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Donald Trump walked out onto the floor of the Republican National Convention in July to James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World. Pundits have noted that although Kamala Harris has campaigned hard on reproductive rights, she hasn’t mentioned the f-word, wearing “the various aspects of her identity lightly”. Although she would be the nation’s first woman president, she’s avoided Hillary Clinton’s “vote-for-me-to-make-history” strategy. Trump has tried to court the votes of young men while Harris’ campaign has painted her as the protector of abortion access.
So what role is gender playing in the US election?
State of play
When it comes to American voters, there’s an undeniable gender gap, the width of which changes depending on who you ask. A Pew research poll released last month found it to be 17 points, with Trump ahead by eight points among men and Harris up nine points among women. On Monday (AEDT) The Hill had the gap at 16. This past Thursday the Washington Monthly released its final Gender Gap Tracker before election day, showing the gender gap between the presidential candidates was similar to 2020’s gap, when Trump lost to Joe Biden, but is not as wide as 2016’s gap, when Trump defeated Clinton. By this indicator Harris is weaker than Biden with both genders but stronger with men compared to Clinton.
White women could decide the race
The gender gap is inseparable from the race gap. For two elections running, Trump has won the country’s largest voting bloc: white women.
As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in The New York Times, “Had white women voted like other women [in 2016], the gender barrier to the nation’s highest office would have been broken and Donald Trump would not have become president”.
Will the past few years have changed anything? Could there be a generational shift? A Harvard Institute of Politics poll released last month found Harris had a 13-point lead ahead of Trump among white women aged under 30 (she was ahead 55 points with non-white women under 30). The Guardian recently reported young women are “increasingly queer, increasingly secular and getting married later in life — all characteristics that tend to be linked with liberalism and support for the Democratic Party”. The publication cited Gallup analysis that found in the past 12 years liberal identification among white women rose by 6%.
Democrats bank on reproductive rights
Abortion is now restricted in about half of US states. American voters are more likely to say Harris, who in March became the first sitting US vice president (or president) to visit an abortion provider, has clearly explained her positions on abortion than they are about Trump.
Trump takes credit for the overturning of Roe v Wade (via his Supreme Court appointees) and repeats the lie that Democrats support “executing babies” or abortion “after birth”, but last month said he would veto a federal abortion ban.
With more abortion rights-related measures on the ballot than ever before, voters have been reassured that Harris would veto any national abortion ban or support a bill restoring Roe’s protections if elected. (Voters could, of course, still vote for a pro-abortion rights measure and for a Republican candidate.)
Women just want a ‘protector’, right?
Occasionally, with trademark inconsistency, Trump will throw out a promise to women that’s as vague as it is paternalistic. Nothing says you understand consent, respect women and wish to grant them agency and bodily autonomy than vowing to protect them “whether [they] like it or not”, as Trump declared last week. So what is an adjudicated rapist vowing to “protect” women from? In Trump’s own words: “migrants coming in”, and from “foreign countries that wanna hit us with missiles”. The type of young woman who could help decide this election, an American woman aged between 25 and 34, is more likely to die than she was at any other point in more than 50 years, but not from the causes identified by Trump.
“Maternal mortality, suicide, homicide, and accidental overdose death rates for young women have all climbed dramatically in recent years,” according to a 2023 report from the Population Reference Bureau. The United States’ shameful (for a wealthy nation) maternal mortality rate will only get worse if reproductive rights remain under assault. (See: Texas where the number of women who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed (by 56%) following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care, far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation (11%) in the same period).
If Trump is going to “protect” women from the drug crisis he’ll first need to learn that fentanyl is an opioid. And if he wants to “protect” women from homicide he might need stronger policies on gun violence and domestic violence — America’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found in 2021 more than one in three homicide deaths were carried out by an intimate partner.
If women say no, go for the bros
The gap between the political preferences of young men and young women is believed to have doubled in the past 25 years. While young women have moved to the left, young men have moved to the right.
Among young men, a New York Times poll from last month found Trump leads Harris 58% to 37%. So it isn’t surprising that in a media blitz chasing the “bro vote”, Trump has in the past few months appeared on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience and Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ with the Boys as well as on a live-stream with internet personality Adin Ross (where he was gifted a MAGA-decorated Tesla Cybertruck and a Rolex watch).
Trump’s supporters have meanwhile continued to spread their cartoonish chauvinism. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson recently described the Democrats as a “hormone-addled, 15-year-old daughter” and Trump as their “daddy” who, when he returns to the White House, will say: “You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now”. Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC recently posted an advertisement warning against Harris because “America really can’t afford a ‘C-Word’ in the White House right now” (the C-word is revealed to be… communist.)
Former political correspondent Susan Milligan has said the former president is going after aggrieved young men who want to reclaim their birthright to power.
“Trump is giving them license to say whatever they want about women, and his campaign is an implicit promise to give them control over women, including their bodies,” Mulligan wrote in The New Republic.
So where does this leave us?
The final NBC News poll results couldn’t be closer at 49%-49%, with women supporting Harris by a 16-point margin and men backing Trump by 18 points. Early voting trends are, according to NPR, “making Republicans nervous and Democrats hopeful” as women made up 53.5% of voters in the seven battleground states.
It is possible some men might not know if their wives helped decide the election — polling from YouGov released this week found that one in eight American women admitted they had cast a vote different to their partners in the past without telling them. An ad recently released by the Harris campaign, narrated by movie star Julia Roberts, suggests women could vote for Harris while telling their husbands otherwise: “What happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”
Trump has said Roberts will cringe at the ad in the future: “It doesn’t say much for her relationship, but I’m sure she has a great relationship.”