Women are done with Trump

But will they actually vote for the Democrats?

Apr 09, 2026

White women are fleeing the Trump coalition faster than nearly any other group. (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)

Here’s a question: Which group do you think is most likely to have turned against Donald Trump between 2024 and today?

For anyone who’s only been paying attention to press coverage of polls, the answer may come as a surprise. It’s not Hispanic or young voters, as you might have guessed. It’s women — and specifically white, non-college-educated women.

This may not be the dominant narrative, but it’s also not that surprising once you think about it. If you tried to create a presidency designed to be uniquely repulsive to women, you would struggle to top the second Trump administration’s “success” in this regard.

And the data couldn’t be clearer: Over the course of our 2026 surveys, we’ve consistently observed that Trump is losing way more ground with women than he is with men. In fact, female Trump voters are nearly twice as likely to disapprove of him as male Trump voters are.

This is remarkable. It’s not noteworthy to say women dislike Trump more than men do; in general, this is to be expected, because women are more liberal than men are.

What our results suggest is something different, though: Even after we control for partisanship, women are more likely at an individual level to disapprove of Trump. In other words, moderate and conservative women are much more likely to disapprove of the president than moderate and conservative men are. That’s a significantly more noteworthy finding.

This is what’s driving Trump’s overall polling apocalypse with women. His net approval with them now sits at a jaw-dropping -27, which is 21 percentage points below his reported 2024 vote share with female voters in our survey data.

That’s a markedly worse picture than among men, in terms of both his current standing and slippage from 2024. Put simply, for every two points Trump has lost with men, he’s lost three with women.

Interestingly, it’s among white women that the slippage is greatest. We don’t really see the same signs of gender polarization with nonwhite voters, where his cratering is relatively uniform (if anything, he’s lost more ground with nonwhite men than he has with nonwhite women).

Some might be tempted to explain this shift by going back to the data on white, liberal, college-educated women being the new bulwark of the Democratic Party.

But as we mentioned earlier, this simply doesn’t hold up as an explanation for the collapse we’re seeing. For one, it’s not just white, college-educated women driving Trump’s drop in public opinion; his biggest collapse is actually with white, non-college-educated women.

Second, it’s not liberal women (or women newly identifying as liberal) driving the collapse. Trump has lost the most ground with white women who self-identify as moderate or conservative ideologically. Among these women, he’s lost approximately double the support he’s lost with comparable male groups.

There’s no other way to put it: These numbers are very ugly for the president and his team. White women are perhaps the most high-propensity electoral group in the country; per Catalist, white women were 38% of the 2024 electorate, compared to 34% for white men. A collapse in support from this group would be catastrophic, and could further endanger Republican Senate odds in states like Alaska, Ohio, Texas, and Maine.

For those who have grown accustomed to examining 2026 through the lens of the “last in, first out” phenomenon, this might again come as a bit of a surprise. After all, Trump gained the most ground with men in 2024 — why, then, would he be now losing the most ground with women?

There’s a way to square this circle: The “last in, first out” theory applies to swings in vote choice, rather than in approval, and although women are much more likely to swing against Trump and disapprove of him, they aren’t disproportionately swinging toward the Democratic Party just yet.

And when it comes to the 2026 elections, vote choice is a much more relevant data point, because it directly measures vote intent.

In other words, the Trump administration appears to be doing an incredible job of repelling women from its base, but many of those women are simply not voting for Democrats. Even though Trump’s two-way disapproval with white, moderate women is 65%, Democrats are getting just 49% of their vote.

That is a shockingly large — and frankly, unparalleled — gap. And while I would bank on some of this gap closing as the election nears, I don’t think all (or even most) of it will.

In my conversations with professionals across the political spectrum, many chalked this gap up to polarization. But I think that’s an incomplete answer. There is no inherent reason for Democrats to struggle so much more at closing the deal with women voters — and especially with moderate women. It’s just not true that these voters are “unwinnable” for Democrats; in cycle after cycle, we see that overperformances of large magnitudes are actually still possible, if increasingly rare.

Instead, I think the answer has more to do with policy than most people think.

Democrats are a very liberal party right now, and this is costing them some gettable moderate and conservative voters. Although Trump’s term has been nothing short of radioactive with voters, nearly 10% of those who dislike Trump still believe that the GOP is closer to their views than the Democrats are. For instance, in our polling, Republicans still hold a small edge with white, moderate voters on both LGBT issues and the economy, despite Trump’s remarkably poor approval ratings.1

When it comes to 2026, that fact won’t be enough for Republicans, at least when it comes to the House. With the generic ballot at D+6 among registered voters, and with Trump’s disapproval hovering at nearly 60%, there is simply no viable lane for the GOP to hold the lower chamber, despite the Democratic Party supporting some unpopular views.

But the Senate is a different story. Democrats need to flip some combination of Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Alaska in order to win the chamber, and each of those states backed Trump by more than 10 percentage points in 2024. A D+6 generic ballot isn’t remotely blue enough for those states to flip without persuading people who dislike Trump but currently aren’t sold on the Democratic Party.

To succeed at that task, Democrats are almost certainly going to need to win over the moderate, white women who may be dissatisfied with Trump but aren’t keen on Democrats’ alternative.