How Gender Became the Election’s Crucial Fault Line

In an alternate universe, Nikki Haley is running for president against Kamala Harris in the true Year of the Woman. In our world, Haley is on the sidelines wishing Republicans would stop alienating a large swath of voters. “Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley said on “Fox & Friends” in September, when she was asked why Trump and Vance were trailing by 14 points among female voters. “When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up, too.”

Trump didn’t take her advice, if he heard it. The next day, while debating Vice President Harris on national television, Trump said Harris’s actions were “stupid” as he falsely accused her of failing to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine. (In fact, Harris did not negotiate with these countries.) Trump also gave muddled answers on abortion — Republicans’ biggest weakness, especially among women — twice resorting to the false claim that Democrats have said it’s acceptable to execute babies.

In the moments after the debate, Taylor Swift made Trump’s bad night with women worse. She endorsed Harris in an Instagram post that she signed “Childless Cat Lady,” taking ownership of a phrase Vance had used as an insult and aligning herself with the many women who had posted photos of themselves with their cats as a retort.

The night was one indication among many that gender is the deepest fault line in this year’s presidential campaign. But this isn’t because Harris is running on her claim to becoming the country’s first female president. She has largely avoided declarations about breaking barriers. It’s Trump and Vance who have made the election all about gender.

Rather than taking what seems like the safe path — treating Harris with respect, affirming some basic support for equality, and steering toward a clear middle path on abortion — they’ve produced some of the campaign’s most memorable moments by firing the kinds of insults at Harris that many women will recognize. Trump stooped to the oldest attack in the book when he shared a crude social media post in August that claimed Harris had used sex to advance her career. At the end of September, he took to calling her “mentally impaired.”

Trump and Vance have also embraced hyper-masculinity. The retired wrestler Hulk Hogan appeared at the Republican National Convention, ripping his shirt in half. The former president has given interviews to bro-y social media stars like Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports and the Nelk Boys, YouTubers who made a video of themselves watching Harris speak at the Democratic National Convention in which one guy in the group smashes her face on the TV with a sledgehammer.

Harris, backed by her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, embodies female power. It’s challenging for women to show strength without coming across as dominating. Harris has tried to find a balance by channeling her experience as a prosecutor into calmly and even pleasantly holding her ground. Trump and Vance treat this female power as a threat.

In presidential contests, the gender gap grew from seven percentage points in 2004 and 2008 to 10 points in 2012, 11 points in 2016, and 12 points in 2020, according to exit polls. This year, it has widened further since Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last month of likely voters in Pennsylvania, women favored Harris 55 percent to 41 percent and men favored Trump 52 percent to 39 percent.

This year, as in the last few election, one crucial group of voters in battleground states are women, mainly Republicans and Independents who have a college education and live in the suburbs in swing states. “The gender gap can ultimately sway the election,” said Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia. “When Democrats exploit it, they win, and when Republicans mitigate it, they win.”

Doubling Down on MAGA’s Male Side

The Trump campaign spelled out its thinking on the gender gap last summer. When Trump was running against Biden, and coasting in the polls, he showed unusual strength for a Republican among Black and Latino voters, especially young men. Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s top campaign advisers, expressed confidence about prioritizing young men of color over suburban women for targeting and turnout, according to a July 10 article in The Atlantic.

Less than a week later, Trump picked Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Vance injected overt anti-feminism into the campaign. He had said earlier this year that he was “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” These subcultures valorize “trad wives,” stay-at-home mothers with a 19th-century aesthetic, and treat women without children as an alarming force on the left who are “trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” as Vance put it to a Christian group in 2021. His dig at “childless cat ladies” in the same year, which he has since defended, named Harris as one of the Democrats who are miserable “at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

On this part of the right, men get to embrace raunch and celebrate women’s sexual availability as (somehow) a rebuke to feminism. And yet the possible consequences for women are unforgiving: Vance opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has supported a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks with some exceptions.

When Harris became the Democratic candidate, Trump’s decision to double down on the male side of MAGA looked riskier. With passion and skill Biden didn’t have on this issue, Harris began highlighting the loss of abortion rights caused by Trump’s nomination of three conservative Supreme Court justices. On the defensive, Trump veered between praising his own courage and refusing to say whether he would veto a national abortion ban.

Harris’s supporters, meanwhile, made her a TikTok star, spreading joyous — and decidedly feminine — memes of her dance steps, laughter and cooking. And Harris identifies herself as “Wife, Momala, Auntie” in her bio on X. “In the ’90s and even 2000s, female candidates wouldn’t showcase their families because of the perception that women couldn’t be both successful politicians and successful parents and wives,” Lawless said. “Sarah Palin helped change that by saying no to the stereotype as a conservative Republican.”

Trump tried a few lines of attack based on Harris’s identity. In July, he called her “dumb as a rock” and “crazy” and “Laughing Kamala” and said at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists that “she happened to turn Black.” Harris refused to respond. “It is delightful that she is not in a defensive posture,” said Loretta Ross, a professor of women and gender studies at Smith College and a founder of the reproductive justice group SisterSong. “Trump is so used to irritating people with his racism and misogyny. She has caught him off guard. He doesn’t know where to go.”

