Vice President Kamala Harris‘s lack of support among men is undermining her campaign, but her White House bid could be salvaged by women.
Harris has tried not to depend on her gender to appeal to women, instead relying on former President Donald Trump‘s policies, particularly regarding abortion, and personality to underscore the contrast between them. But as Trump dominates with men and attempts to make his own pitch to women, Harris is depending on women to win in November.
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Historically, more women have voted for Democrats and men for Republicans, at least during the past three decades. But this election’s gender gap between Harris and Trump of approximately 30 percentage points, depending on the poll, is “historic,” according to Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake.
For Lake, the 2024 gender gap is “rivaled” by that between 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump, when it was 26 points, contending “having a woman candidate is part of it.”
But the gender gap this election has also been exacerbated by “the perceived role of government, especially when it comes to the economy and safety net programs,” Lake told the Washington Examiner.
“Women think that their family might someday need support,” she said. “Men think it’s a good day when [the] government hasn’t done anything bad to you. Abortion is really animating women. And finally, women are much more turned off by Trump’s divisive and toxic style.”
Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy agreed that “there is little doubt the abortion issue is the driving issue in the disparity.”
“In every poll we’ve done, national or swing state, Harris has more female support than Trump has male support,” Malloy told the Washington Examiner.
That creates a slight structural advantage for Harris since women comprised 52% of the electorate in 2020, per Democratic strategist and pollster Stefan Hankin.
“If the same is true this year, then men have to have a 0.8% bigger gap to make up the difference,” Hankin told the Washington Examiner. “Right now, the gender gap is usually a mirror image, which puts Harris in a better position, given the larger share of female voters, but easy for that to change in theory.”
To that end, Harris is continuing to reach out to women, regardless of her edge, including through Alex Cooper’s Call Your Daddy podcast, in which her “Daddy gang” audience is 70% women, with 76% of those women being younger than 35.
Recognizing his own problems with the demographic, Trump is providing counterprogramming by holding a women-only town hall on Fox News on Wednesday. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump also leads his Women for Trump group.
Meantime, Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has made entreaties to men resulting in social media memes. His outreach to men included a Good Morning America interview with former professional football player Michael Strahan, delivering a pep talk for the high school football team he used to coach in Minnesota, and pheasant hunting to coincide with the launch of the Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz organization, though he has been mocked by the Trump campaign for the latter.
“Tampon Tim Walz spent the morning desperately attempting to make up ground with male voters by staging a pheasant ‘hunting’ photo op,” the Trump campaign wrote in an email. “There were no guns in sight — a sign of the future under a Harris-Walz administration.”
The polls have tightened in recent days, with Trump erasing Harris’s edge and reclaiming the lead in nearly all the battleground states. Still, the combination of Trump and abortion may drive up the turnout Harris needs among Democratic women.
Democratic strategist Tracy Sefl argued that women do not want their younger counterparts to “live in a world where they’re devalued, insulted, seen as a threat, and all but spied on in their bedrooms.
“Ultimately, women having their fundamental rights taken away just won’t vote for the guy who’s responsible for doing so — that is my great hope,” Sefl told the Washington Examiner.
Republican strategist and pollster Whit Ayres advised Democrats against making such assumptions, saying that it is “certainly possible but not definite” that Harris can win the election with women, but “the question is the margin by which she wins women, and is that large enough to overcome the margin by which Trump will win men.”
Another challenge for Harris is “the ‘replacement value’ of the lost gender,” according to Suffolk University Political Research Center Director David Paleologos, which he asserted is also “unprecedented” this election.
“For example, if Trump picks up an additional white man, Harris only needs to offset that pickup with an additional white woman,” Paleologos told the Washington Examiner. “But for every additional Hispanic man that Trump picks up, Harris needs two additional Hispanic women in order to protect the nearly 2-to-1 margin enjoyed by [President Joe] Biden in 2020 among all Hispanics.”
“For every additional black man that Trump picks up, Harris must find an offsetting 13 additional black women in order to protect the 13-to-1 landslide ratio among all blacks that Biden won in 2020,” he continued. “If she can’t find those 13 additional votes in the black community, she has to find them elsewhere.”
Ayres, again, advised caution because “it all depends on what state you’re talking about and what district you’re talking about.”
“You can’t make a flat statement like that that applies across the board,” the pollster said. “The vast majority of people have made up their minds, but there’s still a sliver of undecided, and the election could be determined by that sliver of undecided.”
Concerns about the gender gap are punctuated by Harris’s campaign schedule this week.
After interviews with black men-orientated Roland Martin and The Shade Room, which aired Monday morning, she traveled to Erie, Pennsylvania, in an all-important swing county in this election’s possible tipping point battleground state, for a rally and to speak with black men at a black-owned business about her Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. That agenda, which she announced Monday, includes forgivable business loans for black entrepreneurs, education, training, and mentorship programs for black men, a black men’s national health equity initiative, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
Then, on Tuesday, Harris will be in Detroit, Michigan, for a live audio town hall with Breakfast Club radio show host and media personality Charlamagne tha God and another stop with black entrepreneurs.
Ayres dismissed criticism that Harris’s events and policy proposals are unimportant or tokenistic because undecided voters do not tend to “split evenly.”
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“They usually go to one candidate or the other disproportionately, and that tends to be driven by events that occur in the last 10 days, two weeks of the election,” he said.
They come after former President Barack Obama complicated matters for Harris last week during his 2024 campaign debut in which he told Democratic staff and volunteers at a Pennsylvania field office that the vice president’s lack of support among black men is related to sexism.