This is the third article in a series about San Francisco's Republican Party. To read more, check out "The last stand of John Dennis" and "A night out in North Beach with the Republican Club of San Francisco."
Alice Croft, a 31-year-old officer of the San Francisco Young Republicans, has a deep appreciation for Donald Trump’s rhetoric — even his most offensive, derogatory insults directed at women.
The former president generated local excitement (and fear and loathing) yesterday, when he rolled through town yesterday to scoop up donations at the Pacific Heights mansion of venture capitalist David Sacks.
Croft, who moved to the City three years ago, declined a phone interview. In an exchange of about two dozen emails, I asked her about Trump’s use of the term “Horseface” in a tweet to describe Stormy Daniels, the porn star who recently testified that the former president’s pursuit of her culminated in extramarital, unprotected sex.
Croft was asked about Trump bragging that his celebrity status gives him a pass to grope women’s genitals. And about the lewd, sexualized comments he made about his daughter, Ivanka Trump.
She was asked if as a religious person, a Republican, a member of the party that claims to represent and uphold family values, a woman, a mother, a human, does she find the former President’s behavior toward women the least bit reprehensible?
“Trump has the best words,” Croft said in response. “I support him because of his lack of political correctness.”
Croft said she’s also aligned with Trump on the issue of abortion, although given her opposition to the procedure even in instances of rape and incest, and his shifting positions, she may be more conservative.
“I think issues like immigration are more important than abortion,” Croft said. “Morally I'm opposed in all cases because I am Catholic, and think murder is wrong. However, politically I agree with Trump’s position. In politics, there are compromises.”
Interviews with various Republican women in San Francisco reveal Croft’s position on abortion as not unique, but far more severe, restrictive, and conservative than most. Where their support for Trump is concerned, however — even among moderate Republican women — compromises are commonplace, and support for the former president is strong.
Yvette Corkrean, a San Francisco Republican running for the District 11 state Senate seat, takes a much different view of abortion rights than Croft, especially for victims of rape or incest.
“That person is having to relive that trauma, that rape, every day while a baby is growing in them,” Corkrean said. “No, this is unacceptable, it really needs to be up to the person. It’s nobody else’s business. I couldn't imagine being beaten or raped and then having to bear a child.”
Corkrean, 51, aims in November to replace California Sen. Scott Wiener with a fiscally conservative but socially more moderate platform. Her pro-choice position is informed by her professional background as a registered nurse, she said, and extends to unwanted pregnancies in consensual sex. While she encourages personal responsibility, she said, no one should be forced to have a baby.
“One way or another, you know, to have an abortion or to not have an abortion, these are personal choices,” she said.
Corkrean said she’d prefer if derogatory remarks about women were unacceptable in business, entertainment, or the political realm. “Unfortunately, this is no longer the standard everyone goes by in this country,” she said. Asked if Trump’s attitudes toward women should disqualify him as a candidate, she responded, “I’m not aware that has ever been the standard, or implemented in the history of our country.”
Corkrean maintains the same unwavering allegiance to the former president, who is probably the man most responsible for making abortion illegal and unavailable to many women in much of the United States.
Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court Justices created the conservative supermajority that in the 2022 decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturned Roe v. Wade. The 6-3 ruling erased the constitutional right to have an abortion that stood for 49 years.
Five months after Dobbs, California voters responded by enshrining the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. While 10 other states have enacted similar laws, 14 others have banned abortion outright, with some adding civil and criminal penalties for the procedure.
San Francisco says there are “many options” for ending a pregnancy in the city’s hospitals, primary care offices, and community clinics. The City’s website explaining the options makes clear that an abortion in San Francisco is available to people living in any California county, or any U.S. state.
Female Republicans are not monolithic, said Amanda Roberti, an assistant professor of political science at San Francisco State University, who researches abortion politics and conservative women. But as demonstrated in poll after poll on abortion, a “significant number” of them believe that the abortion politics of the Republican party have gone too far, Roberti said.
“You don’t get the numbers in the polling that we see on issues like abortion without Republican folks being like, ‘I think this has gone too far,’” she said.
According to a current Pew Research Center poll, 64 percent of women in the U.S. (and 61 percent of men) think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
And many Republican women have stepped away from the man who made the state bans on abortion possible, according to Roberti.
“I think there’s a bit of astonishment when you think about a traditionally conservative woman hearing the ‘locker room’ talk, or some of the more sexist things that President Trump has said, or some of the things that are actually just quite alarming that he said about the way women look, or about his own daughter,” Roberti said.
“There are absolutely women who bristle at it because of their own values, be it conservative or feminist or anything, where that kind of sexist or objectifying statement goes against their values, and that's enough to turn them off,” she added.
It’s important to note, however, that some Republican women share the type of sexism that Trump exhibits, Roberti said. His antiquated, harmful notion of gender roles resonates with those women because they have the same beliefs, she said.
There’s a “write off of some of his more horrible comments” in their mind, Roberti said, with some Republican women dismissing their significance by saying, “Oh, boys will be boys, men talk like that.”
Roberti’s takeaway point is that Trump isn’t losing enough Republican women to doom him as a candidate. A good example of that might be Jennifer Yan, a 52-year-old business consultant, who said that between 2022 and 2023 she changed her party registration from Democratic to Republican.
Yan is a member of the Briones Society, and one of its 17 members who in March won a majority of seats on the Republican County Central Committee, or RCCC, the party’s local governing body. The RCCC is better known as the San Francisco Republican Party, or SFGOP.
On the issue of abortion, Yan said she is pro-choice, which she believes to be the default of most women in San Francisco. “I’ll put it this way: I think it should be safe, legal, and rare,” she said.
She said she became a Republican because she’s been disappointed by city and state government responses to problems of safety and education. Yan said she’s much more concerned with local issues than national politics but if asked to pick a side, she is more aligned with Republicans.
Asked about Trump’s sexist remarks, and his viability as a candidate, Yan said she’s “not a fan” of the former president, but doesn’t generally follow the tabloids. It’s hard to discern what matters because “there is so much noise out there,” Yan said.
“I am more concerned with the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, its implications, and Biden's cognitive decline,” she said. “I think many voters share that feeling.”
