Donald Trump has made a number of appeals to what he calls “suburban housewives” in recent weeks, but the attempts to win over this important voting bloc seem to have fallen flat as polls show Democratic candidate Joe Biden holding significant leads in the suburbs.
As Newsweek reported, recent polls give Biden the lead among suburbanites, including one showing him up by 16 points with likely voters in five key battleground states. The poll was conducted by Third Way/David Binder Research and showed that 55 percent of this voting group said they planned to vote for Biden if the election were held today, with just 39 percent supporting Trump.
Trump has come under fire for the outreach efforts to suburban residents, women in particular, with critics saying the president is courting racial animosities and playing on fears of Black residents moving into the suburbs.
As The Inquisitr reported, critics have pushed back against the president’s claims that he is preventing low-income housing from being built in these areas, which the president has equated with higher levels of crime and lower property values.
Critics say this harkens back to racist real estate policies that legally prevented Black homebuyers, as well as those of the Jewish faith and other minority groups, from living in certain neighborhoods through practices like red-lining and racially restrictive real estate covenants. Others have connected this electoral pitch to other efforts they saw as racist from Trump, including attacks on minority groups and appeals to racist supporters .
Another poll this week from Washington Post and ABC News showed that Biden held a slimmer but still significant lead over Trump among suburbanites, one that is even larger among the female voters that Trump has taken special efforts to court.
“Among voters in the suburbs, a traditional electoral battleground, Biden has a narrow eight-point lead,” noted the Washington Post . “Trump, who narrowly won suburban voters in 2016, has tried to appeal to them this year by holding himself out as the sole force preventing an influx of minority and poor residents. Still, suburban women currently favor Biden by 13 points, while suburban men are about evenly divided.”
Trump had won the suburbanite vote in 2016, helping propel him to a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton. Political experts believe his increased focus on women in this group shows a concern within his campaign that he is slipping among this demographic in a race that already appears more difficult than he faced four years ago.
