The Republicans’ male-centric campaign could cost them the election, says a former adviser to President Clinton. He says the historical trend of women leaving the Republican Party and higher voter turnout on Election Day could hand the Democrats a victory.

Doug Sosnik is a veteran political strategist who served as chief adviser to Clinton during his second term. Since serving under the president, he has been known for the astute policy analysis he provides to Democrats, even if his analysis has sometimes been a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow.

Last spring, Mr. Sosnik sounded the alarm that President Biden’s re-election prospects were becoming increasingly unlikely. By mid-July, he argued that that path had “all but disappeared.”

Now the veteran political strategist argues that Vice President Harris can win, describing how the Republicans’ male-centric strategy – evident in the selection of Senator Vance as President Trump’s vice presidential candidate and the “Trumpomania” speaker slate at the Republican National Convention – could cost them the election.

The flip side of this equation is that women are flocking to the Democratic Party, and Mr Sosnik believes this could work out better for the Democrats than the Republicans.

In his memo, Sosnik points out that women are already more likely to vote Democrat—in 2020, they supported Biden more than Trump, 55 percent to 44 percent—and that the gender gap in voting “is likely to widen and could determine the outcome of the upcoming election.”

The reasons he cites are complex. First, women are simply more reliable voters than men and have been for decades. In 2020, 68.4 percent of eligible women voted, compared to 65 percent of men.

In swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the gender gap is even more pronounced.

Second, these are the first national elections since Roe v. Wade was repealed, and more and more women became supporters of abortion rights.

According to a Gallup poll, a similar proportion of women generally identified as “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in 2020. Today, 63 percent of women identify as “pro-choice,” compared to 33 percent who identify as “pro-life.”

Among men, the difference is much smaller: 49 percent describe themselves as “pro-life,” while 45 percent say they are “pro-choice.”

Certain groups of women tend to lean more toward the Democrats than women overall, such as college-educated women who favored Mr. Biden by 9 percentage points in 2020. By comparison, Senator Clinton won this group by 7 percentage points in 2016 and Senator Romney by 6 percentage points in 2012.

Young women are also far more likely to describe themselves as “liberal” than men. Among women under 30, 40 percent use this label, compared to 25 percent of men.

“As if these factors were not enough, the style and content of Trump’s campaign, with its intemperate remarks about Harris’ gender and race, as well as the choice of his running mate, JD Vance, who has a long history of making derogatory remarks about women, will further alienate female voters,” Sosnik writes.

He also points out that Harris has “not lost a single news cycle since she announced her candidacy for president,” and that Democrats’ enthusiasm for their candidate has eclipsed that of Republicans. According to a recent Monmouth poll, 85 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans say they are enthusiastic about their party’s nominee.

That enthusiasm, Mr Sosnik said, is likely to continue through the Democratic National Convention and into the presidential debate scheduled for September 10, less than a week before early voting begins in Pennsylvania.