Subject: Bloomberg - Trump Says Clinton Wouldn't Be in Presidential Race If Male
From: "Paustenbach, Mark" <[email-masked]>
To: Debbie Wasserman Schultz <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Miranda, Luis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 May 2016 18:03:08 -0700

Trump Says Clinton Wouldn't Be in Presidential Race If Male
Elizabeth Wasserman<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/authors/ARJCsbJ43Xs/elizabeth-wasserman>
May 1, 2016 - 11:55 AM EDT

Donald Trump doubled down on his claim that Hillary Clinton is using the "woman's card" to win the Democratic nomination for president, saying she wouldn't be in the race if she were a man.

The Republican front-runner has had pushback from women's groups, columnists and on social media since saying on April 26 that the only thing Clinton, a former secretary of state and U.S. senator, had going for her in the race to succeed President Barack Obama was her gender.

He stood behind his remarks on Sunday. "I'm my own strategist. I like what I said," Trump said in interview on "Fox News Sunday." "The only card she has to play is the woman's card," he said of Clinton. "If she were not a woman, she wouldn't even be in the race."

Trump focused on his probable general-election foe after winning five Republican primary contests on April 26. "If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get 5 percent of the vote," he said.

Clinton took the attack in stride, saying that "if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in." The comment was adopted as a Twitter hashtag, #DealMeIn, and she has used the "woman card" as a fundraising<https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/what-official-hillary-america-woman-card-gets-you/> meme.

Uphill Fight

Trump appears to have an uphill fight to win women voters. Gallup's daily tracking poll<http://www.gallup.com/poll/190403/seven-women-unfavorable-opinion-trump.aspx?g_source=Election%202016&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles> for March showed he's viewed unfavorably by 70 percent of U.S. women and 58 percent of men, and that his unfavorability rating with women has been climbing.

Trump angered many women when he said Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" after she asked him, during a candidates' debate in August, about derogatory comments he'd made about women over the years.

"Trump is clearly taking on a strategy that is marginalizing women," Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily's List, a pro-choice political action committee, said on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "Women voters are going to decide this election. And what women voters are looking for are candidates who are supporting equal pay, who are fighting for minimum wage, who are talking about paid family leave."

The real estate mogul said on Sunday that Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has said worse about the former first lady. Trump added that he plans to co-opt some of that rhetoric.

Sanders in March said he thought Clinton was unqualified for the Oval Office because she accepted super-PAC money from Wall Street and voted for the war in Iraq. He later backtracked, saying the former New York senator was both qualified and unqualified. "In a sense it's both," Sanders said on the campaign trail on April 8.