Standing in a seemingly infinite line of individuals donning Harris-Walz branded camouflage hats, pink knit beanies, and “Hotties for Harris” T-shirts, 36-year-old Jenn Cookson was brimming with pleasure.
“I’m only a die-hard Kamala fan and Walz fan,” mentioned Cookson, an acquisitions specialist on the U.S. Protection Division, as she waited for U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally on Tuesday. “I’m not going to lie, after I see her converse right this moment, I’m completely going to cry.”
Feelings are operating excessive amongst American voters simply days earlier than the election on Nov. 5, which polls recommend will likely be a toss-up between Harris and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Each candidates are making their remaining pitches to impress potential voters—however their goal audiences look fairly completely different.
Democrats and Republicans “are actually engaged in a battle of the sexes,” mentioned Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist on the College of Virginia. “That is the primary time I can bear in mind the place they’re actually not competing for a similar voters in any respect,” she added.
Gendered voting preferences are nothing new. For many years, men and women in america have differed of their political opinions, with ladies leaning Democratic over Republican, and younger ladies specifically rising steadily extra progressive whereas their male counterparts have remained the identical. That cut up has been thrown into the highlight this presidential election—the primary since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022—as each Harris and Trump champion starkly completely different visions of womanhood and masculinity on the marketing campaign path.
“The Democrats are making it about abortion rights and about ladies’s rights typically,” Lawless mentioned. “The Republicans are making it extra about males being left behind and never being sufficiently supported by the Democratic administration.”
That strategy has seen Trump’s group, identified for its “grab ‘em by the pussy” and “childless cat ladies” feedback, lean into hypermasculine messaging and sometimes crude rhetoric about women and gender roles. In simply the previous couple of weeks, Trump has praised the dimensions of Arnold Palmer’s genitalia and mocked CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who’s homosexual, by calling him “Allison Cooper.” Final yr, Trump was discovered chargeable for sexual abuse. Now, he’s casting himself as a protector of women—“whether or not the ladies prefer it or not.”
To court docket upward of tens of thousands and thousands of largely younger male potential voters, Trump has appeared on a minimum of a dozen podcasts and shows with overwhelmingly male audiences, together with the immensely well-liked Joe Rogan Expertise. Stephen Miller, a high Trump advisor, constructed on that sort of messaging in an interview with Fox News, wherein he remarked {that a} vote for Trump can be a stamp of manliness.
“The very best factor you are able to do is to put on your Trump assist in your sleeve,” Miller mentioned. “Present that you’re a actual man. Present that you’re not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your courting life will likely be unbelievable.”
It’s a imaginative and prescient of gender roles that stands in sharp distinction to that espoused by Harris, who has made reproductive rights a key function of her marketing campaign and makes use of the catchphrase “we are not going back”—together with in a campaign ad that nodded to the ladies’s suffrage motion. Reproductive rights additionally dominated the dialog when Harris appeared on the favored podcast Name Her Daddy, which has an viewers of some 5 million folks, most of whom are women beneath the age of 45.
“We’re taking a look at, I feel, completely different Americas relying on who wins right here,” mentioned Christine Matthews, a pollster who has labored for Republican candidates with experience on swing voters, notably those that are ladies. “The query is: Will there be sufficient men and women who agree that ‘we should always not return’ to propel Kamala Harris to victory?”
If Harris is certainly propelled to victory, she would make historical past as america’ first girl president. However in contrast to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who known as attention to her gender when she ran for president in 2016, Harris has largely downplayed her id on the marketing campaign path.
“Political leaders are all the time performing their gender,” mentioned Hilary Matfess, a political scientist on the College of Denver’s Josef Korbel College of Worldwide Research whose work focuses on political violence and gender dynamics. “It’s just a little bit trickier for ladies to try to stroll that tightrope—demonstrating that they’re robust, and difficult, and masculine sufficient to get the job performed with out folks pondering, ‘Oh, my god. She’s such an unrelatable bitch.’”
Each Trump and Harris are rallying potential voters at a time when youthful ladies throughout america have grown increasingly progressive prior to now 20 years. However their male counterparts—who are likely to tilt conservative over liberal—haven’t shifted with them.
These patterns have lengthy guided marketing campaign methods for Democrats and Republicans. The system of success for Democrats “is to win ladies by greater than we lose males,” mentioned Celinda Lake, one of many two lead pollsters for the Biden marketing campaign in 2020. “The Republican system is the alternative: win males by greater than they lose ladies.”
That longstanding hole in presidential voting preferences between women and men largely tracks with what we’re seeing forward of this election, specialists and pollsters mentioned, regardless of each candidates’ extra focused outreach. “Despite the fact that each campaigns are leaning closely into messaging to 1 gender or the opposite, the general gender hole is effectively throughout the norm,” Matthews mentioned.
However these numbers might show decisive in key swing states, the place polls point out that Harris has stronger assist amongst ladies, whereas Trump has stronger assist amongst males. Daybreak Teele, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins College, famous there are merely extra women in lots of key battleground counties and that general ladies voter turnout is barely increased than males.
“Even a small choice for the Democrats amongst ladies in a few of these swing states, in a few of these swing counties, could make a distinction as a result of there’s extra of them,” she mentioned.
Girls may broadly lean Democratic, however there stay deep divisions throughout the demographic, notably alongside racial, age, location, and academic traces. These dynamics have been on show in each 2016 and 2020, when nearly all of white women voted for Trump.
One such voter is Maureen Sullivan of Hoboken, New Jersey, who made waves in 2016 for penning a New York Times op-ed explaining her determination to vote for Trump. As a white, college-educated, Catholic mom who grew up in a pro-union family, voting for Trump “was a simple selection,” she wrote, citing financial points, faculty selection, and the way he would “come into workplace much less burdened by get together loyalties.”
Sullivan, who mentioned she grew up in a standard Democratic family however has largely voted Republican, plans to again Trump once more this yr. “We’ve seen the world [become] much more harmful place than it was when Trump was president,” Sullivan advised Overseas Coverage. Underneath a Trump administration, she would wish to see low taxes, a powerful financial system, and adjustments with crime and the border, she mentioned.
“I simply don’t suppose [Harris] has what it takes to be president,” mentioned Sullivan, who famous that she watches the information always. She likened Harris to an “empty pantsuit.” “I attempt to discover one thing in her that convinces me that she would make an honest president, and I simply haven’t seen it. She will be able to’t converse. She doesn’t appear to have any concepts. She definitely can’t talk them if she does have concepts.”
A recent poll discovered that just about 60 % of college-educated white ladies mentioned they’ll again Harris this election. However 55 % of white ladies and 70 % of white males with out faculty levels mentioned they’ll vote for Trump.
And with just some days to go earlier than the election, each conservative and liberal ladies are already turning out in pressure. Girls are already outpacing males in battleground states, leading to a 10-point gender hole in early voting to this point, Politico reported.
Whereas ready in line to listen to Harris’s speech on Tuesday, 51-year-old Renee Dotson, who works in native authorities, mentioned that she was “glad” the Democratic presidential candidate was a girl of coloration. “However, like, extra importantly than her gender and race is the present circumstances that we’re going through as People proper now and the way that may actually be diminished,” she mentioned.
“We’ve already had a style of what presidency appears to be like like beneath this different candidate, and there’s no must revisit that,” she mentioned. “Nothing good got here from it.”
