Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a modest bump in post-debate polls. Is she doing better with women? With men? Is the gender gap getting wider or narrower?
We’ll check in on Week 3 of the Washington Monthly Gender Gap Tracker. But first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:
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Trump’s Laziest Campaign: My comparison of Donald Trump’s campaign trail activity in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Click here for the full story.
Tavis Smiley Is “Increasingly Concerned About the Monopolized America We Live In”: David Masciotra interviews the broadcast journalist about his latest book, The Covenant with Black America: 20 Years Later. Click here for the full story.
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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.
For example, in last week’s Tracker, Harris averaged a 9.9-point lead among women and a 9.2-point deficit among men, creating a total Gender Gap of 19.1 points. As Harris’s female lead was 0.7 points bigger than Trump’s male lead, the Gender Gap Tilt was Harris +0.7.
Last week’s Gender Gap Tracker was composed of six national polls with available gender crosstabs, all sampled before the debate. This week’s edition has 11 such post-debate polls, painting a brighter picture for Harris.
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WASHINGTON MONTHLY GENDER GAP TRACKER
SEPTEMBER 19 EDITION
GENDER GAP: 18.2 (change from last week: down 0.9)
GENDER GAP TILT: Harris +4.5 (3.8-point shift toward Harris)
OVERALL AVERAGE
Harris: 49.5
Trump: 46.6
Margin: Harris +2.8 (2-point shift toward Harris)
FEMALE AVERAGE
Harris: 53.5
Trump: 42.2
Margin: Harris +11.4 (1.5-point shift toward Harris)
MALE AVERAGE
Trump: 51.6
Harris: 44.8
Margin: Trump +6.8 (2.4-point shift toward Harris)
(Note: Numbers don’t add up exactly because of rounding.)
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We can see that Harris’s improvement in the past week, in the aftermath of the debate, is slightly more attributable to a reduced deficit among men rather than an expanded lead among women.
This suggests Trump’s strategy of demeaning Harris’s intelligence, a strategy with misogynistic undertones, failed to impress men in the wake of Harris’s commanding debate performance.
In fact, Harris’s average with men—a tick below 45 percent—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.
And since most polls include undecideds or an inflated third-party vote, this week’s average suggests that on Election Day Harris would meet the Obama/Biden male benchmark.
Also of note: Our Week 3 polls paint a more consistent gender gap picture than our prior weeks.
In Week 1, the range of gender gaps was absurdly wide: from two to 38 points. This week, the gender gaps in eight of the 11 polls are within three points of the 18.2 point gender gap average. Also, in six of the polls, Harris’s Gender Gap Tilt is in a narrow range between six and nine points.
I was on the verge of reporting to you that in Week 3 not a single poll showed Harris’s male share as low or lower than Clinton … until this morning’s national poll from The New York Times and Siena College.
The Times finds a 47-47 percent deadlock in the overall number, the second worst poll for Harris out of the 11 in this week’s Tracker. Yet it’s the worst poll this week for Harris in regard to the male vote, coming in at 40 percent. The same was true last week, when Harris got only 39 percent among men in the Times.
The lone poll in this week’s set with a Trump lead, AtlasIntel, gives the Republican an unusually strong 47 percent share of the female vote. AtlasIntel and the Times are the only two this week in which Trump wins the Gender Gap Tilt.
Just because those two are this week’s outliers does not automatically mean they are wrong.
But the overall picture shows Harris holding her own with men, helping her gain a modest lead over Trump.
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Best,
Bill
