Women Voters Sour on Trump, Handing Democrats an 18-Point Midterm Edge

Registered women voters say they favor Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans by an 18-percentage-point margin, 52% to 34%, according to a new national survey that Republican pollster Christine Matthews conducted for Bellwether Research and Consulting. The poll, which surveyed 1,604 women including 1,291 registered voters, found President Trump's approval rating among women sitting at just 32%, a warning sign for a party bracing for what strategists describe as the first major national referendum on his second term.

The survey, reported by The Daily Beast, also found a dramatic reversal among white women, a demographic that has leaned Republican in recent cycles. White women now favor Democratic House candidates 47% to 39%, flipping from 2024, when they backed Republicans 55% to 44%. That group supported GOP candidates in both the 2022 and 2024 midterms and general elections, making the shift especially notable for a party that has relied on white women as part of its coalition.

Married women, another traditionally Republican-leaning bloc, are now evenly split between the two parties in the Bellwether survey, according to the seed reporting from the Denver Gazette. That is a significant change from recent history: Republicans won married women by 14 points in 2022 and by 13 points in the 2024 House vote. Even among women who voted for Trump, 25% now say they disapprove of the job he is doing.

Cost of Living Tops Women's Concerns

Focus group data and analysis from Matthews, along with Republican lawmakers, point to persistent worry over grocery prices and the broader cost of living as the main driver of female dissatisfaction with the administration, according to Politico. Republican Representative Kat Cammack has said her female constituents consistently cite affordability as their top voting issue. In the Bellwether survey itself, women identified the economy and cost of living, healthcare, Medicare and Social Security, and democracy and the rule of law among the issues they consider most important facing the country, per the Denver Gazette's reporting on the poll's findings.

The Trump administration has faced persistent political headwinds over inflation, trade, immigration and foreign policy, and the numbers suggest those headwinds are landing hardest with women. An Economist/YouGov survey cited in the same reporting found just 35% of respondents approved of Trump's job performance overall, with 61% disapproving. Hispanic respondents in that survey disapproved of his performance at 33%, while 35% approved; Black respondents disapproved at a much steeper 83%, with only 13% approving.

A Familiar Warning From 2018

The 18-point gender gap in the Bellwether poll matches almost exactly the margin that fueled the 2018 Democratic wave, when women backed Democratic congressional candidates 58% to 40% and Democrats flipped 40 House seats to take control of the chamber, as The Daily Beast notes. That earlier midterm served as the first national referendum on Trump's first term, and the parallel is not lost on Republican strategists watching this year's numbers.

The pattern extends beyond the generic ballot. Hoodline reported in earlier Emerson College polling that Trump's overall approval had sunk to 40%, with a 30-point gender gap showing 62% of women disapproving compared with just 32% approving — figures that track closely with the new Bellwether and Economist/YouGov numbers. The trend is also visible in specific races: an August Texas A&M Bush School and ReconMR poll found Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by 13 points among women in Texas, while a UC Berkeley IGS/Los Angeles Times poll showed Democrat Xavier Becerra leading Republican Steve Hilton 55% to 37% in the California governor's race, propelled in part by strong support among women.

What Women Say They Oppose

Beyond broad approval numbers, the Bellwether survey found specific policy flashpoints driving women's discontent. Sixty-eight percent of women opposed construction of the White House ballroom, a project that has moved forward after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay on lower-court stop-work orders in late August. That figure aligns with a separate Economist/YouGov poll showing 57% of Americans overall opposed to demolishing the East Wing for the 1,000-seat ballroom project, according to YouGov.

Women also expressed opposition to tariffs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations, increased production of glyphosate, and construction of data centers in their states, per the Bellwether findings cited by the Denver Gazette. Fifty-five percent of women opposed splitting the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, even as a separate Economist/YouGov poll found 65% of Americans overall support K-12 school vaccine mandates — suggesting resistance to altering the vaccine schedule rather than opposition to immunization itself. Republican women, by contrast, showed far more support for the administration's approach: 76% strongly supported ICE deportations, and Republican women opposed the ballroom construction and other measures at much lower rates than women overall, with only 43% of Republican women expressing opposition on one measure tracked in the survey.

Republicans Still Point to Economic Messaging

Republican strategists have not conceded the gender gap as fixed, pointing to targeted economic proposals such as tax exemptions on tips and overtime pay as ways to reach working women and families before November. Meanwhile, Trump gained support among Black and Latino men in the 2024 election, winning 47% of the Latino male vote according to exit polling that year — a reminder that the coalition shifts cut in more than one direction. Democrats, for their part, are still working through divisions between their establishment and progressive wings even as they look to capitalize on the numbers among women.

Lawmakers have also raised concerns about digital harassment and deepfakes targeting female candidates ahead of the midterms. The federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, which Trump signed in May 2025 and which took effect in May 2026, established criminal penalties for sharing nonconsensual intimate AI imagery and marked the first comprehensive federal deepfake legislation passed by Congress, as Hoodline detailed in its coverage of state AI ad rules. With suburban districts across battleground states expected to be decisive, the numbers suggest kitchen-table economics, not culture-war messaging alone, will shape how women vote when the midterms arrive.