Walz has also helped foil Trump, in Ross’s view, by demonstrating that a man can be entirely comfortable as a woman’s No. 2. “He’s showing us tonic as opposed to toxic masculinity,” Ross said. He’s in a position that hasn’t been seen much on the national stage, and he’s putting his distinct brand of masculinity — a National Guard veteran and high school football coach who helped start a gay-straight alliance — behind supporting Harris with apparent gratitude and cheer.

Harris and Walz have a giant polling lead among young women, significantly higher than Trump and Vance’s lead with young men. That signals that the deepening divide on gender between the parties could last well into the future. And the Democratic ticket’s record-breaking fund-raising could put an end to the perception — false, according to Lawless’s research — that voters or donors are reluctant to support female candidates.

Still, the gender dynamics of the campaign work for Trump with his base. He is polling between 27 and 44 points ahead of Harris among all white voters without a college education in swing states. Not surprisingly, Trump’s numbers are highest with working-class men. Asked whether women’s gains have come at men’s expense, 40 percent of men ages 18 to 49 who support Trump said yes, compared with 17 percent of respondents overall, in a Pew Research Center survey published in June.

Men in this group often say they feel undervalued and left behind. Men are losing ground, in absolute terms and relative to women. Over the last three decades, white people without a bachelor’s degree have suffered a decline in health and income relative to white people with a bachelor’s degree and relative to Black people, according to Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist whose new book, “Stolen Pride,” focuses on the sources of Trump’s attraction.

“His appeal to people who feel like they are going downhill works on women, too,” Hochschild said. “Harris has done so many things right, but I do find missing from her enough recognition of the fear of blue-collar white people who have faced loss. I want that in her rap, to appeal to men and the women who are attached to those men.” A majority of women without a college education support access to abortion and trust Harris more than Trump on that issue, according to the polling firm Blueprint. They also view her more favorably than they viewed Biden. “Overall, non-college women across the seven swing states are moderate,” Blueprint said in September, “and express disdain for Donald Trump and a need to know more about Kamala Harris.”

Nonetheless, these women may wind up breaking for Trump because of economic issues — their top concern — and their class identity, as they have before. In that year’s campaign, Trump crudely attacked Hillary Clinton and faced a series of accusations of sexual assault, not to mention the “Access Hollywood” tape. And yet, while Clinton won the popular vote, a vast majority of Republican women across class lines, along with a sizable share of Independents, voted for Trump — enough for him to win.

Male Chaos, Female Order

It’s impossible, in the end, to prove that gender matters more than any other cultural issue in this year’s election. The race and class gaps among voters in the polls are even larger than the gender gap. Trump and Vance have especially focused on the issue of immigration and received enormous attention for their attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a way to divide people by race and class. Economic issues rank higher as a priority for voters than abortion does.

But Harris’s success in stepping into a losing race and turning it into an even contest, combined with the seeming ineffectiveness of the sexist attacks directed at her, could fundamentally shift the country’s view of what’s possible, no matter who wins. “We’ve reached an important change in the political environment,” Lawless said. “We’re not having a lot of pained conversation this time about whether the U.S. is ready to elect a woman or a Black woman. That has reared its head, but it’s not the central narrative.”

At the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance tried to soften his image, talking about making “it easier for moms to afford to have babies.” He gave no specifics but did acknowledge the trust deficit Republicans have on reproductive rights, making it clear that Republicans know they have ground to make up with women.

The response to the Republican rhetoric on gender suggests that what’s normal has changed. When Trump tried to reassure women about abortion rights at a September rally in Pennsylvania by saying “I am your protector” and decreeing that once he’s elected, “you will no longer be thinking about abortion,” he was mocked for it. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, ran down Harris at a Trump event for not having children, a Trump campaign adviser came forward to say he was offended — and blessed to have a stepmother who helped raise him.

Susan Faludi, a prominent author who has tracked gender issues in America for more than 30 years, sees gains for feminism that are greater for being understated. “I think Harris is doing something much more important than playing the woman card,” Faludi said. “If you look at the central planks of her platform, they are all what we used to call women’s issues — reproductive health care, medical care, child care, elder care. It’s an achievement that these are now regarded as foundational to Americans’ social and economic lives. That was the goal of the women’s movement — to change society by figuring out what the world would look like if women were treated as full citizens.”

Faludi sees something else happening beneath the surface of the contest between a man and a woman whose personas could not be more different. Harris is the candidate of order and Trump is the candidate of “Dionysian chaos,” she said. “In this particular race, stability seems to be coded as female and the desire to tear everything down is coded as male.” It’s a striking inversion of the usual dichotomy of conservative and liberal. But this is an election that has flipped so many things around.

Source photographs for illustration above: Pukach/Shutterstock; Africa studio/Shutterstock.

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