Exit poll: 71 percent bothered by Trump’s treatment of women

by Ben Kamisar and Lisa Hagen - 11/08/16 5:26 PM ET

Nearly three-quarters of voters say they are bothered by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s treatment of women, according to presidential exit polls.

{mosads}Seventy-one percent of voters said they are bothered by the real estate mogul’s treatment of women, while 28 percent say it doesn’t bother them, according to Fox News.

Trump has drawn headlines throughout the campaign for his inflammatory remarks regarding women.

His campaign went through its toughest stretch in October, when a 2005 tape was released in which Trump speaks crudely about women. In the week that followed, a number of women came public with charges that he had made unwanted sexual advances toward them.

Polls have consistently shown a gender gap between voters support for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Trump.

More exit poll data will continue to pour in as Americans continue to vote, so the numbers from the preliminary round of exit polls could change over the course of the night.

News organizations started to release the data at 5 p.m., with six hours left of voting on the West Coast. As a result, it’s important not to extrapolate too much meaning from the initial results.

With that note of caution, here are some other immediate takeaways from the Edison Research’s early exit polling:

Thirty-eight percent of voters are Democrats, 31 percent are Republicans.

Seventy percent of voters are white, 12 percent are black, 11 percent are Latino and 4 percent are Asian. In the 2012 election, 72 percent of the electorate was white, the low mark for white voters.

Sixty-two percent of voters are bothered by the controversy surrounding Clinton’s use of a private email server

Clinton’s favorability with Election Day voters is 44 percent, while Trump’s is 37 percent

Trump leads Clinton by 1 point with white college graduates, a group Mitt Romney led by 14 points in 2012. But Trump tops Clinton by 36 points with white voters with no college degree, a larger gap than Romney’s 2012 lead.

Sixty-nine percent of voters are dissatisfied or angry with the federal government.

Early exits are also coming in from the key swing states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.

In Florida, 39 percent of voters are nonwhite, including 18 percent who are Hispanic. The total nonwhite vote is up 6 points since 2012, while the Hispanic share holds about steady, 1 point higher than in 2012.

In North Carolina, the percentage of nonwhite voters is holding about the same from 2012, with the percentage of black voters down 2 percent, to 21 percent.

Non-college educated whites, a key constituency for Trump, trail college-educated whites as a portion of the electorate by 6 percents. In 2012, when Romney won the state, non-college whites outnumbered college-educated white voters.

But in Ohio, that key constituency is flipped.

Forty-two percent of Ohio voters are whites without a college degree, while 38 percent are white voters with a college degree.

President Obama’s favorability in the state is 54 percent. Voters are about equally concerned about Clinton’s emails as they are about Trump’s treatment of women.

Jonathan Easley and David McCabe contributed.

Tags Donald Trump Hillary Clinton