Faced with a rival, Joe Biden, who just tapped a Black woman to join him on the Democratic ticket, Trump is trying to stop a defection of women voters — using a flurry of tweets and 11th-hour policy initiatives designed to play to potential fears about their families and communities.

In 2016, Trump won a critical demographic — white women without a college degree — by 27 percentage points.

More broadly in 2016, Trump won suburban voters, 49 percent to 45 percent, but has since lost that edge, according to polling data.

Yet Trump’s bellicose overtures to women are leading even some Republicans pollsters to question his gambit, particularly his hellish predictions of rampant crime coming to the suburbs and forced low-income housing driving down suburban property values.

“The campaign thinks it’s fear and they think they can scare people back into the fold, but the Democratic nominee is Joe Biden and it’s not Bernie Sanders,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who has been critical of Trump.

A recent ad from the Trump campaign features a woman of color and real-life Trump voter sitting holding cue cards to describe Biden as “weak,” a man who “embraced the policies of the far left.”.

It’s part of a broader Trump team push to retain women voters that previously was primarily an economic pitch — before the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment rates for women had fallen to historic lows, a majority of new jobs were going to women and there were more women than men in the workforce for only the second time in U.S.

“Whether you like his tweets or not or his tone or not his policies have been beneficial for women,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Trump campaign senior adviser.

Democrats hope Harris will help energize moderate voters and women — especially suburban women — in November.

“She left angry, she left mad, there was nobody more insulting to Biden than she was,” Trump said of Harris’s failed presidential campaign.

In the 2016 election, Trump won suburban voters by roughly 5 percentage points.

The subset of voters split their votes for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012, and then Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016?

A recent Trump campaign ad warns that Biden’s desire to defund the police — a policy Biden does not support — will leave 911 calls unanswered.

Similarly, Trump continues to insist schools fully reopen in the fall, arguing it’s what parents and women want

“The president has and continues to prioritize education and school choice, ensuring every child can receive a quality education no matter their zip code, and his administration is actively working to find a way to safely reopen our schools, getting kids in the classrooms and parents back to work,” said Lara Trump, an adviser to the Trump campaign who has been headlining the “Women for Trump” bus tour stops

That’s troubling to women, said Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, a coalition of Republicans, former Republicans and conservatives who are opposing Trump