Crypto bros v cat ladies: gender and the 2024 election
In a brewery in Pittsburgh’s East End, six guys lounged on barstools talk about brawls and about women. “We can’t stand by, we’ve got to get in the fight,” says one. Another adds that as a husband it is natural to “go into defence mode” when his wife is under attack. The others nod vigorously. “The government should not be in the business of putting their hands on women’s wombs,” he concludes, to loud applause—and some spilled beer—at the tables around them.
This “manel” at East End Brewing, on September 20th, is one of many stops on the “Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour”. The six men—a doctor, a social worker, a representative, two Hollywood actors and a man whose wife nearly died of sepsis due to Texas’s abortion ban—are here to urge men to vote Harris. They talk about wanting to be good role models to their sons and win back rights for their daughters.
This strain of masculinity was on display at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August. It was a sharp contrast with the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump walked on to “This is a man’s world” and Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, a retired wrestler, ripped off his shirt and called the former president a “gladiator”.
The 2024 election is a gendered election, and not just for the obvious reason that a man is running against a woman. The parties are also telling very different stories about gender. Americans are much more likely to believe Kamala Harris would make things better for women and Mr Trump for men, according to a recent poll by Pew. That reflects the fact that men and women are, on average, growing apart in their political preferences. This trend started in 1980, but the chasm has grown wider over the past 16 years. In The Economist’s most recent polling with YouGov, men favour Mr Trump by four percentage points and women Ms Harris by ten.
Presidential elections have long been masculinity contests, says Dan Cassino, at Fairleigh Dickinson University. John Kerry had fun made of his kitesurfing (too coastal to be truly manly), while George W. Bush was photographed clearing brush at his ranch. The back-and-forth between Mr Trump and Joe Biden, in their TV debate, about who had the bigger golf swing was a low point in this type of mano-a-mano contest. But Ms Harris’s declaration that if someone broke into her house “they’re getting shot” fits into the genre too.
And presidenting is still seen as a manly occupation. Some 30% of Americans think Ms Harris’s sex will hurt her chances of winning; only 8% believe the same about Trump. In fact, her two X chromosomes should if anything work in her favour. Several studies show that American voters, on average, do not discriminate against a female candidate because of her sex. According to a meta-study by Susanne Schwarz of Swarthmore College and Alexander Coppock of Yale, voters (particularly if they are Democrats) marginally favour hypothetical female candidates.
For a woman a presidential campaign is therefore a tightrope act. Subtle references to gender can improve her chances of victory but anything too overt has the opposite effect. Hillary Clinton liked to dress in white in 2016, a nod to suffragettes, and spoke of the historic nature of her nomination. Ms Harris avoids such references. Wisely so: polling suggests that men and older women hate it.
Ms Harris is therefore downplaying her sex, while at times reinforcing traditional gender roles: the DNC featured several references to her skills in the kitchen. Meanwhile Mr Trump has doubled down on projecting traditional masculinity. His defiant fist in the air after being shot in July was praised as a display of manly strength. In an interview with Aidin Ross, an online streamer favoured by young men, he talked about “taking out” Mr Biden and telling Kim Jong Un that his red button was bigger than the North Korean dictator’s.
Mars and Venus
Mr Trump is playing to voters with his not-so-subtle innuendo. In 2020 strength was the most important characteristic in a leader for 72% of Republican voters, compared with 28% of Democrats. He is also shaping their attitudes. Recent work by Mr Cassino found that men who identify as “completely masculine” favoured Mr Trump by 30 points whereas those who do not favoured Ms Harris by 20 points.
Dave Gehring, a 37-year-old veteran knocking on doors in a Pittsburgh suburb for the Republican Party, is in no doubt why men like Mr Trump: “He’s masculine.” Young men gravitate towards the former president, he reckons, not just “because he’s cooler”, but because he is “still willing to give young men the opportunity to go and earn that better job based on merit, and take that strong male lead in a household”. As the father of a daughter he does not think women should be attacked for their gender any more than men, but warns that “young men in America are under attack by the left every day.”
He is not alone in believing this. “There’s a growing divide in views about how well men and women are doing in the US,” says Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank (see chart). Trump voters are much more likely to believe that men are the basis of sex discrimination, and the opposite is true of Harris voters. Nearly seven in ten Trump supporters think Ms Harris’s policies will make things worse for men. The Trump campaign hopes to make use of this sense of grievance among young men who rarely vote. At a rally in New York last month Mr Trump concluded with an unusual pep talk: “Harry, get your fat ass out of the couch, you’re going to vote for Trump.”
Yet the changes on the right have been dwarfed by what has happened on the left. Whereas in the Obama years the gap between young men and women identifying as liberals was just five percentage points, during the Trump-Biden years this has tripled to 15 points, according to Gallup. This change has been caused almost entirely by young women moving to the left, rather than young men tacking to the right. The fact that this generation’s formative years were during the #MeToo movement, the Trump years and the decision to overturn Roe v Wade helps explain it.
Republican candidates attempt a kind of chivalry, offering protection for women and their families, rather than feminism. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Mr Trump promised women he would be their “protector” and save them from fear and loneliness. “You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” he said. That is what Mr Gehring and his fellow Republican door-knockers—who would rather talk about law and order and the economy—are hoping.
Dividing the electorate based on sex is, of course, reductive. In 2020 a majority of white women voted for Mr Trump; according to the latest polling, that might turn into a minority in 2024, but only just. And although the youth gender gap is wider than before, most young men still plan to vote for Ms Harris.
Yet leading among women is a real advantage. Since the 1980s a greater share of women than men has turned out to vote. In 2020 women made up 54% of the electorate. Whereas earlier this summer they were more likely than men to be on the fence about whom to vote for, Ms Harris’s candidacy has helped many off it. A final indicator that Democrats might be winning this battle of the sexes: in battleground states, according to Target Smart, a data firm, between July and September, twice as many young Democratic women registered to vote than young Republican men.■
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