Trump denies lower support among suburban women: ‘Why wouldn’t they like me?’

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday dismissed the notion that suburban women may not find him appealing as recent polls suggest he may struggle with a voting bloc that could make or break his White House bid.

Trump addressed the topic unprompted during a winding, roughly 50-minute speech on public safety at a campaign stop in battleground Michigan, where he repeatedly tied illegal immigration to violent crime.

“I keep hearing about the suburban woman doesn’t like Trump. Well, I think it’s a fake poll, because why wouldn’t they like me?” Trump said, flanked by members of the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan. “I keep the suburbs safe. I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house, and I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs. I think that they like me a lot. I think it’s a lot of fake polls.”

Trump added that he believes women desire “a strong military,” a “strong police force,” and they “want to be in the house and they want to be safe.”

“I hope they like my personality. I have a nice personality,” he continued. “But to me, it wouldn’t be very important — the personality. They want to be safe.”

There’s limited public polling available on how Trump stacks up against Vice President Kamala Harris with suburban women. In 2020, Joe Biden bested Trump among suburban voters by only 2 percentage points but by 15 points with female voters.

This cycle, Trump and Harris were neck and neck among suburban voters in a string of surveys released earlier this month, and Harris continued to lead among women.

Trump vowed that if elected, he would implement the “largest domestic deportation operation in the history of our country” and sought to reassure voters he was “not a radical at all.”

“I’m just a commonsense person that was successful from what I did because of the same thing,” he said. “We can let a lot of them come in, but we want them to come into our country legally.”

Trump also touched on the previous evening’s kickoff of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the party, rejuvenated with Harris at the top of the ticket, mused about sweeping the White House and Congress. The first night’s events included rosy and enthusiastic speeches centered on Harris and the Democratic platform, with keynote addresses by Biden and Trump’s 2016 foe, Hillary Clinton.

“I watched last night in amazement as they tried to pretend that everything was great,” Trump said. “The crime was great. The border was great. There wasn’t a problem at all. No inflation, no nothing.”