U.S. election: There was a gender gap, but not a big impact

Donald Trump ran a campaign centered on hypermasculinity, actively courting young men in particular with interviews on popular male-centric podcasts.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, the former president and many of his surrogates leaned into sexist remarks and jokes about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some of his supporters, including former presidential rival Nikki Haley, warned that the former president risked exacerbating his persistent gender gap with Harris. Prominent surrogates from billionaire Elon Musk to Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point, called on men to vote in large numbers to counter Harris’ expected strength among women.

In the end, the gender voting gap was unremarkable by recent historical standards.

Here are some takeaways from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide:

Men were more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey showed. That gap in voting preferences has largely remained the same, even as vote choice among men and women has moved modestly.

Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53 per cent to Trump’s 46 per cent, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to the survey. In 2020, VoteCast showed Biden won 55 per cent of women, while 43 per cent went for Trump.

And it’s nothing new: The majority of women have preferred the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1996, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.

Trump benefited from narrow gains among men and women both, with Harris modestly underperforming compared with Biden in 2020. Fifty-four per cent of men backed Trump in 2024, compared with 51 per cent in 2020.

The shifts by gender were concentrated among younger voters, as well as Black and Latino voters. White voters across genders and older voters across genders voted similarly in 2024 as they did in 2020.

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Women under 30 voted for Harris over Trump, but it was a somewhat smaller majority supporting her, at 58 per cent, than Biden in 2020, at 65 per cent.

1:49 U.S. election 2024: What’s behind the large gender gap among voters?

There was some indication that the Trump campaign’s overtures to young men worked: More than half of men under 30 supported Trump over Harris, but in 2020, the split was reversed.

Trump also about doubled his share of young Black men, cutting into a key Democratic voting group. About 3 in 10 Black men under the age of 45 went for Trump, roughly double the number he got in 2020. For their part, Latino men were less open to the Democratic nominee than they were in 2020. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden.

This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. v. Wade, and it was the second chance in history for Americans to elect their first female president.

Those issues, along with worries about the sexist rhetoric from the Trump camp, were important to many women. But concerns about immigration and inflation weighed more heavily on many voters and cut across gender lines.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said that while it may not have been main reason for his victory, Trump successfully tapped into fear that gender norms and power dynamics are being disrupted.

Dittmar said the results showed that “a majority of voters were willing to disregard misogyny and racism, and some were even motivated by it.”

“We don’t always acknowledge the degree to which our citizens are actually invested in sexism or racism as it pertains to political power,” Dittmar said.

Only about 1 in 10 women said electing a woman president was the top factor in their votes, and 4 in 10 women said it wasn’t a motivator at all. Black women were the most driven by the possibility of the first woman president, with about a third saying it was the main factor in their vote choice.

About 9 in 10 Black women and 6 in 10 Latina women backed Harris. Just under half of white women supported the vice president.

—Associated Press Writer Cora Lewis in New York contributed to this story.

–AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The survey of more than 120,000 voters was conducted for eight days, concluding as polls closed. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 0.4 percentage points.