Mother Jones illustration; Winstead Barnes/Xinhua/Zuma; Unsplash
If the polls are right, the United States is headed for the largest Election Day gender divide in history. Women will cast a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris by 54 percent to 42 percent, according to the latest New York Times/Sienna poll, while men will vote for former President Donald Trump, 55 percent to 41 percent. The gap is even more extreme among voters under 30, with 69 percent of young women picking Harris, but only 45 percent of young men choosing the vice president.
The march towards any kind of greater equality…has never been straight in this country.
Gender is, in many ways, the defining feature of this election, and the contrast between the candidates could not be more stark. There is Harris, who could be the first woman president, or Trump, whom a jury found liable for sexual assault. More critically for voters to consider, this is the first presidential election after the fall of Roe v. Wade. In choosing between Harris and Trump, voters are choosing between a candidate who wants to again make abortion legal across the country, and a candidate who refuses to rule out signing a nationwide ban.
The issue is one of the ways this election has become a referendum on women’s place in society, a revisitation of progress made since the women’s movement. One party wants to put a woman in the White House, the other wants to send women back into their own homes to focus on childbearing. In a post-Roe world, this is far more than any symbolic referendum: Access to abortion is about health care, but also about a woman’s ability to decide the course of her life. As Trump’s campaign promises a return to a patriarchal society, his is not a vision of an equal society, where both sexes benefit from equal rights. Instead, it’s a zero-sum contest where one sex prevails.
Helping his cause is that, on the other side of the ledger, men also feel their future is on the line. Again and again, young males report feeling directionless and emasculated by modern society. They report wanting to be able to earn enough money to support a family, like their fathers or grandfathers did. Trump has courted these men by presenting himself as the epitome of masculinity, describing himself as the protector of women while associating himself, as he did at his convention, with wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off—a combination of paternalism and hypermasculinity that, if the polls are right, carries significant appeal.
To make sense of these currents, I spoke with Notre Dame political scientist Christina Wolbrecht, whose scholarship focuses on the politics of women’s rights. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Polls are showing a bigger gender gap this year than ever before. Do you have any reason to doubt this?
The usual cause of the gender gap is not abortion, it’s not women’s issues. It really has more to do with different preferences among men and women on social welfare issues, on support for education, and health care. The truth is—and I’ll put a big asterisk on this, because we live in a post-Dobbs world—that men and women don’t vary dramatically in their preferences when it comes to abortion rights.
The post-Dobbs asterisk is this: since Roe, the status quo has favored the pro-choice side. And until two years ago, I would have told you that there are single issue pro-life voters whose number one issue was stopping abortion. I would have told you, pre-Dobbs, that pro-choice people are not that way. The world has changed now. No longer do pro-choice people have the status quo. They are instead fighting to get it back. And they’re the ones that are desperate to change policy.
So now that the status quo has changed, we’ll see if that draws people to the polls or influences their vote.
Threat is a mobilizer. This is why, according to the NRA, they’re always coming for your guns, right? Because fear gets people to donate and vote. And now they really are killing women and denying them health care, and that may be more mobilizing.
When I think about the very real possibility of a gender gap bigger than previous cycles, it seems to me that abortion would have to be a big part of that, because there’s so much on the line for women: decisions about if they want kids and when, what they can afford, and what job they have—everything is wrapped up in that.
I think that’s all true, but that doesn’t mean that other things aren’t as or more important. So yes, you want to control your fertility, but you also live in a town where all the manufacturing has left and you don’t have access to jobs and you’ve been told it’s the fault of immigrants. Or you are really worried about foreign trade and how it’s affecting your company. At the end of the day, things like education and wealth and occupation have always driven vote choice. It’s not always clear to me that abortion can overcome those things. Among some people, it can be true that you want to be able to control your fertility and and have access to abortion, and you don’t like what’s happening to women in the states with bans, but you also don’t really like immigrants very much, or you hold sexist beliefs. 2016 was the first time that people’s views on sexism predicted whether they vote Democratic or Republican, and that has remained true since. Both men and women can be sexist. It may be the case that abortion will change everything. But if it does, that’s going to be unprecedented, because it hasn’t in the past.
Staying on that theme of sexism predicting your vote, I want to ask you about men. It does seem like men are moving toward Trump, particularly young men. Trump’s campaign stands for a restoration of traditional gender norms that is appealing to some men. The idea seems to be that men are suffering as gender roles are changing.
There’s traditional sexism that’s like, ‘It’s better women stay home with the kids, and a man’s place is in business, and women are more naturally caring.’ It’s very gender stereotypical. What you were really talking about is gender resentment: ‘Women get stuff just for being women, women are always accusing men of stuff they didn’t do, I can’t tell jokes at work anymore because there are women around.’ That sense that the advance of women limits me, that’s to say, a man, is really powerful. And we’ve seen an association with [that] and voting for Republicans. It’s similar to racial resentment, which is a little different than traditional racism. It’s more focused on, again, ‘People get all these advantages I don’t get, and it’s unfair.’
