On a hot August afternoon, surrounded by food trucks, a Ferris wheel and funnel cake stands, Stephanie Soucek has one goal in mind.
The 42-year-old Republican chairman of Door County, a benchmark district in the battleground state of Wisconsin, has been attending county fairs to urge undecided voters to cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
When she met with Tammy Conway, a Democrat who was considering voting Republican for the first time in decades, Soucek began talking about her family’s expensive car payments, and the economic message seemed to resonate.
Conway is concerned about “ridiculously high” housing interest rates and says Trump could make the economy “much simpler.”
But in explaining his support for the Republican presidential nominee, Soucek avoided mentioning a series of recent controversial comments made by Trump, including personal attacks on Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
“I try to tell people to focus on the policy and not worry about the candidate,” she said, because she knows Trump’s rude personality has alienated women in the past.
Republican leaders in battleground states likely to decide the election are embracing Soucek’s strategy of appealing to white suburban women voters on policies rather than personality, a key voting bloc that Trump narrowly won in his first presidential election but has struggled to win over since.
Local Republicans say they hope Trump will take a similar approach with Vice President Harris, whose campaign has been driven by female voters since she replaced Joe Biden as the top candidate in July.
The concerns focus on a widening gender gap that has characterized the election: Trump is attracting young men, particularly black and Hispanic men, while Democrats are seeking to win over female voters inspired by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld a constitutional right to abortion.
According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released in September, the vice president has a 54% to 41% approval rating among women, up 7 points since the Democratic National Convention late last month.
Soucek said some Republicans worry about whether Trump can reverse the trend.
Defending a “disrespectful” candidate
Caroline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said Harris “implemented dangerously liberal policies that leave women worse off economically and far less safe than they were under President Trump four years ago.”
But some people who spoke to the BBC said Mr Trump’s campaign remained fixated on men, not women.
Republican pollster Christine Matthews said the Trump campaign “is hoping to double down on its MAGA motivating strategy and motivate men, particularly non-college educated men, including Hispanics as well as whites, in ways that overcome gender disparities.”
Chuck Coughlin, a political strategist who works with Republicans in the battleground state of Arizona, said the Trump campaign has leaned into “bro culture” and emphasized masculinity versus “weakness versus strength.”
“That’s appealing to a lot of men,” he said. “It’s not appealing to independent voters.”
Mr. Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate underscored his campaign’s prioritization of outreach to men, but he may not have anticipated how damaging his nomination would be with female voters.
The Ohio senator has faced backlash over past comments he’s made about women, particularly a 2021 video in which he called several Democrats, including Harris, “childless catwomen who are miserable in their lives.”
Betsy Fisher Martin, executive director of the nonpartisan Institute for Women and Politics, said those types of comments don’t help attract swing women voters.
“There are a lot of child-free, cat-loving women voting in the suburbs,” she said.
But some of his most fervent female supporters, like Dixie, a 59-year-old Republican from Door County, aren’t bothered by the former president’s campaign speech.
“He’s not going to tell you what you want to hear. He’s going to tell you the truth,” said Dixie, who declined to give her last name for privacy reasons.
Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump adviser and his 2016 campaign chairman, told the BBC that voters would not have followed Trump’s policies if it weren’t for his “strong, resolute, tough” personality.
“People, especially women, tend to complain, talk and vent about things that make them uncomfortable, and then they vote according to what affects them,” she said.
Food prices trump personal grievances
Local Republicans in battleground states are hoping to reverse the decline in support among women by shifting the debate back to issues that affect families every day, such as crime and the economy, where polls show Republicans are popular.
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic makes it difficult to compare how the U.S. economy has performed under the Trump and Biden administrations. Both administrations enjoyed significant economic growth, but inflation has been a persistent problem over the past three years as wages have not kept up with rising prices.
And a recent KFF poll found that 40% of suburban women voters said inflation was the top issue in the race.
For Laila Juntunen, 88, a former stay-at-home mom who lives outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, the price increases under Biden were too hard to ignore.
