What’s Really Fueling U.S. Voters?
In the end, the election may boil down to different ideas about female and male roles; to gender equality and gender traditionalism.
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There’s a gender gap among U.S. voters, and it’s substantial. Women, especially younger women, are more likely to lean Democratic. Men, as you likely guessed, are more likely to lean Republican.
Data sources, too many to count, show this directionally, but to put some numbers to it, one survey suggests that about 57% of young women show a preference for Harris, while just 45% of men show a preference for her.
In many ways, it makes sense.
After all, on one side we have a candidate poised to become the first woman president of the United States—and wouldn’t that be nice? And on the other? A man approaching 80 who has made, among so many other things, a sport of bragging about his exploits with women. (Exhibit A: The Survivors for Kamala ad which ran in The New York Times this week.)
But something interesting is going on just beneath the surface, too: Voter priorities. To put it simply, women’s and men’s priorities are not aligned; far from it. In one recent poll, for example, young American women listed abortion as their top issue, while another survey found that men between 18-40 listed inflation as their top issue. In fact, by some measures, abortion may not even breach these men’s top 10.
While both women and men favor abortion rights and both have concerns about the economy, ranking abortion rights as a top priority leads to greater support for Harris, while ranking the economy highly leads to a more likely vote for Trump. Other things affect the vote too starting with the plain fact that women are more likely to vote than men. If you’re a married woman you’re more likely to vote in line with your husband. But the percentage of single women—who vote differently than single men—is larger now than in prior generations, contributing to the growing differences in partisan affiliation.
This yawning gap, which is global in scope and has been growing steadily, can in part be explained by the history of the American workplace. We’ll explain.
Taking Cues From the Workplace
We are the authors of the book “Fair Shake,” which looks at how, over the last half century, the American workplace has evolved to produce a “winner-take-all” economy that enriches a few at the expense of many.
The winners are able to do it because many workplace cultures still celebrate the norms of masculinity. Corporate workplaces, once criticized as the complacent world of “organization men,” have become “tournaments,” where the ambitious vie for high-stakes bonuses. In this world, executives prove their worth by engaging in aggressive behaviors, cut-throat competition and rule-breaking. They may work fanatical hours; take unnecessary risks; and often there is evidence of bullying and sexually harassing other workers—especially when they feel a masculinity threat.
You can see it when “charismatic CEOs” promise outsize results and take great—often unethical—risks to achieve them. You can see it in inflated paychecks and bonuses granted to CEOs and their lieutenants. (The gap between CEO and average worker pay has skyrocketed and is now 290 to one.) You can see it when CEOs routinely fire workers (Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently quipped about it.) And you can see it in a tendency to break laws and destroy unions—anything really, that gets in the way of their goals, as if the rules don’t apply to them.
Growing Disillusionment
The trends that have remade tech, finance and the upper reaches of the American business of course have ramifications for ordinary working Americans—including, of course, those who vote.
Throughout the industrialized world, mid-level jobs—particularly secure high-paying manufacturing jobs historically held by men—are dwindling thanks to the “charismatic CEOS” cutting jobs, whether by automating them or sending them abroad. That leaves men picking between competitive high-end jobs which may be too high a reach or lower-end jobs that represent a loss in income and status. (Meanwhile lots of the mid-level jobs that do remain—like construction and agriculture—are cyclical, have volatile income and offer less security.)
Women, by contrast, have gained a more secure, though far from equal, toehold in the economy. They have become better educated than their male counterparts, and the female-typical jobs in the middle of the economy—those in health care, education, or government services—are more secure, although they are lower-paying.
The result is women and men are entering this election cycle on unequal footing—men feeling less secure than they have in the past, women more secure. And we know this type of insecurity makes voters reach for a savior—or an authoritarian.
Even without these economic shifts, men are more likely to see the world in terms of hierarchy and competition and frame it as a zero-sum game. In other words, if you aren’t winning, you’re losing.
Those who perceive themselves as losing (say, due to women’s growing gains or men’s dwindling jobs), experience higher levels of status threat. It’s the same old idea that gains for one group—such as women or immigrants—result in a loss to other groups. A full 40% of male Trump supporters under age 50 believe that women’s gains in society have come at the expense of men.
This idea plays out globally: As young women around the world have polled more liberal over the past decade, young men have become “more patriarchal” when compared with women and older men.
The Gendered Terms of the Election
The clash between Trump and Harris can be cast in gendered terms. Trump represents personalized power (“I alone can fix it”) tied to strength and dominance. He stokes fear and insecurity. He has made the vilification of immigrants a central part of his campaign, blaming them for increased crime rates—even though crime is down—and for the loss of “Black and Hispanic jobs.” And he has doubled down on racist rhetoric to appeal to white voters. In short, he is playing directly to male economic anxieties.
In times of insecurity and chaos, as the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote in 1941, people feel anxiety, seek security, and latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. Sound familiar?
Then there’s Harris, the prosecutor, who represents the rule of law and not just a willingness, but a determination, to hold rule-breakers, including those who abuse women, to account. As she said in an early campaign speech: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type.”
In a “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” call, Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, emphasized, “the reason rural America hurts is because robber barons like these guys have come in…they undermine the basic social safety net that makes this country great.” If you’re paying attention, the reference is easy to spot: Walz was drawing a comparison between the “robber barons” (or corporate titans) of the Gilded Age and today’s free market billionaires who block regional economic investment and other support for workers.
So what’s really fueling this election? In the end it may boil down to different ideas about female and male roles; to gender equality and gender traditionalism. These are key values that seem to divide Democrats and Republicans, with female Republicans being dramatically more likely than female Democrats to embrace patriarchal values. As for those young men who believe that American society has become “too soft and feminine” and who see themselves as “very masculine”—they’re the same ones that are substantially more likely to identify as Republican than other men.
That’s why it’s not just Harris vs. Trump on the ballot this November (our apologies to the third-party candidates we may have overlooked), but gendered attitudes toward freedom, authoritarianism, equality, and the rule of law that will ultimately be put to the test.
Ruchi Kumar
Holly Baxter
Vicki Shabo
