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Almost all Democratic women think Trump should be impeached — and it reveals a dramatic difference in how men and women view Trump

Eighty percent of Democratic women think President Donald Trump should be impeached, but just 60% of Democratic men agree.

People protesting Donald Trump outside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Eighty percent of Democratic women say Trump should be impeached.

Eighty percent of Democratic women and 46% of independent women think President Donald Trump should be impeached, according to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute.

But just 60% of Democratic men and 32% of independent men agree.

This gender gap reflects a dramatic difference in how men and women view Trump. Overall, women's approval of the president is 11 points lower than men's. And women view Trump less favorably than they have any president in the past 64 years.

Democratic and left-leaning women are also significantly more pessimistic about the country's future than men with their same political orientation, according to Pew polling from April.

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Their dissatisfaction has pushed many to protest on the streets and social media, and even pursue new career paths as candidates for public office.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who wrote a book about female voters with Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, said women felt more targeted than men did by both Trump's policy positions and his rhetoric.

"For men, there's a substantive concern," Lake said. "For women, there's a stylistic and substantive concern."

Trump's stances on a range of issues — including healthcare and criminal justice — have pushed women and people of color to the front lines.

But while women's political activity has spiked on the left, there's no evidence that this has discouraged liberal men from joining the ranks of the resistance.

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"There's nothing to suggest that Democratic men have felt marginalized," Jennifer Lawless, the director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, told Business Insider. "It's just that Democratic women have really grabbed the bull by the horns and said, 'We're going to do everything we can to push back against this agenda.'"

Kelly Dittmar, a professor at Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, said she thought progressive men might be deferring to women and people of color.

"It's a complicated position for men because Trump's whole positioning of himself is within a context of male dominance," Dittmar said. "He's putting forth this idea that the manliest people are best — they're the best to speak and they're the best to make policy, and so I think that creates the sense among some progressive men that, perhaps, we don't want to seem that way, and therefore we want to make sure that women are given as much power and voice in this movement."

She also argued that women in Congress were getting more attention and praise than their male colleagues for speaking out against Trump.

But while Trump lost the female vote by 12 points in November, 53% of white women and 64% of non-college-educated white women voted for him, to some pollsters' surprise.

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"That was the sort of big myth of the election, that all of a sudden white women were voting for Democrats," Dittmar said. "We knew that white women had voted consistently Republican in the last few elections."

And that hasn't changed — at least not yet.

"Party polarization has become the biggest force in American politics," Lawless said. "There's a little bit more room for dismay among Republican women than Republican men, but still just a fraction."

There's not much of a gender gap among Republican voters on the issue of impeachment. While recent polling has shown a drop in support for Trump — most notably among non-college-educated white women — just 9% of GOP women and 4% of GOP men say Trump should be impeached.

But Lawless added that Republican women's views might be shifting in the aftermath of the president's controversial response to this month's violent white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one female counterprotester dead.

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"With something as blatantly obvious as his botching of the Charlottesville response, [Republican women] might see even more freedom to move away from their approval or their support for Trump," Lawless said. "Because at this point, removing him from office doesn't mean that they get Hillary Clinton — it would mean that they get Mike Pence."

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