is when he’s watching FOX News on his own.

So why does the President suffer from such a low approval rating? The answer is fairly simple: Women. As FOX News columnist Mary Anne Marsh writes, “when you look at the cross tabs of the FOX poll, it is clear women have turned on Trump in such large numbers and across so many demographics it is impossible to ignore… women of every color, age, and income reject Trump in this Poll.” This will not come as news to many, nor is it terribly revelatory in any other aspect than who, now, is saying it. The truth of this has become so glaring that even the conservative press have been forced to talk about it.

But now let’s get right down to it…why have women, as a demographic, turned on this President so completely? The Pew Research Center provides us with an interesting insight: In 1960, in households with children under 8 years old, the percentage in which mothers were the sole or primary provider stood at 10.8%, by 2011 this figure had risen to 40.4%. Could it be that with a large and growing percentage of the burden of economic provision coming from women, they are no longer prepared to accept being economic outsiders and political marginalization?

Not to burrow too deeply into anthropology, but we live in a political age in which individualism is touted as a virtue at the highest level. The President’s rallying cry “America First” is really an extension of “me first,” allegedly the spirit by which America has thrived. In the words of fictional, capitalist talisman Gordon Gecko, “Greed is good.” This is a very male-driven school of thought. Women, by virtue of biology, are forced to think of and nurture others. Is it any surprise, then, in a society such as ours, that a large part of the push-back would be from women? Look at the figureheads of this revolution, Reps Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley, their gender isn’t incidental. Nor is their ethnicity. Trump recently told these women to, “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Ignoring for a moment that Rep Ayanna Pressley’s family arrived in the United States roughly 200 years before that of Donald Trump, there’s an easy parallel to be drawn between the President’s stated desire to see people of color excluded and his clear gender bias.

In short, Trump has, in the words of FOX News, “a women problem,” and not one it will be easy to solve. The women’s rebellion against his administration goes to the heart of its ideology and there can be no easy truce. “Getting women onside” will require an agreement to share wealth and political power with whom it has not historically been shared, and that is something that Trump has set himself up against from day one.