Republicans have a problem with women. Their problem is basically that more and more women don't want to vote for them. By increasingly-wide margins, in fact. Some Republicans have now begun to realize this, and they are desperately trying to woo these women back to their side of the aisle. This is not going well, to put it mildly.

The Republican problem with women has been there for a while, to some extent or another. Women have been voting for Democrats in greater numbers over the past few elections, even before the demise of Roe v. Wade. But since the Supreme Court threw out women's right to bodily autonomy, the problem has gotten much worse.

For a long time, many Republicans believed the fantasy that most Americans wanted abortion to be made illegal again and that they would reap the political benefits from doing so, once they had enough justices on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. They were confident that theirs was the majority position -- and they are now finding out how wrong they were about that.

Now they are trapped by their own stance. The hardliners in their own party won't accept any compromise on the issue. Instead, they press for stricter and stricter bans to be passed at the state level. Many Republicans actually saw this route as a political winner for them. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, pushed through a 6-week abortion ban in his state just to burnish his conservative credentials while he ran for president.

Donald Trump, to his credit, realized earlier than most Republicans that abortion bans could indeed go too far for most voters, and he opposed the move by DeSantis. Perhaps this was just a knee-jerk reaction, since he was running against DeSantis for the Republican nomination at the time -- and was therefore automatically opposed to just about anything DeSantis did. Trump was then put in his own bind on the issue after a ballot measure to throw out the abortion ban entirely was placed on the Florida ballot. He tried to keep to his position that the 6-week ban went too far, but got pushback from the hardliners in his own party, so the next day he announced he would be voting against the ballot measure -- in effect, voting to support the 6-week ban that he had criticized DeSantis for passing.

At least Trump realizes that abortion bans are increasingly unpopular with women voters -- many Republicans haven't even come to this realization yet. But Trump always has to fit everything into a construct in his own mind where he is absolutely right about absolutely everything, so he came up with the bizarre notion that everyone -- that's everyone! -- really wanted abortion to go back to the states, and therefore overturning Roe wasn't the problem at all.

Of course, this makes no sense, because "everyone" wasn't actually in favor of overturning Roe -- not by a long shot. And now abortion rights are a very big political deal for lots and lots of women (and plenty of supportive men, as well). So Trump knows he's got to at least try to defuse the issue somehow. What he came up with is jaw-droppingly insulting, however. It reeks of 1950s-level misogyny and paternalism. Here's his new reassurance to women, from a speech he recently gave in Pennsylvania, where he spoke directly to women voters:

You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You're not going to be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.

This is an offensive thing for me to write, but it really does smack of: "Don't worry your pretty little head about such things -- Daddy will take care of everything for you." Like I said, such thinking belongs somewhere back in the Eisenhower years.

Trump knows he might just lose the election because the polls show his gap among women to be bigger than the normal advantage Democrats have -- it's higher than 20 percent in some polls. So in his usual ham-fisted way, he is trying to woo some of those suburban women voters back. But taking the "don't worry, just let me protect you" tack is a tough thing to pull off for a man who has been accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women -- and who already is on the hook to the tune of tens of millions of dollars to one who successfully sued him.

Even if Trump didn't have all that baggage, it's still an incredibly insulting thing to say to women: "You will no longer be thinking about abortion." Really? Why not? Because women will feel protected by the big, strong male leader and all their anxieties will magically melt away? How is any of that even relevant to the fact that one-third of American women no longer have full bodily autonomy anymore? It makes no sense whatsoever.

At least Trump is trying, ham-fisted though his effort may be. Trump knows the issue is a big drag on Republicans at the ballot box. He's being offensively paternalistic, but at least he's making some sort of an attempt to reassure women. This attempt is as empty as his words -- the only women who "will no longer be thinking about abortion" are those that live in states where abortion rights are protected. Women who still live in states with Draconian bans will indeed still be thinking about abortion, even if Trump does manage to win the election.

Trump's language is so insulting you'd think it would be impossible to come up with anything worse -- but you'd be wrong. Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, essentially told Trump: "Hold my beer." Here is what Moreno recently had to say on the subject:

Sadly, by the way, there's a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like: "Listen, abortion is it. If I can't have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else." ... Okay, it's a little crazy, by the way, but -- especially for women that are like past 50 -- I'm thinking to myself: "I don’t think that's an issue for you."

Nothing encapsulates Republican male self-centeredness more than assuming that for every woman out there, it's just about her own body. In Moreno's thinking, no woman over 50 has any daughters or granddaughters that they care about at all. No woman over 50 is enraged that men took away a basic human right from women -- as long as they are personally not affected any more. This is an unbelievably offensive thing to say (and to think, for that matter). Especially to the voters of a state that already overturned an abortion ban by a huge margin (57 percent voted to remove the ban).

Republicans definitely have a woman problem. But some of their efforts to deal with it are just digging that hole deeper. Telling women: "Don't worry your pretty little head over abortion," or: "Hey, vote for me, you're over 50 -- it's not a problem for you anymore, so what have you got to lose?" is just not going to work.

When Roe was overturned, many pundits thought it'd be a fleeting issue, at best. It might be relevant in the first election afterwards but it would then fade, the pundits predicted, since Americans have short memory spans and are always moving on to the new thing. This was absolutely wrong. If anything, the issue of women's rights has only grown in each subsequent election. The only way this issue is going to stop hurting Republicans is if enough Democrats get elected to pass a national abortion rights law and permanently throw out all the state-level abortion bans (and all the other hurdles conservative states have placed in the way of getting an abortion as well). Then Republicans can put the whole issue in their rear-view mirror and just refuse to talk about it ever again -- as indeed they have done on the issue of gay marriage. That's the only way out of this mess for Republicans -- to have Democrats save them from their own political disaster.

Until we get to that point, we will doubtlessly see more and more desperation from Republican politicians seeking office. Naive Republican politicians had assumed for decades that overturning Roe would be the end of the road for the abortion political fight, but instead it has opened 50 new fronts in the political battle. Republicans have tied themselves to an unpopular position and it is going to continue hurting them for some time to come. And there is no easy way out for them -- fuzzy words of reassurance aren't going to change the fact that a woman facing a miscarriage will still be forced to suffer hours of needless pain before she is able to get the medical attention she needs, in far too many places in this country. That's not some fleeting issue that women voters (and, again, plenty of men voters too) are going to just suddenly forget about. So we'll continue to see Republicans like Trump and Moreno just digging that hole even deeper as they flail about and try to fix the mess they created. Because Republicans do indeed have a problem with women, and it's not going away any time soon.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant