Democrats hope to rally female voters after misogynistic Republican remarks | US election 2024

Republicans have made a series of offensive and misogynistic comments just five days before the vote, boosting Democratic hopes of getting women out on Election Day in a contest where women’s rights have been a central issue of the Kamala Harris campaign.

With a wide gender gap appearing to define the race — women disproportionately breaking for Kamala Harris and men for Donald Trump — both campaigns have sought to shore up their bases in their final remarks.

On Thursday, the former US president, debating his claims that the US did not become involved in any new foreign conflicts during his administration, attacked former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of George W Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, for being a “radical warhawk”, saying that guns should be pointed at her to “see how she feels about it”.

The broadside’s violent image of a prominent female politician was just the latest in a series of dark comments from Republicans that the Harris campaign has seized on as evidence that a Trump victory would be a disaster for women’s liberties.

Calling Cheney “a very stupid individual,” Trump said, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns is trained on her face.”

Ian Sams, a senior adviser to Harris’ campaign, called Trump’s “dangerous, violent rhetoric.” “You have Donald Trump talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad. And you have Vice President Harris talking about sending one to her cabinet,” Sams said MSNBC on Friday.

Meanwhile, Harris described as “very offensive” a promise by Trump the day before to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”.

The Democratic campaign also released a new ad, narrated by Julia Roberts, showing a woman walking into a voting booth and apparently secretly voting for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have the right to vote, you can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” the ad reads, as the woman gives another a knowing look across the partitions of the voting booth.

When she emerges after voting for Harris, a man asks her if she made “the right choice.” “Yeah, honey,” she says with a smile.

Responding to the ad, Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters said on air that if his wife votes for Harris, “it’s the same as an affair” and that he would divorce her. “For me, it violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What else has she lied about?”

The remark was followed by Charlie Kirk, whose right-wing organization Turning Point Action has a key role in Trump’s get-out-the-vote efforts, saying the man in the ad is “probably working his tail off to make sure (the wife) can go and have a good life”, adding: “And she lies to him and says ‘I’m going to vote for Trump’, then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret at the ballot box.”

And the pro-Trump pastor Dale Partridge declared Tuesday that “in a Christian marriage a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”.

The Trump campaign has tried to hit back, accusing Democrat-backing billionaire Mark Cuban of talking down to female Trump supporters by saying Trump was too “scared” to surround himself with “strong, intelligent women.”

Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, directly challenged Cuban. “Play on mate. I’ll take you any day in a debate or maybe even an arm wrestle.”

But a pledge by Trump on Thursday that he would give Robert F Kennedy Jr a prominent role in his administration working on “women’s health” drew further criticism.

Trump has tried to woo women with the dubious proposition that they don’t have to worry about reproductive rights — Trump claims credit for overturning the federal right to abortion — if they’ve already been killed by an undocumented migrant.

“I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in,” Trump said. “I want to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and many other things.”

The Harris campaign, meanwhile, hopes his comments are a useful political wedge coming from a man convicted of sexual misconduct, with a judge calling a “rape” charge against Trump “substantially true” .

Another sexual assault allegation was leveled at Trump last week by model Stacey Williams, who revealed to The Guardian that Trump, she says, groped her in a “twisted game” with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s first presidential campaign was jeopardized by leaked audio in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women by grabbing women by their genitals, and he was found guilty on 34 counts after trying to buy the silence of adult film star Stormy Daniels and thereby interfere unlawfully. with the 2016 election.

“This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices,” Harris said Thursday at an event in Phoenix.

“He simply does not respect women’s freedom or women’s intelligence to know what is in their own interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”