Any pollster will tell you that a gender gap — the deep divide in support among men and women — has existed in presidential contests since the 1980s. But a combination of national events and supersized personalities has super charged that gap to make the 2024 election feel more like the battle of the sexes.
It’s the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned and Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden installment as the Democratic nominee created another opportunity for America to elect its first female president. Add to that former President Donald Trump’s hypermasculine messaging and you’ve got a historically wide gulf between men and women’s opinions of the upcoming elections and the candidates.
Neither campaign has shied away from pumping up their appeal to their supporters. If anything, they’ve doubled down.
For former President Donald Trump, that has meant featuring a t-shirt-ripping Hulk Hogan on the final night of his convention, endorsements from wrestlers from the WWE, and crude jokes about genitalia on the campaign trail.
“I am your protector,” he told the ladies at a Pennsylvania rally last month. “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector.”
While Trump rallies have always had a festival feel to them, the event at the Cobb Energy Center was all of that on steroids, maybe literally. There was the screaming music, muscled-up Trump fans, and a whole lot of talk about how to be a real man. If the Young Republicans and CrossFit had a baby, it would have been that rally.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a rising star from Florida, started it off by telling the women in the audience, “Let me just say to the ladies here tonight … you look great, y’all all look good.” He then listed Trump’s plans on the economy, his promise to deport undocumented immigrants, his policy to “keep men out of women’s sports,” and Republicans’ vision for little girls, who will someday “live in a home with a husband” and a family.
“If you want to call it toxic masculinity, be my guest,” Donalds said. “You know what we call it? Manhood. And manhood is what is needed in America today.” For a group of mostly white men, who have been told for many years that they are the problem, the idea that they are the solution was just what they wanted to hear.
After the warm up speakers, Trump got started. “This is some crowd,” he said to chants of USA!-USA! “I know these people. They’re tough as hell. They’re from Georgia, they should be tough.”
The message from the Harris campaign couldn’t be more different. While Trump is telling men how to be tough, Harris is telling American women what she thinks they deserve — the right to an abortion, affordable child care, home health care for elderly parents, schools without guns, and a president, she says, who their children can be proud of.
If a Trump rally is like a workout, a Harris rally can feel like a sorority meeting, literally. In fact, women from Black sororities routinely come to Harris events in their sorority colors, as they did at each night of the Democratic convention. The topics for the women there are personal, and often intimate. Speakers have shared their abortion stories, or as in Atlanta last month, cried over a young woman who died after leaving Georgia for an out-of-state abortion. Harris leads chants of women yelling, “We’re not going back!”
Despite the historic nature of her candidacy, Harris almost never talks about being a woman, but she doesn’t have to. The upside of that for her candidacy, and the downside, are already embedded in people’s perceptions of her, including a worry among some Democrats that Black men are lagging Black women in supporting her.
When Harris attended New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta on Sunday, Pastor Jamal Bryant told congregants, “Something is wrong with brothers who don’t know how to support a sister.”
The result of all of this is a larger-than-ever gender gap heading into Election Day. The latest AJC poll showed Trump with a huge lead over Harris among men in Georgia, 59% to 28%, while Harris holds a massive lead among women, 55% to 37%.
Digging into the cross tabs of the poll suggests that a major factor in those differences is the policies each candidate is pushing.
Twice as many women as men say abortion or gun policies are a top issue for their votes, while men are more likely than women to say the economy, taxes and immigration are their top issues. Men are nine points less likely to say they have confidence the election will be fair and 20 points less likely to say abortion should be easier to obtain than it is under Georgia’s abortion ban.
Other gaps emerge, too. Seventy-one percent of men say the country is on the wrong track, while 52% of women say the same thing, and appear far less likely than men to be looking for a wholesale change from the Biden administration.
With the race nearly deadlocked — Trump is ahead of Harris just outside of the margin of error — look for both campaigns to be focused on the sliver of undecided voters who remain, especially the 31% of Black men in Georgia who say they haven’t made up their minds yet.
Harris will bring former President Barack Obama to Georgia later this week, and Trump will be in Gwinnett for two events next week. The battle of the sexes will continue, and the winner will be the next president.
