Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Made with Flourish

Survey: Elected women outperform men, but a woman is unlikely to beat Trump

Made with Flourish
Made with Flourish

People favor an increase in female candidates and some think they often do a better job in office than men — but they are less certain that a woman can defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

That is among several intriguing results of a survey released Thursday by All in Together, a nonpartisan political education nonprofit that urges women to participate in civic life and politics in particular.

The survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Aug. 2-9 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

More than half of respondents (58 percent) said that more female candidates has "been a good thing for the country." Also, 42 percent of women and 23 percent of men said that women in elected officials do a better job that men.


Still, while survey participants favored the generic Democratic candidate over Trump in next year's election by a 53 percent to 35 percent margin, the numbers changed when people were asked about the chances of a woman defeating Trump.

In that matchup, Trump had a 9-point advantage.

Other findings in the poll:

  • About 70 percent said the country is very politically divided, and women are slightly more optimistic about the coming years — 57 percent believe the United States will be as divided in two to three years, compared to 64 percent of men.
  • Two-thirds said Trump's 2016 election has made them more motivated to vote in 2020. Democratic women, at 79 percent, are the most motivated by Trump.
  • Nearly half said Trump has made things in Washington worse, with the expected partisan divide of 81 percent of Democrats saying he made things worse, with 61 percent of Republicans saying Trump made things better.
  • Three-fourths of Democrats say they are paying more attention to politics since the 2016 election, compared to 53 percent of Republicans.

"The polls point to a mismatch in motivation and action," said Lauren Leader, CEO of All in Together. "Democratic women are highly motivated to beat Trump in 2020 yet focus most of their energy on social media rather than committing to going out and working to help their preferred candidate."

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Made with Flourish

Read More

Members of Congress standing next to a poster about Project 2025

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Patty Murray look at their Project 2025 poster during a press conference on Sept. 12.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Project 2025 policies are on the Nov. 5 ballot

Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.

It’s becoming crystal clear, as we near the Nov. 5 presidential election, that voters need to seriously check out the radical government reformation policies contained within the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Here’s why.

The right-wing think tank has written not one, not two, but nine “Mandate for Leadership” documents for Republican presidential candidates, with its first playbook published in 1981. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million —serious money — in 2023 to create Project 2025 for Donald Trump to implement.

Keep ReadingShow less
‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid
Daniel Stid

‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the ninth in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

The problem of polarization has been on Daniel Stid’s mind for a while.

Trained as a political scientist, Stid has spent time working in government (as a staffer for former Rep. Dick Armey), business (at Boston Consulting Group) and the nonprofit sector (at the Bridgespan Group). But Stid is perhaps best known for founding and leading the Hewlett Foundation’s U.S. democracy program. From 2013 to 2022, Stid helped give away $180 million in grants to combat polarization and shore up American democracy. Since leaving Hewlett, he has created a new organization, Lyceum Labs, and launched a blog, The Art of Association, where he writes frequently about civil society and American politics.

Keep ReadingShow less
screenshot of Steve Kornacki

You don't need to be Steve Kornacki to know which states (and counties) to watch on election night.

YouTube screenshot

How to win a bar bet on election night

Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”

The odds are you don’t go to sleep at night and dream of precinct maps and tabulation deadlines like NBC’s breathless election guru Steve Kornacki. Watch him on election night and you will be dazzled and exhausted by his machine-gun-like sharing of statistics and crosstabs.

Keep ReadingShow less
The word "meritocracy" on a chalkboard
bowie15

The propaganda of 'meritocracy'

Degefe is a research associate in Duke University's Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. Ince is an assistant sociology professor at the University of Washington.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) recently launched the Merit Caucus to prevent diversity, equity, and inclusion from dominating education. Owens, chairman of the Education and Workplace subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, argued that the left is waging a "war on meritocracy" and is threatening America’s excellence, all in the name of equity.

Such sentiment is clearly becoming more prevalent, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively end race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities and by Texas, Florida, Alabama and Utah banning the use of state dollars for DEI programs in public universities, effectively closing these offices.

Keep ReadingShow less