"They made a decision this was ok when they nominated this president"

The Republican Party’s fight to save President Trump’s embattled Supreme Court nominee amid allegations of sexual assault has surfaced deep anxieties over the hypermasculine mind-set that has come to define the GOP in the nation’s roiling gender debate.

The images are striking: The specter of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee — all 11 of them men — questioning U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett A. Kavanaugh’s female accuser. A senior GOP aide working on the confirmation resigning amid his own sexual harassment allegations. A viral photo of “women for Kavanaugh” featuring more men than women. A South Carolina Republican congressman making a crude joke about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being groped by Abraham Lincoln.

And then there is the party’s id, Trump, who as a candidate denied more than a dozen accusations of sexual assault and harassment and sought to silence and retaliate against his accusers — and who as president has defended one accused man after another.

The moment brings into sharp relief the gulf that has emerged between the two political parties as they navigate America’s cultural reckoning on sexual assault. Democrats have embraced the #MeToo movement to galvanize female voters and attempt to lift scores of female candidates to victory in November’s midterm elections. A growing number of Democratic women are also considering presidential campaigns in 2020.

By contrast, strategists in both parties say Trump’s agenda and style — and the fact that the GOP leadership stands mostly in lockstep with him — are undoing years of often painstaking work by party leaders to court more female and minority voters.

Trump risks solidifying the Republican Party as the party of men. Though the president is not on the ballot this fall, he is framing the midterm elections as a referendum on his presidency, and that has leaders and operatives in party fearing what GOP strategist Alex Castellanos termed a “pink wave” of women powering a Democratic takeover of the House, and perhaps the Senate, to deliver a rebuke to Trump.

“The antipathy to Trump from women — college-educated, white, suburban women — transcends anything I’ve ever seen in politics,” Castellanos said. “And it’s not just against Trump’s policies, of course. It’s against Trump as the 1960s ‘Mad Men’ alpha male. It’s Trump who grabbed women where he shouldn’t. Women are coming out to vote against Donald Trump because they see him as a culturally regressive force that would undo the women’s march to equality.”

The fault lines were evident last week, when Trump spoke out about the Kavanaugh episode by saying the real victim is the federal judge, whom Christine Blasey Ford accused sexually assaulting her when he was 17, and attacking Ford’s credibility. The president’s comments made some Republican elected officials plainly uncomfortable; Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called them “appalling.”

But the president is not an isolated figure outside the party’s mainstream. Trump is the embodiment of his political base’s instincts, grievances and worldview, roaring about what he sees as injustice against accused men and pulling his party along with him.

“Everything about this kind of encapsulates in one moment the problem the Republican Party has with women, ranging from it being male-dominated — with Trump’s Cabinet and the Republican leadership in Congress — to issues of dismissing women who experienced harassment and assault with typical kinds of victim-blaming,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said.

Inside Trump’s political orbit, there long has been what one former White House official called a “blindness” to gender issues as a political liability — in part because the president resents the accusations that have been brought against him personally and because he and his allies see the broader issue as a liberal talking point.

The gender gap between the two parties has increased since Trump’s election. The percentage of women who say they lean toward the Republican Party is now 32 percent, down from 35 percent in 2016 and an average of 37 percent between 2010 and 2017, according to Post-ABC News polling.

The shifts in partisanship coincide with a gender divide on Trump’s popularity. The president’s approval rating has averaged 12 percentage points higher among men than among women, 45 percent to 32 percent , in Post-ABC polling since April 2017.

“What we did in the 2016 election is trade fast-growing, well-educated suburban counties for slower-growing, less-well-educated small-town and rural counties,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. “That worked for Donald Trump in 2016, by the hair of his chinny chin chin, but it’s not a formula for long-term success.”

Melina Palken, 60, a retired Army physician who raises sheep and dairy cows, drove 16 hours from her home in Elk City, Idaho, to see Trump on stage in Las Vegas on Thursday night. Asked about the Kavanaugh allegations, she said, “Oh, my God, you have to live under a rock to not know that man is the sweetest ever and he would never do anything like that to women.”

Palken added: “He’s, like, pure as the driven snow.”

"They made a decision that this behavior was okay when they nominated this president.”