For months, Donald Trump has rigidly courted male voters. His media strategy has centered on bro-themed podcasts and his field operation is designed to surgically target men who aren’t registered or who rarely vote. But three days before the election, the former President returned to a state he’s won twice to make an explicit race-baiting appeal to the other gender.
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“I will protect women,” Trump told a crowd in Gastonia, North Carolina. He wasn’t referring to one of the most salient issues in this election: reproductive rights In fact, Trump didn’t mention the word “abortion” once in his 90-minute speech. Rather, he was referring to his plan to shut down the southern border and deport more than 11 million undocumented migrants. “The suburban women are under attack,” Trump said. “If they don’t get me, they will have millions of people coming through the suburbs.” He then paused the rally to play a three-minute video of a woman’s harrowing account of her adolescent daughter being kidnapped and strangled to death by immigrants who entered the country illegally.
Trump blamed the tragedy on his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has falsely claimed was the Biden Administration official in charge of immigration and the border; she was actually tasked with studying the root causes of migration from Central America. The diatribe culminated in one of the event’s loudest applauses—when Trump pledged to pursue capital punishment against murderous migrants. “I am hereby calling for the death penalty for all illegal migrants who kill American people or law enforcement officials,” he said.
By making draconian immigration policies his main pitch to female voters in the election’s final days, Trump is trying to mitigate his most glaring vulnerability, according to several of his top advisers. A recent POLITICO analysis found that women have far outpaced men in early voting across the battleground states, including North Carolina. That could be costly for Trump: multiple surveys—including the campaign’s own internal polling—have found that women prefer Harris by nearly 10 points there. Trump may be especially imperiled with female voters in the Tar Heel State, where he has stood by Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s bid for governor, even after CNN reported that Robinson made lewd and racist comments on a pornographic website. Any defections could be consequential. The current FiveThirtyEight average of North Carolina polls has Trump with a slim one-point lead against Harris.
Fear mongering wasn’t the only Trump tactic at the Gastonia rally. On the runway of a small regional airport, Trump tried to seize on President Joe Biden’s gaffe earlier this week seemingly calling his supporters “garbage.” Many of the MAGA faithful wore the disparagement as a badge of honor. Multiple people came wearing garbage bags. “You want to call us that,” says one of them, Jeff Miller, a truck driver from Gastonia. “We’ll go ahead and entertain that.” Terry Pinningtom, a retired construction worker from Hickman, ensconced himself in a garbage can with the inscription “NC Garbage for Trump.”
Trump tapped into the crowd’s feeling of dispossession, anxiety, and grievance. He likened Biden’s comment to Hillary Clinton’s now infamous line from the 2016 campaign calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” The upshot, Trump’s aides tell TIME, is that it may mobilize the base in the election’s 11th hour, some of whom aren’t regular voters. On stage, Trump seemed to bask in it. “Garbage is a hell of a lot worse than deplorable,” he said with a smirk.
While Trump projected confidence in his campaign’s chances, he promulgated baseless claims of voter fraud by amorphous forces—a tell that he’s planting the seeds to say the election was stolen if he loses. “They wanna cheat,” he said. “They cheat like hell.” It’s a message that even Trump’s most trusted advisers have warned against, saying that it encourages his followers to doubt the system and, in some cases, abstain from voting altogether. But Trump has been unable to restrain himself, his aides say, and has instead tried to preempt that reaction. “The only way to stop the lies is to swamp them with your vote,” he said Saturday.
Several attendees were bracing for the possibility of a Trump loss. Some of them were already looking ahead to how Trump might respond should Harris win. “I think he should call on all of his supporters to stand up,” says Penningtom. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling on them to go out and kill people in the streets. But if the evidence proves Trump is the president, the people who supported Trump shouldn’t obey anybody except Trump.” Others say Trump should do what he didn’t last time and gracefully concede. “We have to accept it,” says Janice Pelonero, who lives a stone’s throw from the rally. “What else are you going to do?”
It’s unlikely Trump sees it the same way. But it’s a problem he’s trying to avert as he spends the next two days barnstorming swing states. Aides say he will continue to try to appeal to suburban women by focusing on immigration, as well as the economy and crime, while holding true to his campaign’s theory that men under 40 are the key to returning him to the White House. Some in Trump’s inner orbit have warned him that it’s a risky bet with obvious limitations. But Trump has plunged ahead. He acknowledged the strategy on Saturday, suggesting his marathon of fawning frat-like podcast interviews could propel him back to power. “If Kamala can’t handle an interview with Joe Rogan,” Trump said, “then she can’t handle the presidency.”
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