Is there really a ‘gender gap’ in the US election?

The 2024 US presidential election may be too close to call, but commentators and pollsters alike seem clear about one thing: Trump vs Harris is a battle of the sexes. Apparently, this is ‘the gender-gap election’. It’s ‘America’s men vs women election’, claims the BBC. ‘The differences between how men and women view the state of the nation, the issues that matter and the candidates is the defining divide in American politics today’, argues USA Today. But just how real are these divisions?

Surveys certainly show a greater proportion of women than men backing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. One recent poll suggests 53 per cent of women plan to vote Democrat, compared with only 36 per cent who back the Republicans. The same poll has men voting in the exact opposite way, with 53 per cent pledging to back Trump and 37 per cent backing Harris. This cuts across racial groups, too. A poll of black voters reports that 70 per cent of black men will back Harris, compared to 83 per cent of black women. Younger women are also far more likely to come out for Harris than younger men. These gender differences matter, because women cast their ballots in far greater numbers than men.

We should, however, be wary about reading too much into opinion polls. Nearly one in four Americans admits to lying about who they are supporting in the presidential election, with women more likely to say they are ‘not sure’ who they will vote for than men. Gen Z voters are especially happy to mislead pollsters. This is hardly surprising, given that women who backed Trump in 2016 were diagnosed as suffering from internalised misogyny. With Trump supporters being labelled ‘deplorable’, ‘garbage’, far right, fascists and Nazis, it is easy to see why people might give a more socially acceptable response to pollsters.

Whatever the truth behind the polls, the Democrats have not just leant into a gender divide, but also stoked it. Harris has seized on celebrity endorsements from the likes of Charli XCX, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift in the hopes of appealing to women. The stars came out in force to ensure that ‘this time, white women vote for a woman’. In other words, there must be no repeat of 2016, when white women misbehaved and backed Trump. Michelle Obama states it bluntly: ‘A vote for Trump is a vote against women.’ Her husband, meanwhile, has been chastising ‘the brothers’ for not ‘feeling the idea of having a woman as president’.

As part of her attempt to court the female vote, Harris has made reproductive rights central to her campaign. The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade in 2022 means there is genuine worry about continued access to abortion – an issue that, unsurprisingly, resonates more strongly with women than men. According to one survey, both men and women rate the economy as their primary concern when deciding who to vote for, but women rate abortion and women’s rights second. For men, this issue comes in seventh place. At the same time, some have accused Harris of fear-mongering and overstating the threat a Trump victory poses to abortion provision.

Despite what the headlines suggest, the gender gap may be more hype than reality. You might not sense it from reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, but plenty of women do back Trump – from erstwhile foes such as Tulsi Gabbard and Megyn Kelly to the Moms for Liberty crew and even black women who ‘are all-in for MAGA’.

Other women may not be throwing their weight behind Trump, but that doesn’t mean they’re voting for Harris, either. Novelist Lionel Shriver says that, as much as she hates Trump, Harris ‘has never had an original idea nor held a consistent principle’. Similarly, feminist Meghan Murphy believes that, while Trump might not be ‘perfect’, ‘the best option for America, for women, for children and for the working class is a Trump presidency’.

You can see why women are backing Trump. Harris might support abortion rights, but the Republicans are staking a claim to defending other crucial sex-based rights. At his recent Madison Square Garden rally, Trump promised that his team will get ‘transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports’. He says he will ask Congress to pass a bill stating there are ‘only two genders’ and ban hormonal or surgical intervention for transgender children across the whole country. Harris has shied away from talking about such issues, leading some to argue that ‘the trans issue is losing Kamala the election’. Pitching to women – and defending women’s reproductive rights – while being unable to name women as biological females is surely a difficult act to pull off.

Ultimately though, as the campaign draws to an end, both Harris and Trump have resorted to patronising women. Trump’s promise last week to protect women ‘whether they like it or not’ has sparked outrage, with Harris describing the remark as ‘very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies’. She seems to have missed the point. Trump’s comment wasn’t a reference to abortion, but to illegal migration. And it was delivered as a joke at the expense of his advisers, who apparently warned him not to say it.

Harris’s comments about women’s agency would be more convincing were it not for a pro-Democrat advertisement currently doing the rounds. The video features Julia Roberts reminding women (presumably intimidated by their husbands) that, in the polling booth, ‘you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know’. Thanks, Julia!

Women might be telling pollsters they back Harris, but they deserve far better than being patronised and insulted in turn. Having stoked a ‘historic gender gap’, it would only be fitting if the Democrats were to lose to a candidate who, if nothing else, knows what a woman is.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.