“Look at the groceries you buy and how much you pay,” she told the BBC, pointing to shopping carts piled high in a grocery store car park.
Strategists say Trump would do well to focus more on those specific economic policies to appeal to voters like Juntenen.
“If Trump refrains from attacking and taking on some of his more fiery politics, he could especially win over female voters,” said Ariel Hill Davis, co-founder of the Coalition of Republican Progressive Women, which advocates for women’s representation in the party.
“If the three big issues are the economy, inflation and public safety, I think he can sway voters easily.”
“Staying Away” From Abortion
Republicans in battleground states are struggling with another issue galvanizing women across the country: reproductive rights.
Democrats have seized on abortion rights as a way to energize voters following the 2022 defeat of Roe v. Wade, and Harris has become a leading voice in the White House on the issue.
Voters in several states, including Republican strongholds, have passed referendums protecting abortion rights, and the issue will be on the ballot in at least eight states in November, including the battleground states of Nevada and Arizona.
Republicans have struggled to convey a unified message on reproductive rights, with President Trump repeatedly saying policies should be left to states and refusing to support a nationwide abortion ban that many Republicans support.
He had come under fire from anti-abortion conservatives in recent weeks for conflicting statements about whether he would support a referendum to protect abortion rights in Florida, after which he made it clear he would vote against the referendum.
That same week, Trump told an audience in Michigan that if he was re-elected, his administration would pay for IVF, a fertility treatment that Democrats say Republicans are trying to take away through state abortion laws.
Tom Eddy, chairman of the Erie County Republican Party, a must-win battleground state in Pennsylvania, said he found the best approach was to avoid the issue altogether.
“I tell candidates, ‘Stay away from abortion,'” he said. “Whatever policy you promote on abortion, it’s obviously wrong because half the population thinks the opposite.”
The KFF poll showed that abortion is a lower priority for suburban women voters than immigration, border security and the economy, yet it continues to be a motivating issue for a growing share of voters.
A New York Times/Siena College poll last month suggested this was the most important issue for women voters under 45.
Polls have shown that a majority of suburban women support access to abortion, and Soucek said Republicans need to find a unified message.
“It’s about making sure we’re sending the right message to women that we care about them, but we also care about their unborn babies,” she said.
Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to President Trump, said Democrats are focused “from the waist down” while Republicans are focused “from the waist up.”
“We women have brains, ears, eyes, hearts and mouths from the waist up and can solve all kinds of problems, whether it’s food economics, entrepreneurship, taxes, regulation or energy independence,” she said.
But that word hasn’t gone down well with all women voters in Wisconsin.
Holly Rapnow, a 56-year-old former Republican from Green Bay, said one of the reasons she plans to vote for Harris is because of reproductive rights.
“I think it’s great what she’s trying to do for us – to bring back women’s rights,” she said.
Should we let “Trump be Trump”?
Experts say the political landscape has changed dramatically since Donald Trump first ran for president.
Fisher-Martin said some women voters in 2016 dismissed their concerns about Trump, believing his behavior would change once he was in the White House.
But she said the 2016 slogan “Keep Trump Trump” would no longer work.
In the 2018 midterm elections, suburban, college-educated women largely rejected President Trump and the Republican Party, driving the so-called “blue wave” that elected more than 100 women to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Reproductive rights played a central role in Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in 2022, raising fears among Republicans that it could do so again.
Political experts say Trump could gain support by directly addressing suburban female voters’ concerns about his character.
“What if he said something like, ‘You may not like me personally, you may not like what I have to say, but I’m your go-to person if you don’t want to worry too much about your grocery bill,'” Fisher-Martin said.
“I don’t know if he’ll get that far.”
Kellyanne Conway knows Trump better than anyone, and she believes his core message — are voters better off now than when he was president? — is relevant to all Americans, regardless of gender.
“As I told him recently,” she added, “he’s hit women before, and he can hit women again.”