The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

Democrats rarely win most men in competitive races for any major office, just as Republicans rarely win most women. As a result, the gender gap has been a constant in elections since the 1980s — but the question of which side benefits from it varies. Most elections are decided by which party does a better job of maximizing its advantage with its stronger gender, while minimizing its deficit with its weaker.

In the 2020 presidential race, Democrats held the gender advantage among voters. Joe Biden amassed a national lead among women (15 points) almost twice as large as his deficit among men (8 points), according to the exit polls conducted for a consortium of news organizations including CNN. That allowed Biden to comfortably win the popular vote. The former president likewise won women by at least as much as he lost men in five of the seven swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada), capturing them all. (Biden lost men by more than he won women in North Carolina and Georgia, but narrowly captured the latter anyway because women constituted such a large majority of the voters.)

In 2024, the equation flipped. Trump won the national popular vote after beating Vice President Kamala Harris among men by 12 percentage points and losing women to her by just 8, according to the exit polls. Harris still won most women in six of the seven key swing states (albeit generally by smaller margins than Biden did), but she lost men by more and saw each of those states go to Trump. (In Arizona, which Trump also carried, Harris lost both men and women.) The gender gap still existed in 2024, but it functioned in a way that boosted Trump.

Many of the women who voted for Trump in 2024 did so despite harboring clear doubts about him. In the exit poll, a strong majority of women said they considered his views too extreme — but about 1 in 9 of them who felt that way voted for him anyway. More than 1 in 4 women who said they believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases also voted for him; strikingly that was even higher than the percentage of women supporting abortion rights (about 1 in 5) who supported him in 2020, before his Supreme Court appointees helped to overturn the constitutional right to the procedure.

Jackie Payne, the executive director of Galvanize Action, a liberal group that studies moderate, working- and middle-class White women, told me during the 2024 election that in her polling and focus group research, women who thought Trump would improve their economic situation actively resisted any information that might complicate their decision to support him. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him — a strong economy — and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said then.

Now, Payne said, many of those women feel disappointed by Trump on both counts. “They feel he is not delivering for them on the economy and actually making things feel more insecure and unsafe in the rest of their lives,” she said.

Both ends of that equation are evident in polls. Women consistently express much more negative views than men about the economy and inflation: In the latest CNN/SSRS poll, 76% of women, compared with 62% of men, described the economy as poor. In a January poll by KFF, a nonpartisan health care think tank, women were slightly more likely than men to say they worried about affording their mortgage and health care, and much more likely to say they worried about affording food, groceries and utilities. In a New York Times/Siena University poll around the same time a 54%-45% majority of male voters said they could afford the life they want; an even larger 56%-42% majority of female voters said they could not. In that same survey, far more female voters (53%) than male voters (36%) said it was now unaffordable to raise a family.

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That opens Republicans to the risk that even more female voters will disapprove of Trump’s performance on Election Day than the 59% recorded in the 2018 exit poll. That’s an ominous prospect for the party, because even though that level of discontent with Trump helped Democrats record their best performance among women voters in any recent House election: The exit polls showed women that year preferred Democratic House candidates over Republicans by 19 percentage points, the biggest margin either side has recorded with either gender in any 21st century midterm.

The Democrats’ 2018 sweep offered more proof of Lake’s equation: Republicans still narrowly won men in the national House popular vote that year, but were routed because Democrats won women by much more, the exit polls found. The formula explained the 2022 and 2014 House elections, too: Republicans those years won men by much more than Democrats won women and gained seats each time.

The GOP’s biggest 2026 risk may be hiding in plain sight