A photo illustration of attendees cheering as Democratic presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at the Rawhide Event Center on October 10, 2024 in Chandler, Arizona.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
For months, polls of the presidential election have shown a distinct difference in the way men and women say they will vote for the candidates. Vice-President Kamala Harris consistently leads Donald Trump among women overall, while men are more likely to back him. Young men in particular are swinging toward Trump and Republicans. As Time magazine recently reported, John Della Volpe of Harvard University’s Kennedy School found surveys of “voters under 30 show that young men are shifting towards Republicans by a 14-point swing compared to 2020.” They may see a relatable figure in Trump as the former president and his surrogates court the so-called “bro vote.”
Trump’s strongman pitch is also fundamentally paternalistic, both in his own words and in the rhetoric of his allies. Trump, Tucker Carlson recently said, would give the country a much-needed spanking. “When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’” On the other side there is Harris, the first woman of color to lead the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket and the second-ever woman nominee. She is poised to make history a mere two years after Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped reproductive rights away from millions.
With Election Day fast approaching, I spoke to Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, about this year’s gender gap, what it may portend for the election, and what influences the way that women in particular vote.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harris is leading Trump among women and Trump is quite famously courting young men, it appears with some success. Is there anything unusual about this year’s gender gap?
So we started seeing this gender gap, this difference in the way men and women vote, back in 1980. It’s been consistent since then. And the gap has varied. It’s been as high as 12 points in 2020 in the Biden-Trump race. It was 11 points when Hillary Clinton ran. And so far, the most recent polling I’ve seen is the YouGov polling for The Economist, and that’s showing a ten-point gender gap. This gender gap that we’re seeing is significant, but it is in line with gender gaps we have seen over cycles in the past.
That’s interesting to note, because it’s gotten a lot of attention this year.
It’s getting a lot of attention. Although I have to say, it gets attention almost every cycle, and it always feels like everyone has just discovered women vote differently than men. But we know that women are more likely to support Democratic candidates than men and are less likely to support the Republican candidate. And I think it’s also important to remember women are not monolithic. So this varies tremendously by race. You don’t need me to say that Black women are the backbone of the Democratic coalition.
But even when you look at white women, there’s variation among white women by education. And again, we don’t have great data on that right now because we’re not seeing that broken out. But it seems to be that college-educated women who oftentimes in the past were more Republican voters, sort of fiscally conservative, socially more moderate, have started to drift to the Democratic Party because of Donald Trump.
We’ve talked about women voting differently than men, and that’s been consistent for a number of years now, even if the exact gender gap varies from election to election. Do we know why men and women vote differently?
We don’t know exactly, and there are multiple reasons. It’s not about the gender of the candidate, it’s about party. So what is different about the Democratic Party than the Republican Party? For a lot of women, it’s about the economy. Women make less money than men, so they have less money saved for retirement. They’re more employment insecure, they live longer, they’re oftentimes juggling both work and family responsibilities in a way that’s different than men, and therefore they see themselves as more connected to government and more reliant either now or potentially on the social safety net that government provides. And the party that has traditionally been more supportive of that social safety net is the Democratic Party.
So imagining yourself needing Social Security because you live longer or you’re in the sandwich generation where you’re taking care of your kids and your older parents, thinking about things like Social Security and Medicare, family leave, unemployment insurance, any sort of government subsidies, child-care tax credits, all of these things resonate in a different way with women. Men I think, because they see themselves with a different relationship with government, they’re more inclined to think about government as being problematic or something that we don’t need to spend so much money on. And I oftentimes think about even on the Republican side, in the past we saw Republican women who might want to see government spending cut, but more surgically as opposed to men who might want to cut it with a machete.
Also in 2022, you have an overlay of the overturning of Roe with the Dobbs decision. Always when polling is done, what is the most important issue for you when you go into the voting booth? The economy always rises to the top. But the abortion issue used to be sort of down further in the hierarchy of maybe nine. It’s now up to three and four. It has really moved up in saliency for women. It is one thing when you are working to achieve a right, but when a right is taken away from you that was there for five decades, it really resonates and it really drives home the importance of elections and the outcome of elections and voting. And we think that this is a part of what is driving women’s votes this year.
And I think at the end of the day, the real question is going to be the difference we’re seeing is the difference we have been seeing over time. The question will be, I think, more so about turnout. And we do know that women historically have been turning out at higher rates than men. In the last few election cycles, about 10 million more women have voted than men. So that really, when you talk about voting, you look at both of those factors, both turnout and the gender gap, and you really see the potential for the power of that women’s vote and the difference that voting preferences can make in the outcome of an election.
The American Survey Center at AEI reports that 55 percent of young women now say they identify as feminist while less than one-third of young men say the same. And I’m curious to know, given this trend and the gender gap that we’ve been talking about, how might that trend influence the way that people vote?
Well, if you’re identifying as a feminist, you’re more likely to be voting for Democratic candidates, right? And Gallup did some interesting polling this year where they did see this, they called it a leftward expansion from that young women are facing 18 to 29 and seeing a real shift. I mean, they were, I think back in 2008, something like 30, what did they say? Thirty-two percent of women identified as liberal or very liberal, and now it’s up to 40 percent.
And I think it’s understandable why it’s shifted from 2017 to 2024. I think Trump has done a lot to shift women, young women, into a more progressive ideology. Again, the Dobbs decision, but also a whole host of other issues around immigration, around climate. These are all issues that young women care about.
But particularly around reproductive health and access to reproductive health care, abortion, the threat of losing access to contraception, the threat of losing access to IVF, all of these things where if women feel targeted, it will push them. And I think combined with the kind of rhetoric that Trump has been using since 2016, since his campaign against Hillary Clinton, the kind of hypertoxic masculinity that is sort of his signature has had an impact on pushing young women towards the left.