After the 2016 election, surveys showed that people who voted for Trump were more likely to say, ‘It’s harder to be white, there’s more racism towards white people.‘
Racial resentment was an important predictor in 2016, as was gender resentment. That continued in 2020 and I absolutely, 100 percent assume it will continue in 2024. In general, men are more likely to hold those sorts of gender resentment views. There are a lot of women who feel like they lose out from women’s equality; it’s probably fair to say more with older women.
Resentment sexism seems to be cropping up more with younger men in terms of feeling like, ‘I have no future, I can’t make any money, I can’t buy a house, there’s no place for me in society right now.‘
There’s been talk for months of this idea that young men are becoming very conservative and young women are becoming very liberal. There are debates amongst the more statistically-minded pollsters about what the data really show. What’s interesting is that a lot of that isn’t so much the movement of men, but it is the movement of women.
Let me circle back to the two types of sexism you described. We’re seeing a lot of messaging around the resentment piece, particularly targeted at young men. There also actually seems to be a lot of what you described as traditional sexism. I think especially of JD Vance and his derision of childless cat ladies, his comments that the role of grandmothers is to take care of their grandkids and that women are more fulfilled by having kids.
To make the connection to race again—because I do think they belong together—ten years ago, we talked about racial resentment as dog whistles. The dog whistles are gone. People are just coming out and saying outwardly racist things: ‘These people aren’t as smart. They’re rapists and murderers.’
You are absolutely correct that a lot of what has been brought to people’s attention, about JD Vance in particular, is exactly what you said. It’s out and out. ‘It’s better if women are at home and men are working. What’s wrong with Taylor Swift, she’s 33 years old and doesn’t have a child, because that’s women’s purpose in life.’ I don’t think it’s a mistake.
On the flip side, masculinity appears to be a big part of Trump’s draw. He has Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the convention, he talks about how he is going to protect women. That all seems like stuff in the traditional sexism bucket. There’s this clip of Stephen Miller, Trump’s close adviser, giving dating advice. He told men to “wear your Trump support on your sleeve” to “show that you’re a real man” and “not a beta.” The obvious message is if you want to be masculine, then you vote for Trump.
It’s a huge, huge piece of it. The gender resentment we were just talking about is a strong man who provides for his family, is the leader, is the decision maker. We’re seeing that a lot in this election. [There’s a] comparison to Tim Walz. Donald Trump’s the above-it-all, wealthy traditional man. Tim Walz has all these male skills. He’s going to fix your gutter. He coached football. He has a traditional family. But he’s also community-oriented. Nobody thinks Donald Trump ever helped anybody do anything. Whereas part of the Tim Walz brand is this idea that he’s always the guy who lends a hand.
He’s the Democrats’ alternative version of what it means to be a man who is not threatened by women.
I gotta tell you, I’ve been studying women in politics for 30 years. It’s insane. This is not where we were going.
What do you mean?
That I succumbed to one of the greatest myths in American history, which is this idea that the road to progress is straight and continually forward. I was 14 when the first woman was on a presidential ticket, and that was a big deal in my household. And so, of course, then we’re going to have a woman presidential candidate, and we’re going to elect the first woman vice president. And in some ways, that’s right. In the last three presidential elections, women have been at the top of one of the tickets in two of them. That’s remarkable, given our history.
But the reality, the thing that I know in my more experienced and knowledgeable brain, is that the march towards any kind of greater equality and breaking down hierarchies has never been straight in this country. We’ve made leaps and bounds on things, and then taken them back. That struggle over what is the future, and what does the United States look like, and what kind of people are we going to be, and how are we going to live? It has really been very pointed in this election.
There’s the narrative about women’s place being raising kids at home. But with access to abortion being also on the ballot, it’s not just rhetoric anymore. Maybe women will just have to stay home—or more women than want to.
Do people truly understand what is at stake in this election? Is it getting through to women that this really is limiting access—not just to abortion, but to birth control, to control over your children and how they’re raised, and all those types of questions? More broadly, that a Donald Trump presidency almost certainly leads to a dramatic corrosion of the state of American democracy. Rights and freedoms and liberties are also on the ballot. There are probably some psychologists that could explain how it’s hard for our brains to grasp something that significant.
I see that meme all the time showing women in Iran in the ‘40s and ‘50s, where they had all sorts of freedoms and were very cosmopolitan. And then a different kind of government comes in and shuts all of that down. If we’ve learned anything in the last eight years, it’s that the United States is not as special as we thought, that the erosion of rights is very, very real.