Keller: Could there be a record gender gap in this year's presidential election?
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON - We're less than seven weeks away from the presidential election, and new polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris has opened up a big lead over former President Donald Trump with a key voting group -- women.
Could we be witnessing the emergence of an historic gender gap in the history of American politics?
"He doesn't trust women and they sure the hell don't trust him," said Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz in a recent speech. And for Walz and Harris, the attitude of Trump and his running mate J.D.Vance toward women is shaping up to be a crucial campaign contribution.
Poll: Women favor Democrats
In the most recent national Suffolk University/USA Today poll, women favor the Democrats by 21 points, nearly double the all-time largest gender gap run up by Bill Clinton over Bob Dole in 1996.
And what seemed like a stray gaffe by Vance - his remark that "we are effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives" - is starting to look like a hostile campaign strategy.
"They seem to know that they're not going to win with women and they're really leaning into a lot of almost anti-woman messaging," said Amanda Hunter, contributing editor for the group Women on the Ballot. "Not just the 'childless cat-lady' but even tweeting 'I hate Taylor Swift' in all caps," as Trump did after the pop megastar endorsed the Democratic ticket.
And just this week, Trump campaign surrogate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, said at a Trump rally: "So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble." Harris has stepchildren with husband Doug Emhoff.
"Women really seem fed up"
"Women really seem fed up with a lot of that," said Hunter. "They have felt for the last several years that they are on a rollercoaster in terms of Trump's antics that they can't get off, and in that way politics tends to stress a lot of women out."
And to Massachusetts-based journalist Bill Scher, who compiles the "gender gap tracker" for Washington Monthly magazine, the reaction of women reactions to all this could be a decisive factor in November. "We're seeing, both anecdotally and in the numbers, women saying this is abhorrent that you would disparage someone either for the choice of not having children, being a stepmother, marrying later in life after your childbearing years."
In that same Suffolk poll where Harris is winning women by 21 points, Trump is leading among men by 13. That, too is a big gap, and the Democrats need to narrow it as much as they can in the crucial swing states.
That may be why you don't see the Harris campaign ridiculing men and their cultural heroes. There's an argument that Trump has largely given up on competing for women and is just trying to excite and maximize the male vote.
But if their game plan is divide and conquer, it's risky at best.