This week’s headline is, of course, the Trump/Harris debate on Tuesday night. Given that the first Presidential debate effectively ended Biden’s candidacy it is fair to say that the stakes were high for both sides.
We mentioned last week that Trump was in an easier situation than Harris going into the debate, however. He was fully defined, for good or ill, with almost every American voter where she had a much vaguer image.
Both sides met their minimum conditions for the night, and Harris exceeded hers. Trump looked his energetic and talkative self, and that comfortably familiar performance is what his supporters wanted to see. Harris, on the other hand, managed to both stay composed and ultimately bait Trump into some soundbites Democratic strategists will be able to weaponize over the next two months (You can read the Harris campaign’s publicly released analysis of the result here and the Trump campaign’s here.)
The debate was widely watched, especially in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania. In the media, and some of the quick-turnaround polling, Harris appears to have come out ahead in terms of net impression.
The campaigns clearly view their potential upside from another debate differently, with the Harris campaign immediately pushing for a second one, while Trump stated that there will be no second debate. Harris’ team clearly feel that they made up ground, while Trump himself seems to feel that there is no upside for him in another round. That said, Trump has been known to change his mind as circumstances change, so we’ll what the chain reaction of countermoves has in store.
Right on the heels of the debate came the first major dominoes, when Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Because nothing makes me feel more alive, we can transition the Taylor Swift endorsement into a larger conversation about the gender gap on the ballot. The haters gonna hate, but Swift’s endorsement did have one immediate impact: driving over 400k worth of traffic to vote.gov with her post. But will it have an electoral impact?
Swift did endorse in the 2018 Tennessee Senate race, and while some thought it would doom Blackburn, it didn’t. But while that endorsement was more reminiscent of Swift’s Reputation-era clap-backs (“Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me”), her endorsement of Harris was relatively measured, though with the “childless cat lady” sign-off to add a little hook at the end.
What we need to be cautious of is treating this as a cause for the monster slowly lurching toward your favorite city: what will likely be the biggest gender gap we’ve ever seen.
The Center for American Women in Politics has a comprehensive factsheet on the gender gap, including looking at all the subgroups within the women’s vote. For the hope of it all, we’ve had a gender gap since the late 1970s, and 50 years is a long time. But it reached its peak in the last two elections, with a 12-point gap in 2020 following 11-points in 2016.
In polls from the last fortnight, the gender gap is at least at these peaks if not even bigger: The recent NYT/Sienna National Poll had the gender gap at 14-points, the NPR/PBS/Marist poll of RVs had the gap at 13-points and a NYPost Poll had it at 12-points. It’s smaller in some states. For example, in Florida (!!!), it’s only 8-points according to the latest Emerson poll.
There are two sides to this gender gap. As poorly as Republicans are doing with women, Democrats are doing poorly with men. But we’re not in the business of trying to help Democrats win, so let’s look how we got here and what we can do to minimize the impact.
The Republican party, led in large part by the Trump campaign, has leaned into an alpha type masculine approach to 2024 which made sense when it was a Trump v Biden race and virility was a stand in for having the energy to perform the job. It’s not a tone that women voters will naturally gravitate toward, but when the alternative was Biden, it was appealing enough to enough women. Now, everything has changed and with Harris as the opposition, those women are in exile and are leaving out the side door, but it’s too late to take back the Hulk Hogan moment at the convention and all it represents.
But still, while thematic choices exacerbate the gap, it is not the driver of the problem.
A recent Gallup analysis found that more women 18-29 are identifying themselves as political liberal than ever before. Another Gallup report earlier this year showed that younger and senior women were reporting more liberal while men were remaining consistent.
We couldn’t get through a conversation on the gender gap without talking about abortion (but aren’t you impressed we made it this far?). Part of the reason Gallup found more women 18-29 are considering themselves to be liberal comes from those who say abortion should be legal under any/most circumstances. In 2001-2007 this was 43%, it’s now 60%.
Earlier this year, Pew found that there was not a significant difference between how men and women viewed the issue, with 64% of women and 61% of men saying abortion should be legal in all/most cases, vs 33% of women and 38% of men saying it should be illegal in all or most cases. But clearly the issue has a greater salience for one gender over the other.
With the emphasis Democrats are placing on the issue post-Dobbs, the number of ballot measures where voters can directly have their say on the issue, and the clips Democrats have of Republican candidates saying they are “100% pro life,” it’s death by a thousand cuts.
It is noteworthy that more women cite being liberal on environmental issues than abortion, and the biggest gender gap between men and women 18-29 continues to be about the Second Amendment: 74% of women say gun laws should be more strict compared to 51% of men.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Republican policy and rhetoric has been trending more populist in the Trump era which is also exacerbating the gender dynamics through secondary effects. Trump’s populism strongly connects with non-college educated voters and alienates college educated voters. His ascendency in the Republican party sped up the shift of college educated voters (women and men) to supporting Democrats. With women outpacing men in college enrollment, populist messaging will have limited reach with women voters in the future.
This is not to say populism can’t connect with women – 20th century populism embraced suffrage. The growing educational attainment of women, especially relative to men, adds a ceiling to its usefulness—but there are still millions of women with whom a populist message will resonate if Republicans can find the right language to use to communicate.
Leading up to the debate, Tulsi Gabbard said, “President Trump respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing and to speak to women in any other way than he speaks to a man.” That’s right, but it’s also not: the invisible string here is that women approach issues differently than men, consume different media, react differently to the same terminology. It’s not about wholesale changing a message or campaign just to reach women. Instead, it’s about using the right imagery and language to focus on the same issues in a way that will connect with them.
Consider the economy: many Republicans feel comfortable talking about the economy like they’ve just walked off the set of CNBC: job numbers, wages, the stock market. But when women are talking about the economy, it’s more about prices, and costs (the outgoing rather than the incoming). It’s not patronizing to be speaking to costs instead of the stock market, it’s just good politics.
(Bonus for those of you who made it this far, the first person to correctly guess the number of Taylor Swift lyric references we worked into this email wins some WPAi swag)
Want to talk about the data more in-depth? We’re here to talk.
Alex Muir (amuir@wpaintel.com)
Amanda Iovino (aiovino@wpaintel.com)
Conor Maguire (cmaguire@wpaintel.com)