Are women voters poised to promote Vice President Kamala Harris to the Oval Office, or are they showing hesitancy? Are male voters clamoring for a second Donald Trump presidency, or are they rejecting the Republican nominee’s misogynistic appeals?
Of course, we won’t be able to answer these questions until the votes are counted. But with Election Day in less than nine weeks, we can try to assess which candidate is proving more adept at navigating the gender gap, and if the electorate is rising above divisive tactics.
Introducing the Washington Monthly Gender Gap Tracker.
I’ve noticed political commentators as of late predicting or suggesting that the 2024 presidential election will have the largest gender gap ever.
That might be true.
However, as I noted last month when I asked, “Are Men Ready for Kamala?” The available data is conflicting. Some polls show a historic gender gap, others a narrow crack.
Whenever there’s a new poll, whether it’s the topline numbers or the demographic subsamples, the standard caution applies: it’s only one survey. But when it comes to gender gap analyses, often mainstream media reporters do not follow this rule.
Calculating averages can give us a better, if still inconclusive, picture. When considering the latest gender gap data, we should compare it to the past gender gaps.
That is the mission of the Washington Monthly Gender Gap Tracker.
For this inaugural edition of the Tracker, I used all the national polls collected for the FiveThirtyEight database fully sampled after the Democratic National Convention, except polls with partisan sponsors. I also left out one polling outfit flagged by the analysts at Split Ticket for having a questionable methodology.
Most are two-way heats between Harris and Trump, with likely voters sampled. Still, I used multi-candidate polls or registered voter samples when no other option from a particular pollster was available.
Ten polls cleared those criteria. Let’s go to the Tracker!
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WASHINGTON MONTHLY GENDER GAP TRACKER: SEPTEMBER 5 EDITION
GENDER GAP: 16.2
OVERALL AVERAGE
Harris: 49.6
Trump: 45.8
Margin: Harris +3.8
FEMALE AVERAGE
Harris: 52.4
Trump: 41.2
Margin: Harris +11.2
MALE AVERAGE
Trump: 49.7
Harris: 44.7
Margin: Trump +5
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Here are a few questions you might be asking to help make sense of this data.
Q: How would a 16-point gender gap compare to the three most recent elections?
A: It would be smaller than the last two elections and roughly similar to the 2012 election.
Here’s the data from Catalist’s thorough post-election analysis:
2020 GENDER GAP: 19
FEMALE
Biden 56
Trump 43
Margin: Biden +13
MALE
Trump 52
Biden 46
Margin: Trump +6
2016 GENDER GAP: 24
WOMEN
Clinton: 54
Trump: 41
Margin: Clinton +13
MEN
Trump: 52
Clinton: 41
Margin: Trump +11
2012 GENDER GAP: 15
WOMEN
Obama: 55
Romney: 44
Margin: Obama +11
MEN
Romney: 51
Obama: 47
Margin: Romney +4
Q: Why is the current Harris-Trump gender gap average smaller than the Clinton-Trump gender gap?
A: The 2016 election—pitting Trump, a brazen misogynist, against Hillary Clinton, a feminist icon—produced the largest known gender gap in history.
The 2020 election, Trump’s second time on the ballot, was the third largest. The second largest was the 2000 election, which featured Al Gore and George W. Bush. As I noted last month, we only began seeing significant gender gaps with the 1980 presidential election.
Clinton came out on the short end of the 24-point gap because of a drop in male support (She improved among college-educated white women but declined among non-college white women). Obama scored 47 percent of the male vote in 2012. Biden got a similar 46 percent in 2020, but Clinton only managed 41 percent.
Harris’s current average of 44.7 percent support among men tracks closer to the victorious Joe Biden and Barack Obama campaigns. (Today’s polls generally include undecided voters and have inflated third-party numbers, so we can expect the final Election Day numbers to be slightly higher.)
Q. Are today’s polls showing consistent gender breakdowns?
Absolutely not! We are seeing wildly different gender gaps depending on the poll.
For example, two recent polls—Quinnipiac University and USA Today/Suffolk University, have gender gaps well above 30 points, with Harris’s male share at 40 percent and 38 percent, respectively, but female share in the upper 50s. (Quinnipiac is one of Harris’s worst national post-convention polls, with a slight one-point lead overall.)
But the gender gap in The Economist/YouGov poll is a barely perceptible 5 points, with Harris winning women by 4 points and trailing Trump with men by just one point.
Is the average closer to reality? Or are some of these polls better at collecting accurate subsamples than others? We can’t know yet.
However, Harris supporters should be heartened by this data point: Only two of these ten polls show Harris performing with men at or below Hillary Clinton’s low of 41 percent. In five of the 10, Harris is already reaching—or clearing—Biden’s 46 percent level.
Keep reading the Washington Monthly newsletter for weekly updates of the Gender Gap Tracker.
