A decade ago, Donald Trump’s improbable presidential campaign was rocked – and nearly derailed – by the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, a 2005 recording in which the real estate developer turned reality TV star boasted about kissing and grabbing women without their consent.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said, a remark he later downplayed as “locker-room talk” before musing that the tape might be fake. (It wasn’t.)

In the moment, it felt fatal – the ignoble end of an explosive campaign for the White House. Back then, Americans hadn’t quite grasped Trump’s capacity to shock but not surprise. Within days, the outrage receded, swallowed by two more “October surprises” – WikiLeaks released the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and then-FBI director James Comey announced the bureau was reviewing new emails related to her private server.

That November, voters punished the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party for her emails, among other grievances, real and imagined, and handed the presidency to the man who had boasted that he could “grab em by the pussy”.

US women haven’t voted the same since, and next month’s midterm elections offer another test of their tolerance for Trump in the Trump era.

Long divided by race and class, Trump’s rise – or perhaps Clinton’s defeat – splintered US women further, along lines of educational achievement and marital status. In 2016, Trump won white women overall, but Clinton prevailed among college-educated white women, a partisan reversal from the presidential election four years earlier.

In 2018, suburban women voters “revolted”, propelling Democratic victories and sending a record 102 women to the US House of Representatives in what was hailed as another Year of the Women.

A conservative backlash brewed. The Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court after Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had sexually assaulted her when they were teens – a claim he vigorously denied.

Gen Z grew up in the shadow of that collision. As a cohort, they are marked by a wide ideological gender divide, with gen Z women – many mobilized by the overturning of Roe v Wade – becoming more progressive and politically engaged, while their male peers drifted rightward into Maga and the “manosphere”.

Anger over the loss of federal abortion protections helped forestall Democratic losses in the 2022 midterms. But the gender gap wasn’t enough to shatter the glass ceiling in 2024, when Trump defeated Kamala Harris – even after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil suit brought by writer E Jean Carroll.

A gender divide once again looms over the midterm map that will determine the balance of power in Washington for Trump’s final two years in office.

A recent New York Times-Siena poll found 65% of women disapproved of Trump’s handling of his job as president, compared with 52% of men. According to the survey, 57% of women would back the Democratic House candidate in their district, whereas only 45% of men said the same, a dynamic that played out across three key Senate contests surveyed in the poll – Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire.

Trump has maintained that he has empowered women throughout his business and political career. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the first woman to ever serve in the role. But polling suggests women are deeply dissatisfied with the president’s second-term performance, including, according to one national poll, one in four women who voted for him.

In Maine, Republican senator Susan Collins, long considered untouchable, is facing voters for the first time since Kavanaugh joined four conservative justices to end the constitutional right to abortion. Her Democratic opponent, logger-turned politician Troy Jackson, is working hard to ensure voters don’t forget that their senator cast a decisive vote to put him on the bench.

The Times poll shows him leading among women voters by 53% to 44%.

Trump has cast the November election as a referendum on his presidency. Will voters cement his power – or turn over control to Democrats, and grind his agenda to a halt? It all may depend on what US women want.

Don’t Miss:

• ‘Of course I’m the underdog’: the British former spin doctor trying to turn California red

• A fake image of a Georgia mayor kissing a person went viral. Can US voters trust everything they see?

• Most Americans don’t know Hasan Piker. The rest say he is changing this year’s elections

• Trump campaign ads paid with public money violate federal law, critics say

• Trump allies could use midterms ‘counting window’ to disrupt results, experts warn

• What Democrats are getting right – and wrong – in run-up to midterms: ‘We can’t just be anti-Trump’

Quoted:

“This is the beginning of the end. This is the decline. As powerful and transgressive as he’s been, the country does not have a positive outlook right now. In fact, the negativity and pessimism among voters has reached a point that is unparalleled since Jimmy Carter,” Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist, said about Trump’s final years in office.

Read more: ‘The weaker he gets, the more dangerous he gets’: Trump lashes out as his power wanes

Watch this race: A Hobbs’ Choice in Arizona

A “unity ticket”? In these partisan times?

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, and John Giles, a former Republican mayor of Mesa, a populous Phoenix suburb, are giving bipartisanship a whirl in the battleground state.

Facing a tough re-election, Hobbs tapped Giles – a vocal Trump critic who formally left his party in May to become an independent after endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 – to be her running mate.

Hobbs’ choice of Giles is an overture to the independents and moderate Republicans she will likely need to secure a second term. Once a reliably Republican stronghold, Arizona has elected a string of Democrats statewide since Trump was first elected. In 2020, voters there narrowly backed Joe Biden for president before swinging back to Trump in 2024.

This year is the first time Arizonans will elect a lieutenant governor, after voters approved the second-in-command role in 2022.

Hobbs faces Republican congressman Andy Biggs, a staunch Trump ally who played a prominent role in the effort to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. Biggs has chosen Sine Kerr, a dairy farmer and former state senator as his running mate.

In an age of political tribalism and populist rage, is the center a viable path to power for the unassuming Hobbs-Giles ticket?

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The US politics team is hosting a series of reader Q&As leading up to the midterms.

Our next live conversation will be on 6 October 2026 at 12pm EDT, with a panel of our politics and foreign policy reporters breaking down the war with Iran, the costs that come with it and political consequences for Trump as US voters head to the polls in November. Send us your questions here.