New polls show Vice President Harris faces a major challenge in winning over male voters and is losing men by a bigger margin than she’s winning women in key states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.
The gender gap between Democrats and Republicans isn’t new, but it’s becoming especially pronounced in the toss-up race for president.
Former President Trump’s problems with female voters are well known. New polls show that Harris has just as big of a problem with male voters in some states.
At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Harris and her political team largely downplayed her chance of making history by becoming the first woman elected president, and political experts say male voters in some parts of the country remain leery about putting a woman in the Oval Office.
A senior Senate Democratic aide said sexism and misogyny are still powerful forces in the country’s battleground states.
“Misogyny is a hell of a drug,” the source quipped, who said the same problem reared its head when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee eight years ago.
“It was glossed over when people said everyone hated Hillary Clinton,” the Democrat added.
Clinton lost the male vote to Trump in 2016 by 11 points, 41 percent to 52 percent, while she won the female vote by 13 points, 54 percent to 41 percent.
Trump’s campaign has tried to exploit the gender divide by saturating battleground states with advertising focused on the economy, inflation, illegal immigration and crime, designed to appeal to younger male voters.
“It’s battle of the sexes,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, regarding the trend of male voters turning toward Trump and away from Harris. “The feeling is that for every advance women make, men necessarily lose.”
“In some instances, the statistics bear out this apprehension among men,” he added, pointing to the declines in the number of men attending college as well as some of their earning power.
Women still earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by a man, on average.
Baker said Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school football coach, as her running mate appeared designed to give the Democratic ticket more appeal with male voters.
“They saw him as a man’s man, and I think the idea was that he is somebody who could connect with these very alienated male voters who feel that the trend of national policy in recent years has been very much tilted in favor of women,” he said.
New polling shows that male voters have shifted toward Trump and away from Harris in Pennsylvania, one of the biggest prizes of the 2024 electoral map.
A new CNN/SSRS poll showed Trump leading Harris among likely male voters in Pennsylvania by 15 points — 55 percent to 40 percent — and Harris leading Trump among female voters in the state by 11 points — 53 percent to 42 percent.
In comparison, a CNN/SSRS poll conducted in March showed Trump with a smaller lead over President Biden among male voters in Pennsylvania: 51 percent to 41 percent.
J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist working to help Harris in Pennsylvania, said the Trump campaign has saturated the state with attack ads aimed at moving younger male voters.
“From a spending perspective, Pennsylvania has just been completely inundated for months with advertising in a way that the other swing states outside of Georgia really haven’t,” he said. “The Trump campaign, their affiliated super PACs, they’ve basically said on the record, for them, Pennsylvania is the ballgame.
“They are coming down heavy on the state,” he added. “The Trump campaign has made it no real secret that they see younger men, in particular, as a pretty key demographic for them to focus on.”
Male voters are also swinging hard to Trump and away from Harris in Nevada, according to the latest CNN/SSRS poll.
The new survey of likely voters in Nevada showed Trump with an 18-point lead among male voters, 57 percent to 39 percent, while Harris had a 16-point lead among female voters, 55 percent to 39 percent.
Jon Ralston, CEO of The Nevada Independent and a leading political commentator in the state, said that Nevada voters regard the presidential race differently than races for the U.S. Senate and House.
“I think people do look at the presidency differently than any other race,” he said.
While Nevada has two women serving as senators, Ralston noted, “there has never been a female governor of Nevada.”
“Nevada is a very blue-collar state and has a lower higher-education attainment than most states. It has a very large Hispanic population, and there is some evidence that some Hispanic men are very conservative on some issues and that may be contributing to it,” he said of the gender gap shown in polls.
But Ralston also expressed his general skepticism of polling in Nevada, given the difficulty of accurately gauging public opinion.
Recent polling shows Trump getting the better of the gender divide in another swing state: North Carolina.
An East Carolina University poll conducted Aug. 26-28 among likely voters in the state found Trump leading by 9 points among male voters — 51.6 percent to 42.8 percent — and Harris leading by nearly 5 points among female voters — 49.5 percent to 45.1 percent.
Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina-based Democratic strategist, said “the gender gap is real and it was actually here when it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”
He said some male voters aren’t comfortable supporting a woman for president.
“We saw that in 2016. I think there’s a certain segment of the population that votes by gender, and we may see part of that again,” he said.
Trump carried North Carolina over Hillary Clinton by 3.6 percentage points, or 173,000 votes, in 2016. He beat Biden by a smaller margin — 1.3 percentage points, or 74,000 votes — in 2020.
But Jackson said female voters are skewing toward Harris because Trump’s “traditionalist misogynistic, sexist views” are “coming through,” and they also see Harris’s candidacy as “historic.”
And he said Harris has revved up Democratic voters in the state, where Black voters are expected to make up about 20 percent of the electorate.
In Georgia, Trump has a 10-point lead among male voters, 53 percent to 43 percent, and Harris has a 10-point lead among female voters, 53 percent to 43 percent, according to a CNN/SSRS survey.
Even in California, a Democratic stronghold, a new survey by The Hill/Emerson College Polling shows Harris losing support among male voters, though she still maintains a sizeable lead over Trump among California’s liberal-leaning men.
Male support for Harris has dropped substantially. The 30-point advantage she enjoyed among California male voters has dropped to a 20-point advantage.
In Ohio, Trump now has a 26-point lead among men, far more than Harris’s 3-point advantage with women, according to The Hill/Emerson poll. Trump’s lead among male voters in Ohio has increased by 6 points since 2020.
And in Florida, Trump has a 12-point lead among men while Harris has a 2-point lead among women, the survey showed. Trump had a 9-point advantage among male voters in the state in 2020.