Wisconsin highlights another problem for Trump: Female voters don’t like him

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David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

Each confrontation in the march toward the July presidential nominating conventions has presented a trial and logic of its own: a test of rural politics in Iowa, of evangelical and minority support in South Carolina, of displaced manufacturing workers in Michigan. And today Wisconsin voters are making important choices in a vital contest with a distinct character.

Wisconsin is the first state where the front-runners are on the defensive and where the challengers are on the offensive.

Wisconsin's geographical position in roughly the middle of the United States, and its primary in roughly the middle of the nomination struggle, underscores its importance in this unusual political season.

The Wisconsin primary could be a significant watershed for Republican front-runner Donald J. Trump. He goes into Tuesday's balloting as the distinct underdog to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas even as his national poll numbers hit a new low. And as the balloting approached, he told worried supporters to expect a "surprise" today and called on the third candidate in the Republican race, Governor John Kasich of Ohio, to withdraw.

The state also serves to highlight another challenge for Mr. Trump: his inability to connect with female voters.

Increasingly, the Manhattan businessman's inability to attract female voters has endangered his nomination and has prompted national Republicans to fear the impact on congressional races if he is at the top of the GOP ticket.

About seven in 10 women view Mr. Trump unfavourably, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll – a devastating critique from a demographic group that accounts for about 53 per cent of the American electorate. Even more significant: That survey was taken before Mr. Trump suggested, just as Wisconsin voters were focusing on Tuesday's primary, that women who received abortions should be punished. (He later recanted the statement.)

"It's not a gender gap but a grand canyon," says Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics at Chatham University. "The Republican Party always suffers from a gender gap but Donald Trump could widen it substantially."

The skepticism women bring to Mr. Trump is similarly potent in Wisconsin, where only a quarter of Republican women in the state said they would vote for him, according to the Marquette University Law School Poll, considered the most reliable survey in the state.

Though Mr. Trump's troubles in Wisconsin could undermine the sense of inevitability he has sought to cultivate nationally, they are not of recent origin. His polling numbers in Wisconsin have consistently trailed his polling numbers nationally by about a dozen points, suggesting that his difficulties in the state are not a short-term phenomenon based entirely on last week's developments.

These difficulties date to the first days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was considered a strong contender and, based on impressive early performances in Iowa, was even regarded as the front-runner. But Mr. Walker, a conservative avatar because of his strong national profile and his anti-union campaign in the state capital of Madison, was an early skeptic of Mr. Trump. Since Mr. Walker left the race, there has been no question in Wisconsin how the leader of the state Republican Party regarded Mr. Trump.

Then, in recent days, Mr. Cruz unleashed a barrage of criticism of Mr. Trump, even comparing the former reality-television personality to another figure from the realm of reality TV. "There's no doubt that Donald Trump is the Kim Kardashian presidential candidate," Mr. Cruz said. "He sits on Twitter and makes a lot of noise, but he has no solutions to fixing the problems."

In the Democratic race, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly is taking on Mr. Trump. Sunday, in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, she criticized "his rhetoric, his demagoguery," adding: "When you incite violence, you are acting like a political arsonist."

And last week, she employed Mr. Trump as a bludgeon to attack Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and to blunt his rise as the Wisconsin balloting neared. "Senator Sanders agreed that Donald Trump's comments were shameful," she said, "but then he said they were a distraction from, and I quote, 'A serious discussion about the serious issues facing America.'" The implication? Ms. Clinton considers abortion rights a central issue, not a peripheral matter.

Ms. Clinton has 1,712 convention delegates to Mr. Sanders's 1,011 in the struggle to gain the 2,383 required for nomination. Victories in the last three contests, in Washington, Hawaii and Alaska, cheered the Sanders campaign, but even if he sweeps to victory in Wisconsin – which has voted Democratic in the last seven elections in a row – he faces enormous obstacles to defeat Ms. Clinton.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, remains 501 delegates short of the 1,237 he needs to win his party's nomination. Mr. Cruz hopes to win all 42 delegates on offer in Wisconsin.

There are good reasons why Mr. Cruz and Mr. Sanders made their stands in Wisconsin.

For Republicans, it is a political test in perhaps the only venue where the GOP state establishment might be even farther to the right than the conservative rebels who have roiled the party all year. For Democrats, it is a test among progressive voters in a state that pioneered workers' compensation, the minimum wage and transparency in campaign finance.

But there is another factor: the calendar.

The two men – who have nothing in common besides their rebel status in the Senate chamber and their unhappy status as challengers threatened with extinction in their respective presidential nomination races – are chary of waiting another fortnight for the next confrontation.

Both the front-runners' mounting delegate counts and the primary schedule make that a perilous gamble, for after Wisconsin the campaign swings into New York – the sprawling state, difficult to organize and expensive to advertise in, where Mr. Trump has his headquarters and where Ms. Clinton was twice elected to the U.S. Senate.