How influential is the gender of a presidential candidate when we’re thinking about the ways that men and women vote?
So as we’ve looked at the gender gap over time, the gap we’re seeing for Harris is in line with the gap that we saw when Biden ran against Trump. In ’16, the gender gap was 11 points when running against Clinton. So we always talk about the fact that it is not about the gender of the candidate, it is about the party of the candidate.
I’ll give you an old example, but I think it still holds true. In New Jersey, when Christine Todd Whitman was the governor of New Jersey, she ran for re-election. She was a pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, anti-gun, very moderate Republican woman. She was challenged at the time by Jim McGreevey, who later went on to become governor, but not in that race. He lost, she won. There was a gender gap. It favored Jim McGreevey.
It is really about party. What we do think can happen in cases, and if you go and look at some Senate races, and the problem is we don’t have a way of measuring what would’ve happened had there been a man in the race. But we think there’s the potential that when a woman is running as a Democrat, it might increase turnout because it might energize those women to be engaged in a way that they might’ve sort of sat it out without a woman at the top of the ticket, whether it’s a Senate race or the presidential election.
So I think it’s important to just really, it is not the gender of the candidate and the race of the candidate. So in this case, Harris has the potential to, I think, energize Black women, Asian American women and women overall to be more motivated to show up and to turn out. But it’s all about who feels they have the most at stake, who feels they have the most to gain or lose by the outcome of the election. That’s what ultimately drives turnout.
As you said earlier, women obviously are not a monolithic voting bloc. If we look at women voters more carefully, what distinctions or voting trends might we observe within that category that could impact the outcome of an election?
Well, I think because women are not monolithic, you need to look at women and look at other demographic issues, race, age, education, even geography of where they live. There is this tremendous variation. So I think it’s always dangerous to just sort of say, “Well, women are going to vote more Democratic.” It’s true if you conflate them, but if you break it out, that’s not the case. I think that what’s happening now is everyone is wondering what will those white, college-educated women who may have voted for Trump in 2016 do in 2024? Will they continue the kind of shift that they have been making to the Democratic candidate in light of Dobbs decision, in light of frankly the kind of campaign that Trump has been running? Which has not been a campaign that has been about reaching out to these women, he is not courting that vote or trying to lessen that gender gap.
I think he plays to his base, which are white men largely and white women without a college degree, who he keeps going back to this idea that somehow it’s been about division, it’s been about saying it’s kind of them-us, and they are making your life less than, and they don’t value you. And I do. And it’s about that kind of division.
So I think the sense is Black women are highly energized in this election cycle. And again, it’s about turnout, making sure those women get to the polls. But Latinas and Asian American women, these are voters that I think have been pretty traditionally Democratic voters. This is going to be incredibly close. It’s about who you can pull in that might not have been in the typical Democratic coalition. It’s why you see Harris going to Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with Liz Cheney. It is about saying to those women, “You can vote for the Democratic candidate in this case.” And Trump has made it easier for them to step back from the Republican Party by the kind of toxic masculinity that we’ve been seeing on display. I mean, even just the other day, the way Tucker Carlson introduced him, I mean, that was unbelievable.
It sent a message of, “We don’t even care about you.” But also, frankly, the E. Jean Carroll case, the Stormy Daniels case, all of this, going back to Access Hollywood, his history with women, the way he talks about women, even the way he’s talking about Harris. Even if you might not be a Kamala Harris supporter, there is an uncomfortableness that these women have with someone saying that she’s stupid, that she’s low intelligence.
Republicans seem to be leaning on anti-trans messaging pretty hard. It seems to be an attempt to appeal to suburban women in particular who might otherwise be on the fence about the party after Dobbs, with this notion of protecting girls’ sports, for example. Is there any empirical proof that this message might appeal to women voters?
I have not seen any. I feel like this is another example of the division strategy. I think you’re right. I think it’s an attempt as mothers of kids in schools and what’s going on in your schools.
But I have not seen anything that has shown that this is working as a way of convincing women that this is something that they’re voting on. I mean, the reality is it’s not the kind of issue that touches their lives. The issue that touches their lives right now is this issue of reproductive health care. I’ve not seen anything that is showing that women are particularly tuned into that issue, or it is high on their list of issues that are driving their vote. I find that hard to believe. It’s certainly not showing up as more so than the economy, immigration, reproductive health care and abortion. I mean, it’s just not.
This is such an obvious thing to say, but women are complex and they vote the way they vote for all kinds of different reasons. With that in mind, if Democrats want to keep the gains they’ve made with women voters, how should they tailor their message and policies going forward?
I think the policies of the Democratic Party have been in alignment with women voters, as is evidenced by this difference that we’ve seen over time in their preferences. It’s speaking to that social safety net that they care about. It’s speaking to their issues around access to reproductive health care and abortion. It speaks to issues around affirmative action and social justice issues that matter to women and to women’s lives.
So I think it is because of where the party stands is why we see this gender gap. It’s a rational choice that women are making in the sense that it is about what affects their lives, and that’s how they’re voting. And that’s the challenge really, that the Republican Party has with women voters.
But in terms of reaching across the aisle to some of these more fiscally conservative, but socially moderate, and those issues combined with the way in which the Republican Party has sort of fallen in line behind Trump has hurt them with those voters. And I think that the question will be, will they show up? Will those women say, “I don’t like Donald Trump, but I can’t vote for the Democrat” so they just stay home? Or will they turn out? That’s going to be what we get to wait and watch for in a week and a half.
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