[The following is an excerpt form an article published in MyPlainView]

 

The president's recent return to racial politics may be aimed at rallying his base of white working-class voters across rural America. But the risks of the strategy are glaring in conversations with women like Evans.

 

Many professional, suburban women — a critical voting bloc in the 2020 election — recoil at the abrasive, divisive rhetoric, exposing the president to a potential wave of opposition in key battlegrounds across the country.

 

In more than three dozen interviews by The Associated Press with women in critical suburbs, nearly all expressed dismay — or worse — at Trump's racially polarizing insults and what was often described as unpresidential treatment of people. Even some who gave Trump credit for the economy or backed his crackdown on immigration acknowledged they were troubled or uncomfortable lining up behind the president.

 

The interviews in suburbs outside Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit and Denver are a warning light for the Republican president's reelection campaign. Trump did not win a majority of female voters in 2016, but he won enough — notably winning white women by a roughly 10 percentage-point margin, according to the American National Election Studies survey — to help him eke out victories across the Rust Belt and take the White House.

 

Since then, there are few signs Trump has expanded his support among women. The 2018 midterms amounted to a strong showing of opposition among women in the suburbs, registering in unprecedented turnout overall, a Democratic House and a record number of women elected in statehouses across the country.

 

A continuing trend of women voting against Republicans could prove exceedingly difficult for Trump to overcome in his 2020 reelection bid.

 

"It's one of the more serious problems that the Republicans face," said G. Terry Madonna, a pollster and director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

 

Trump's tweet at the so-called squad of Democratic congresswomen along with interviews in politically divided Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Clinton beat Trump by 2,700 votes, or less than 1 percentage point, demonstrated the Trump campaign's challenge. Nearly all of the dozen women interviewed disapproved of Trump's rhetoric.

 

"The way he treats people, it's horrible," said Victoria Galiczynski, a 63-year-old registered Democrat, before she pushed her shopping cart into an upscale grocery store in Newtown.

 

Chris Myers, a 52-year-old accountant and Trump supporter, ticked off such attributes as his negotiating grit, but also quickly acknowledged his behavior.

 

"He's not the most pleasant person. He can be very blunt and boorish," Myers said as she prepared to go grocery shopping. "But I think this country needs someone who is more business-oriented."