If you’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to watch one of Donald Trump’s rallies of late, you’ve probably noticed a strange, recurring bit in which he begs suburban women to like him. “Suburban women, will you please like me,” he asked the crowd in Pennsylvania last week. “Suburban women,” he said in Georgia on Friday, “I heard they like my policy, but they don’t like my personality. I said, ‘They don’t care about my personality, they want to be safe.’” “I saved your suburbs,” he lectured women in Michigan over the weekend. “Women—suburban women, you’re supposed to love Trump.”

This specific appeal to a certain subset of the population is happening, with increasing desperation, because in 2016 white women—specifically white suburban women—propelled Trump into the White House. And this time around, polls show that the president is not only behind with white people in general, who he won by 20 points four years ago, but white women in particular. That’s a problem in a number of key states, but especially in Pennsylvania, which could decide the election. And unfortunately for Trump, his pleas are not working, which probably has something to do with the fact that they’re coupled with rank misogyny, in addition to the whole ignoring COVID-19 and calling for his enemies to be arrested thing. Per Politico:

Juliann Bortz wants to apologize for something she did a few years ago. The 71-year-old resident of the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a registered Democrat, voted for Donald Trump. It wasn’t that she was unhappy with former President Barack Obama: She voted for him too. Bortz, who lives in the Lehigh Valley, a swing area, thought a “new approach, a business approach” couldn’t hurt when she cast a ballot for Trump. “I was wrong. Boy was I wrong,” said Bortz, who is white. Her change of heart is due to the “lies,” the “division” and Trump’s attacks on veterans. And she said there are friends and neighbors just like her—Democrats who voted Republican in 2016 but are now flipping back. “We were joking about forming a group, like the, ‘We’re so sorry, group,’” she said.

Bortz isn’t alone: Women in Pennsylvania and across the country are leaving Trump behind, including the white women who helped power his victory four years ago, according to polling in key states. White women with college degrees in Pennsylvania are especially done with him, rejecting him at even higher rates than they did in 2016. And while Trump is still winning white women without college degrees in the state, he’s doing so by a much smaller margin than in 2016. In a place like Pennsylvania—a state Trump won by only 44,000 votes in 2016 and which is now widely considered the tipping-point state in the Electoral College—those margins matter.

According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden is beating the president by an average of 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, with white women accounting for a major part of the reversal from 2016. Someone on the campaign clearly drilled this point into Trump’s head, hence the embarrassing begging for women to like him which, again, is not working out for him at all.

…white suburban women aren’t answering Trump’s plea. In 2016, Trump won white women in the state by 50% to Hillary Clinton’s 47%, according to exit polls. Now, Biden is ahead by as much as 23 points with white women, according to a Quinnipiac survey from earlier this month. A Washington Post/ABC poll of Pennsylvania voters in September showed a similar lead, with white women preferring Biden by 13 points. Among suburban women overall, he’s ahead by 18 points.

Gloria Lee Snover, chair of Pennsylvania’s Northampton County Republican Party, insisted to Politico that there are tons of women, mostly blue-collar workers or business owners, who still support Trump in her county. But, she conceded, he has a problem with women who have this crazy notion that the president of the United States should actually be doing something about the pandemic raging across the country, rather than lying and claiming it’s going away. “When I look on Facebook, the women that support Biden are a lot of middle-aged suburban white women who are talking about COVID constantly and their fear of it,” she said. “I’ll be honest: They’re obsessed with COVID. Most of them I know are really into COVID. They think the world’s ending with COVID. They’re in their house with COVID. They’re worried about COVID.” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican strategist in the state, acknowledged that Trump is probably a goner on November if he can’t win back white suburban women in the next two weeks. “I don’t think the math adds up for that,” he said, adding that as Republicans “do better with exurban and rural non-college women and worse with those college-educated women in the suburbs, there’s more of the latter than the former. So in the war of attrition, we’re on the wrong side of the equation.”

Elsewhere, white women in other states are joining a coterie of peers who voted for Trump four years ago and are now literally apologizing for doing so, which is hilariously bad news for someone trying to win reelection. “I really failed my fellow American citizens [by voting for Trump in 2016],” Wisconsinite Claudia Luckenbach-Boman told The Guardian in July, adding that to vote for him again in 2020 would mean she was not just “a failure as an American, but also a failure as a human being.” In August, Erin Rosiello, of Ohio, told Insider she “made a horrible mistake” voting for Trump. In an Associated Press story published on Monday, a Michigan woman who voted for Trump in 2016 now says she describes him as “a terrible person.” And just to put a finer point on the situation in Pennsylvania, which could make or break Trump’s chances at a second term, here’s what another woman hailing from the Keystone State told The Guardian over the summer: “I just want to apologize to the world. I feel so guilty for having a part in voting this moron in.”

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