The lead-up to the 2024 election appeared to portend a historic gender hole within the outcomes, with girls assumed to swing closely to Harris whereas males would leap to Trump.
“Heightened considerations about reproductive rights, ignited by the Supreme Court docket’s Dobbs determination, kickstarted a widening of the gender hole as girls flocked to assist Democrats within the 2022 midterm elections,” reads one Politico evaluation launched in August. “The present presidential matchup—that includes the vice chairman’s historic candidacy and Donald Trump, who’s seen very unfavorably by girls—seems to be supercharging this pattern.”
“It is the battle of the sexes and it is no sport,” Quinnipiac College polling analyst Tim Malloy stated in a statement final month. “There’s a evident hole in Michigan and Wisconsin between the variety of girls supporting Harris and the variety of males supporting Trump. On November fifth, it’ll all come all the way down to who reveals up.”
One Harris advert inspired girls to vote Democratic in defiance of their Republican husbands.
“Within the one place in America girls nonetheless have the fitting to decide on, you may vote any method you need and nobody will ever know,” Julia Roberts narrates over footage of a lady—in a rhinestone-encrusted American flag baseball cap no much less—hovering her pen over the Trump field on her poll, earlier than locking eyes with one other girl and filling within the bubble for Harris.
Nonetheless, exit polls point out that the predictions of an unprecedented gender divide did not come to fruition. Sure, there was a big hole in how women and men voted, nevertheless it was an identical divide to that seen in earlier elections. In line with CNN‘s exit poll, there was round a 10-point gender hole between women and men voting for Trump, with 42 p.c of males and 53 p.c of ladies voting for Harris whereas 55 p.c of males and 45 p.c of ladies voted for Trump. However these numbers aren’t surprising.
The hole was bigger for Latino and black voters than it was for white voters. Sixty p.c of white males and 53 p.c of white girls voted for Trump. In the meantime, there was a 14-point hole in black males’s and ladies’s assist for Harris, with 21 p.c of black males and seven p.c of black girls voting for Trump. Latino voters had a 17-point gender hole, with 55 p.c of Latino males and 38 p.c of Latina girls supporting Trump.
However whereas there may be actually a gulf between the candidates most well-liked by women and men, these numbers are hardly unprecedented. In 2020, exit polls discovered a gender hole between women and men’s votes of between 9 and 12 share level. In 2016, polls discovered a roughly 8- to-11-point hole.
Even when women and men voted for Democrats and Republicans at roughly the identical proportions as they’ve for the previous a number of elections, it’s exhausting to overlook the gendered messages every marketing campaign despatched out.
Whereas the Harris group aired cringeworthy advertisements depicting working-class males declaring that they are man enough to “assist girls,” cry at motion pictures, and “not ban younger girls from studying Little Ladies,” Vice President-elect J.D. Vance made probably the most well-known gaffes of the election season when footage emerged of him griping about “childless cat girls.“
Of their rhetoric, the Democrats are extremely changing into a celebration all in favour of interesting primarily to girls, whereas Republicans are shifting their messaging to broadly enchantment to males. Nonetheless, this technique would not appear to have massively expanded present gender gaps.
