With virtually every poll that has come out in the last three months showing that Donald Trump is losing the votes of suburban women, whom he calls “housewives” though most are wage earners, about a week ago, he pathetically begged a crowd at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania, “Suburban women, will you please like me? Please! Please!”
With six weeks before the election, Trump decided to put into the field his most cherished asset to gain back the votes of “suburban housewives”: his only daughter from his first wife and his second oldest child, Ivanka, according to Politico.
It’s unclear how Ivanka will connect with suburban women. She’s a Manhattanite who now lives in a toney Washington neighborhood. She rides in chauffeured limousines. She’s never sat in the coach section of an airplane in her life. And she has just a 36% favorability rate, versus a 46% unfavorability rate.
Ivanka, who has a White House position though she has no government experience and has who has gotten every job she’s had thanks to her Trump birthright, would be an unlikely emissary to college-educated suburban women who juggle child care, careers, relationships and bills.
She’s doing retail politicking, the kind her father hates: going to town meetings, meeting people at their store fronts, taking photos with kids in Halloween costumes. She tries to explain superficially how her father’s policies have helped women, typically touting an initiative to provide day care for working mothers, a policy that has failed to materialize in the four years Trump’s been in office.
She is trying to become the face of Trump’s claim that he is “saving the suburbs,” a trope that is based on an intentional false representation of an Obama-era recommendation for local development, but intends to stoke racial animus and fear.
“The reality is that women voters are looking at the substance of what’s happened,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It’s kind of late, three weeks out, to try suddenly to be having a different tone and tenor. I don’t think she alone can make up for what these women have been seeing the last four years.”