Watch Live Replay: Hillary Clinton in Allendale, Michigan

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — After a Friday campaign stop in Detroit, Democrat Hillary Clinton is headed for the opposite side of the state Monday on the eve of one of the most historic — and one of the most divisive and vitriolic — presidential elections in history.

The former secretary of state will be in the greater Grand Rapids areas, the candidate’s first campaign stop west of U.S. 23 in this election cycle. The Michigan Democratic Party get-out-the-vote rally from 2-4 p.m. Eastern Time at Grand Valley State University Fieldhouse, 10915 S. Campus Drive, Allendale. For tickets, go here.

Both Clinton’s campaign and that of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, are blitzing the state in the final sprint toward Election Day, each hoping to leap ahead in a Michigan race that polls suggest is too close to call.

The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state is on the brink of making history Tuesday as America’s first woman president, but a new poll released Saturday suggests that because of her gender, Clinton has been held to a higher standard than male presidential candidates before her.

Double Standard? It Depends

Clinton and Trump supporters differed wildly when asked about the double standard of male and female presidential candidates in the Pew Research Center survey conducted Oct. 20-25. About half of Clinton’s supporters think she has been held to a higher standard than male presidential candidates before her, and 11 percent of Trump supporters thought that was true.

The research also shows a gender gap among Clinton supporters. Women are more likely than men to think she is held to a higher standard, according to the poll. Among Clinton’s female supporters, 37 percent thought gender is a factor and 34 percent said it isn’t.

Among men who support Clinton, the findings were almost the opposite, with 52 percent saying her gender isn’t a factor and 40 percent saying she has been held to a higher standard than male candidates running for president.

Women and men almost universally think Clinton is well qualified for the presidency, 98 percent to 97 percent, but slightly more women than men, 93 percent compared with 88 percent. thought she would be a strong leader.

Men and women differed significantly when asked about Clinton’s likeability: 41 percent of men, compared with 26 percent of women, said she is “hard to like.” Among voters under 50, nearly half (48 percent) and one-third of women described Clinton as hard to like.

Despite those differences, Clinton’s female and male supporters agree, 65 percent versus 61 percent, that it is important to elect a woman to the White House. In comparison, only 18 percent of women and 20 percent of men thought it was important to elect a woman to the presidency.

Strategists: Trump Encourages It

Trump’s supporters don’t seem to be turned off by criticism that the campaign has been sexist and misogynistic, and in some instances may embrace it. In Las Vegas, two men stretched out a vinyl banner almost as long as the van they had driven to a Clinton rally. In bold red-and-black letters, it proclaimed “Trump that bitch,” NPR reported.

The message wasn’t new. It is emblazoned on T-shirts Trump supporters have been wearing to rallies since at least March, on bumper stickers and even on a bottle of hot sauce. Rallies have also drawn children wearing a variety of shirts and signs that describe Clinton in crude sexual terms. The shirts weren’t sold expressly campaign, but neither are they discouraged.

NPR said it’s difficult to sort out whether such vitriol would have been directed at any woman seeking the presidency, if it is something unique about Clinton or if she would have faced it her opponent had been anyone but Trump.

But Katie Packer, who was deputy campaign manager for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, said Trump is at least partially to blame. Packer said Trump and his supporters’ conduct in the campaign is a poor lesson for “our little boys” and Trump has yet to acknowledge it.

“Is this what we're teaching these kids is an appropriate way to treat women that you don't agree with?” Packer said. “And there hasn't been a peep from the campaign about this stuff being offensive. And, so, by not addressing it, they have encouraged it."

Another strategist, Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to John McCain's 2008 campaign, told NPR that Trump has “created a permissible environment for this.”

Clinton, Schmidt said, is challenging some of the same norms that Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president, did in his first campaign. “There was anger, and there was angst and, as Sen. Obama was moving towards election to the presidency, the crowds became angrier frankly at the end of the campaign,” he said.

But McCain controlled the tenor of his rallies more than Trump has, stopping a woman who said at a rally: “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, he’s a — he’s an Arab.”

“No ma’am,” Schmidt recalled McCain interrupting the woman. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Eight years later, the difference is stark.

Not only is Trump not calling out his supporters for discriminatory attacks, as McCain did in the 2008 campaign, he’s participating in them. It started early, when he accused Clinton of playing “the woman’s card” because without it, “she would have no chance, I mean zero, of winning,” he said last spring.

He criticized Clinton as not having “a presidential look,” and, when challenged at the candidates’ second debate, pivoted and said she lacks the stamina to be president. And near the end of the candidates’ final debate, Trump interjected that Clinton was “such a nasty woman” when she took a jab at him over his taxes in her answer to a question about Social Security.

Historic Turnout of Women?

At the time of the last debate, Clinton was riding a bump in the polls due to leaked tapes of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women and grabbing them by their genitalia. Her lead strengthened especially among white, suburban, college-educated women — and that’s a demographic Trump needs to win.

“It is ironic in so many ways,” Debbie Walsh, who heads the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, told NPR, “that the person that this woman is running against kind of is almost a caricature of this uber-masculine guy with just tremendous bravado.”

Clinton saw her lead narrow after FBI Director James Comey’s “October surprise,” a letter to Congress in which he said the discovery of a new trove of emails could be “pertinent” to earlier investigations into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. On Sunday, Comey said the emails didn’t alter the July conclusion, and that he would not be recommending the Department of Justice file charges against her.

Clinton’s drop in the polls after Comey’s bombshell included some women who had previously supported her. A Fox 2 Detroit/Mitchell Poll of likely Michigan voters showed Clinton’s biggest losses were among men and women 65 and older who are now supporting Trump. That poll showed Clinton narrowly leading Trump, 47 percent to 44 percent, in the poll of 887 likely voters released Wednesday.

Clinton has also struggled to gain support among young millennial women who reject the notion they should vote for Clinton because she is a woman, but experts still predict the 2016 election could have a historically large gender gap. The FiveThirtyEight political blog said that the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy, Trump’s comments about women, the Trump tapes and allegations of sexual assault that women have made against him are turning high numbers of women voters who could carry Clinton to the White House.

America Where Girls Can Be President

Clinton, for the most part, hasn’t made a big issue of the historic nature of her candidacy.

She has said she isn’t running to become the first woman president, but as a logical next step in a lifetime of public service. She has said, however, that her election would bring about a time when “finally, fathers will be able to say to their daughter, ‘You, too, can grow up to be president.’ ”

And she has stayed mainly out of the fray when sexist remarks are directed toward her — except on one notable occasion, at the end of the candidates’ first debate when she took Trump on for shaming former Miss Universe Alicia Machado for gaining weight.

“One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina, “ Clinton said, pausing, before saying, “Donald, she has a name: Her name is Alicia Machado.”

In one final punch, Clinton hit Trump hard: “She has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.”

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons