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Donald Trump took to Twitter Wednesday to claim that his approval ratings among suburban housewives are doing well.
“The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge!” the president wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, this isn’t borne out in national polls. In fact, a recent NPR poll shows some 66 percent of suburban women disapprove of Trump’s job as president. A surprising 58 percent said they “strongly disapprove” of the president’s job. Polls, of course, are not a direct indicator of how people will vote. Some people who disapprove of politicians still vote for them because they disapprove of their opposition even more.
That being said, polls have been indicators of political elections in the past. There is a documented correlation between polling approval ratings and presidential elections. Suburban women, as a focus of the president, also rings hollow for many. Some have suggested the president is imagining a type of housewife that simply doesn’t exist anymore: The type of person who’s searching the internet for deals on “2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Small SUV”, dropping the kids off for soccer practice and is more concerned with the grocery aisle than the two sides of the aisle in Congress.
Republican strategists face a serious threat in November. Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris stand a reasonable shot at beating the incumbent at the polls. In spite of the pandemic making in-person voting less likely, millions of Americans will likely mail in their ballots. However, Trump’s supporters are unlikely to do so, thanks to the president’s own rhetoric. For months, Trump has alleged that mail-in voting is prone to fraud.
As such, Republican campaigns have struggled to convince their voters to use absentee ballots. In rural areas where there may be few polling places, strategists would prefer their likely voters to lock in their vote with a mail-in ballot. Thanks to Trump’s rhetoric, however, few of them trust the tried-and-true mail-in ballot.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate face a serious threat. They’re defending more competitive seats than Democrats, and only four or five seats need to be flipped for Democrats to assume complete control of Congress. Should this happen, Republicans will find themselves on the receiving end of the last four years of their own control of government.
