Recent polls show that Vice President Harris is having great difficulty attracting male voters, losing a larger share of men than women in key states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.
The gender divide among Republicans is nothing up-to-date, but it is particularly evident in the head-to-head presidential race.
Former President Trump’s problems with female voters are well known. New polls show that Harris is having just as massive a problem with male voters in some states.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, Harris and her political team largely downplayed her chance of making history as the first woman elected president. And political experts say male voters in some parts of the country remain skeptical about putting a woman in the Oval Office.
A senior Democratic Senate aide said sexism and misogyny are still powerful forces in the country’s swing states.
“Misogyny is a drug from hell,” the source joked, adding that the same problem arose eight years ago when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic candidate.
“It was euphemized when people said everyone hated Hillary Clinton,” the Democrat added.
In 2016, Clinton lost the male vote to Trump by 11 percentage points, 41 percent to 52 percent. In contrast, she won the female vote by 13 percentage points, 54 percent to 41 percent.
Trump’s campaign tried to exploit the gender gap by running ads in swing states that focused on the economy, inflation, illegal immigration and crime to appeal to younger male voters.
“It’s a battle of the sexes,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, of the trend of male voters turning to Trump and turning their backs on Harris. “There’s a sense that for every advance that women make, men are bound to lose.”
“In some cases, the statistics confirm this fear among men,” he added, pointing to the decline in the number of men attending college and also some of their earning power.
For every dollar a man earns, women still earn an average of 84 cents.
Baker said Harris’ choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach, as her running mate appeared to be aimed at making the Democratic slate more attractive to male voters.
“They saw him as a real man, and I think the idea was that he was someone who could connect with these very alienated male voters who feel that national politics has been very female-favored in recent years,” he said.
New polls show that male voters in Pennsylvania, one of the biggest winners on the 2024 electoral map, are turning away from Harris and toward Trump.
A up-to-date CNN/SSRS poll showed that Trump was ahead of Harris by 15 percentage points (55 percent to 40 percent) among likely male voters in Pennsylvania and that Harris was ahead of Trump by 11 percentage points (53 percent to 42 percent) among the state’s female voters.
By comparison, a CNN/SSRS poll conducted in March found that Trump had a smaller lead over President Biden among male voters in Pennsylvania: 51 percent to 41 percent.
JJ Abbott, a Democratic strategist who supports Harris in Pennsylvania, said the Trump campaign has saturated the state with attack ads aimed at luring away younger male voters.
“From a spending perspective, Pennsylvania has been inundated with advertising for months, which is not the case in the other swing states except Georgia,” he said. “The Trump campaign and its affiliated super PACs have basically made it official that Pennsylvania is the most critical thing to them.
“They are being tough on the state,” he added. “The Trump campaign has made no secret of the fact that they see younger men in particular as an important target group to focus on.”
In Nevada, too, male voters are leaning strongly toward Trump and away from Harris, according to the latest CNN/SSRS poll.
A up-to-date poll of likely voters in Nevada found that Trump has an 18 percentage point lead among male voters (57 percent to 39 percent), while Harris has a 16 percentage point lead among female voters (55 percent to 39 percent).
Jon Ralston, CEO of The Nevada Independent and the state’s leading political commentator, said: Voters in Nevada view the presidential election campaign differently than the race for seats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
“I think people look at the presidential election differently than any other election campaign,” he said.
Although Nevada has two female senators, Ralston noted, “Nevada has never had a female governor.”
“Nevada is a blue-collar state with lower levels of education than most other states. There is a very large Hispanic population and there is evidence that some Hispanic men are very conservative on some issues, which may be contributing to that,” he said of the gender gap showing up in polls.
However, Ralston also expressed his general skepticism about opinion polls in Nevada given the difficulty of accurately assessing public opinion.
Recent polls show that Trump maintains the upper hand across the gender gap in another swing state: North Carolina.
A poll of likely voters in the state conducted by East Carolina University from August 26 to 28 found Trump leading by 9 percentage points among male voters, 51.6 percent to 42.8 percent, and Harris leading by nearly 5 percentage points among female voters, 49.5 percent to 45.1 percent.
Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist from North Carolina, said: “The gender gap is real and it was actually there when Joe Biden and Donald Trump existed.”
He said some male voters were uncomfortable supporting a woman for president.
“We saw that in 2016. I think there is a certain part of the population that votes by gender, and we may see some of that again,” he said.
In 2016, Trump won North Carolina by 3.6 percentage points, or 173,000 votes, over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he beat Biden by a smaller margin—1.3 percentage points, or 74,000 votes.
However, Jackson said female voters were more likely to favor Harris because Trump’s “traditionalist, misogynistic and sexist views” “come through” and because they viewed Harris’ candidacy as “historic.”
And he said Harris won over Democratic voters in the state, where black voters are expected to make up about 20 percent of the electorate.
In Georgia, Trump is ahead by 10 percentage points among male voters (53 percent to 43 percent), and Harris is ahead by 10 percentage points among female voters (53 percent to 43 percent), according to a CNN/SSRS poll.
Even in California, a Democratic stronghold, Harris is losing support among male voters, according to a up-to-date poll from The Hill/Emerson College Polling. But she still holds a sizable lead over Trump among California’s liberal-leaning men.
Male support for Harris has declined significantly, with the 30-percentage-point lead she had among California’s male voters shrinking to 20 percentage points.
In Ohio, Trump now has a 26-point lead among men, according to The Hill/Emerson poll, far more than Harris’ 3-point lead among women. Trump’s lead among male voters in Ohio has increased by 6 points since 2020.
And in Florida, Trump has a 12 percentage point lead among men, while Harris has a two percentage point lead among women, the poll found. Among the state’s male voters, Trump had a 9 percentage point lead in 2020.
