Even though Vice-President Kamala Harris had the edge with women, and Donald Trump with men, the gender voting gap was unremarkable by recent historical standards.
During his hypermasculinity-focused campaign, Donald Trump actively courted young men by appearing on well-known podcasts that cater to guys.
The former president and several of his surrogates resorted to sexist jokes and comments about Vice President Kamala Harris in the final weeks of the campaign.
Former presidential opponent Nikki Haley was among his backers who cautioned that the former president ran the risk of widening the gender divide he already had with Harris. In order to counter Harris’ anticipated dominance among women, prominent surrogates, ranging from entrepreneur Elon Musk to Charlie Kirk, head of the conservative youth movement Turning Point, urged males to cast ballots in big numbers.
Ultimately, by modern historical standards, the gender voting discrepancy was not noteworthy.
The following are some conclusions drawn from AP VoteCast, a national survey of over 120,000 voters:
The gender gap was big but not unusual
According to the survey, men were more inclined than women to back President-elect Trump. Despite slight changes in the voting preferences of men and women, this disparity has mainly not changed.
According to the poll, Harris had a slight edge over President Joe Biden in 2020, having won 53% of the vote compared to 46% for Trump among women. According to VoteCast, Biden received 55% of women’s votes in 2020, compared to 43% for Trump.
And it’s nothing new: the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University reports that, in every presidential election since 1996, the majority of women have favored the Democratic nominee.
Trump made inroads with men, too
Both men and women saw minor gains for Trump, while Harris’s 2020 performance was slightly worse than Biden’s. In 2024, 54 percent of men supported Trump, up from 51 percent in 2020.
Black and Latino voters, as well as younger voters, were the main groups affected by the gender shifts. In 2024, older voters of both sexes and white voters of both sexes cast votes that were comparable to those of 2020.
Though the majority of women under 30 who voted for Harris over Trump was slightly fewer (58%) than that of Biden in 2020 (65%).
The fact that over half of males under 30 chose Trump over Harris in 2020 was a sign that the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to young men were successful.
Additionally, Trump nearly boosted his percentage of young Black men, which hurts a crucial Democratic vote bloc. Approximately three out of ten Black men under 45 voted for Trump, which is about twice as many as he received in 2020. Compared to 2020, Latino men were less receptive to the Democratic candidacy. About half of Latino men voted for Harris, compared to roughly 60% who supported Biden.
Economic concerns cut across gender
This was the second time in American history that the country had the opportunity to elect its first female president and the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was reversed by the Supreme Court.
Many women were concerned about those issues as well as the Trump campaign’s misogynistic comments. However, many voters’ concerns about inflation and immigration were more significant and transcended gender boundaries.
According to Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, Trump was able to capitalize on the anxiety that power relations and gender norms are changing, even though it may not have been the primary factor in his triumph.
According to Dittmar, the findings demonstrated that most voters were prepared to overlook racism and misogyny, and some were even inspired by it.
Dittmar stated, “We don’t always recognize the extent to which our citizens are genuinely invested in racism or sexism as it pertains to political power.”
Four out of ten women stated that voting for a female president was not a motivator at all, and only around one out of ten stated that it was the primary reason for their votes. Approximately one-third of Black women stated that the prospect of the first female president was the primary reason for their vote.
Six out of ten Latina women and nine out of ten Black women supported Harris. The vice president was favored by slightly fewer than half of white women.
—Associated Press This narrative was written by Cora Lewis in New York.
-AP NORC at the University of Chicago conducts the VoteCast survey of the American electorate for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal, and The Associated Press. Over 120,000 people participated in the eight-day survey, which ended when polls closed. Both Spanish and English were used during the interviews. Self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is intended to be representative of the U.S. population, self-identified registered voters chosen from nonprobability online panels, and a random sample of registered voters selected from state voter files are all included in the survey. Voters are expected to have a sample error margin of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points.