The Washington Monthly Gender Gap Tracker numbers for Week 4 aren’t much different than Week 3.
But this gives us an opportunity to explore another aspect of the gender gap: the youth vote.
This week, the Harvard Youth Poll provided fresh general election trial heat data for voters under the age of 30, helping us better understand the Generation Z gender gap.
Several recent news reports have suggested that Gen Z men are moving rightward and embracing Donald Trump. And the Trump campaign is clearly targeting young men with a media strategy heavy on testosterone-drenched podcasts.
But what does the data really show?
First, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:
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The Chaos of the Supreme Court’s Last Term—and What May Be Coming This Time: Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps offers a dire preview of the next term for a Supreme Court “caught in currents it can’t predict or control.” Click here for the full story.
Americans Have Not Actually Turned Against Higher Education Like the Media Says: Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen of New America find that most Americans want to send their kids to “some form of education and training after high school.” Click here for the full story.
With the Senate on the Line, It’s Time for Democrats to Spend in Florida and Texas: My case for Democrats competing in the two expensive megastates with longshot Senate races. Click here for the full story.
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Publicly available Gen Z trial heat data, testing levels of support for Trump and Kamala Harris, is scant. Yet that doesn’t stop media outlets from wild speculation in hopes of identifying a new political trend.
For example, last month The New York Times published an article titled, Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer.
The premise rested on six New York Times/Siena College swing state polls conducted in August in which, collectively, “young men favored Mr. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Ms. Harris by 38 points, a 51-point gap.”
That’s an absolutely enormous gap—probably too enormous to be true.
Poll data subsamples are notoriously sketchy because the samples are small and come with high margins of error.
For example, in the Times’s August poll of Wisconsin, the overall sample size was 661 respondents, and the margin of error was determined to be plus-or-minus 4.3 points. The number of voters under 30 in that sample was only 83, meaning roughly 40 male and female Gen Z respondents. The margin of error for a subsample of 40 people, whatever it is, must be extremely high—high enough to make the subsample data worthless.
In early September, the NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll was released, based on a sample of more than 2,600 voters under 30. The poll found Trump doing surprisingly well among young men nationally: “Young women said they’re going to vote for Harris for president by 30 points. Young men also said they favor Harris — but by only 4 points over Trump.”
That’s a 26-point gender gap. But with Trump almost matching Harris among young men, Harris was left with an overall lead with under 30 voters of just 16 points, smaller than the youth margin of the last three Democratic nominees, which, according to Catalist, were all 22 or 23 points. (Catalist does not breakdown youth data by gender.)
The new Harvard Youth Poll, which sampled about 2,000 young voters, tells a different story. Harris leads Trump among Gen Zers by a robust 32 points, thanks to a solid 17-point lead among men and an astronomical 47-point lead among women.
The Harvard Youth Poll story is not one in which young men are sharply moving right and buoying Trump, but one in which young women are sharply moving left to the net benefit of Harris.
We cannot say at this point that the Harvard Youth Poll is more accurate than the NBC News poll. The last several weeks of tracking dozens of national polls for the Gender Gap Tracker reminds us that the range of gender gap results is very wide. One or two polls offers a shaky basis for sweeping declarations.
We need a lot more data before concluding that Trump is resonating broadly with young men.
And now, your Week 4 Gender Gap Tracker.
To refresh: the Gender Gap Tracker follows both the Gender Gap—the distance between the margin among women and the margin among men—and the Gender Gap Tilt—the difference between the female lead and the male lead.
We have adjusted the Week 3 numbers because the NBC News poll released on Sunday (with Harris leading by five, powered by a 21-point lead among women) was sampled in the Week 3 period. The Week 3 Gender Gap has been adjusted upward from 18.2 to 19.4, and the Gender Gap Tilt from Harris +4.5 to Harris +4.9.
With that addition, last week’s Tracker was composed of 12 national polls. This week we have six. (Two polls with strong leads for Harris, Ipsos and Morning Consult, are not included because their gender data is not publicly available.)
WASHINGTON MONTHLY GENDER GAP TRACKER
SEPTEMBER 26 EDITION
GENDER GAP: 16.0 (change from last week: down 3.4)
GENDER GAP TILT: Harris +4.3 (0.6 shift toward Trump)
OVERALL AVERAGE
Harris: 49.0
Trump: 46.5
Margin: Harris +2.5 (0.5-point shift toward Trump)
FEMALE AVERAGE
Harris: 52.7
Trump: 42.5
Margin: Harris +10.2 (2-point shift toward Trump)
MALE AVERAGE
Trump: 50.8
Harris: 45.0
Margin: Trump +5.8 (1.5-point shift toward Harris)
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Similar to last week, Harris’s 45 percent average share of men is very close to the final male shares won by victorious Democrats Barack Obama (47 percent in 2012) and Joe Biden (46 percent in 2020), and not reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s subpar 41 percent performance.
Harris’s female share, just under 53 percent, is close to Clinton’s 54 percent and Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. (Biden’s 56 percent tied Obama’s 2008 performance with women as the best by a Democrat since at least 1972.)
The overall picture remains the same: Harris holding her own with men, helping her keep a modest lead over Trump.
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Best,
Bill
