Donald Trump ran a campaign centered on hypermasculinity, and particularly courted young men by giving interviews on popular male-centric podcasts.
In the final weeks of the election campaign, the former president and several of his aides made sexual remarks and jokes about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Some of his supporters, including former presidential rival Nikki Haley, have warned that the former president risks exacerbating an ongoing gender gap with Harris. Prominent representatives, 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’s expected strength among women.
In the end, the gender voting gap was negligible by modern historical standards.
Here are some takeaways from the AP VoteCast poll, which surveyed more than 120,000 voters across the country:
The gender gap was large but not unusual
The poll showed that men are more likely than women to support President-elect Trump. This gap in voting preferences has remained largely unchanged, even as vote choice between men and women has moved modestly.
Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53 percent compared to 46 percent for Trump, but this margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, according to the poll. In 2020, VoteCast showed that Biden won with 55 percent of women, while 43 percent went for Trump.
This is nothing new: A majority of women have favored the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1996, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.
Trump has had inroads with men, too
Trump benefited from narrow gains among both men and women, with Harris underperforming modestly compared with Biden in 2020. Fifty-four percent of men supported Trump in 2024, compared to 51 percent in 2020.
Shifts by gender were concentrated among younger voters, as well as black and Latino voters. White heterosexual voters and older heterosexual voters voted similarly in 2024 as they did in 2020.
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Women under 30 voted for Harris over Trump, but her majority support was somewhat smaller, at 58 percent, than for Biden in 2020, at 65 percent.
There were some signs that the Trump campaign’s initiatives toward young people worked: More than half of men under 30 supported Trump over Harris, but in 2020, the split was reversed.
Trump also doubled his share of young black men, forming a key Democratic voting group. About 3 in 10 Black men under 45 went for Trump, nearly double the number he did in 2020. For their part, Latino men were less open to the Democratic nominee than they were in 2020. Nearly half of Latino men voted for Trump. Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden.
Economic concerns cross both genders
This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Against Wade, this was the second opportunity in history for Americans to elect their first female president.
These issues, along with concerns about sexist rhetoric from Trump’s camp, were important to many women. But concerns about immigration and inflation further affected many voters and crossed gender lines.
Although this may not have been the primary reason for his victory, Trump successfully exploited fear of imbalanced gender norms and power dynamics, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Dittmar said the results showed that “a majority of voters were willing to ignore misogyny and racism, and some were even motivated to do so.”
“We don’t always acknowledge the degree to which our citizens are actually invested in sexism or racism in relation to political power,” Dittmar said.
Only about 1 in 10 women said that electing a female president was the most important factor in their votes, and 4 in 10 women said it was not a motivator at all. Black women were most affected by the possibility of a first female president, with about a third saying that was the main factor in their vote choice.
About 9 in 10 black women and 6 in 10 Latina women support 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 Poll of American voters Conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The poll, which included more than 120,000 voters, was conducted for eight days and ended with the closing of the polls. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey collects 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 from online non-probability panels. The margin of error in voter sampling is plus or minus 0.4 percentage points.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
