(Bloomberg) -- In an election against a female opponent in which abortion rights was a hot campaign topic, Republican Donald Trump made a risky gamble to bank on support from men. And it worked.
The strategy leaned hard on the cachet of billionaire Elon Musk, podcasts popular with young men and “locker-room” talk about a generously endowed golf legend. Even Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and Republican presidential candidate who ultimately endorsed Trump, warned that the campaign risked alienating female voters. “This bromance and masculinity stuff, I mean, it borders on edgy to the point where it’s going to make women uncomfortable,” she said in a Fox News interview in late October. But polling of voters suggests that Trump’s bet paid off, as young men in particular flocked toward him.
In the background, broader economic trends suggest that economic gaps between men and women are narrowing, though less progress is being made at the very top of the corporate ladder. Womens rights activists describe Trump’s victory as a setback for gender parity; social conservatives have lauded the president-elect as a champion of family values.
What did we learn from the election data?
The Fox News Voter Analysis, conducted between Oct. 28 and when polls closed on Nov. 5, suggest that 52% of men aged 18-44 voted for Trump, while 46% voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate. That essentially reversed the split in the last election, when 51% of that group voted for Joe Biden and 45% voted for Trump. Trump’s campaign especially focused on young men, including Blacks and Latinos, who were casting ballots for the first time. First-time voters preferred Biden by a two-to-one margin in 2020 but narrowly went for Trump this time around, according to exit polling cited by the Washington Post.
While Harris won 54% of the vote from women, according to the Fox News Voter Analysis, she did not receive the surge in female votes that her campaign had banked on and that many pollsters had projected. Indeed, the gender gap in voting — women’s tendency to support Democrats more than men do — actually narrowed a little from 2020.
What was Trump’s appeal to young male voters?
The Trump campaign sought support in venues that catered to male audiences, such as Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts bouts. Trump leaned into concerns about immigration, with his top adviser Stephen Miller calling on men to vote as a way to stop undocumented migrants from committing crime. But the simplest explanation for Trump’s allure for young men may be economics. Men saw a sharp spike in their inflation-adjusted earnings during Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency. Moreover, Trump’s appeal to voters without higher education is now a gendered one, as women make up a majority of the college-educated workforce.
What about the potency of abortion as a political issue?
There was evidence that abortion was a galvanizing issue for older women, some of whom can remember a time before abortion was first legalized nationally in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The Fox News Voter Analysis suggests that older women preferred Harris to Trump by a split of 51% to 47%, reversing a trend seen in the 2020 election.
The impact of the issue, however, was not as broad as Democrats had hoped. One reason may be that Trump’s views on abortion are not clear-cut. During his last term as president he put in place the Supreme Court justices who doomed Roe, making way for near-total bans on abortion in some states. But he said Oct. 1 that he would veto a “federal abortion ban,” after previously suggesting he’d support a proposal to restrict the procedure nationwide to the first 15 weeks of a pregnancy, an idea supported by some Republicans. At least 2.6 million voters cast ballots in favor of both state-level abortion protections and Trump, a Bloomberg analysis showed. Ballot initiatives preserving abortion rights passed in 7 of 10 states.
Where do men and women stand in the US workforce?
Women are participating in the US workforce like never before and closing the gap with men. The number of women in senior leadership roles at US companies in the S&P Global Market Index nearly tripled between 2005 and 2023 to 22.3%, the data provider found. But they’re still poorly represented at the very top; in the same period, women’s share of C-suite jobs rose to 11.8% from 6.5%, and even slipped slightly last year.
The burdens of child care still fall disproportionately on women, however. Some 30% of children live with just one parent, and about three-quarters of those live with their mother. High costs of child care — topping housing for the average family of four — remain a significant impediment to women’s advancement.
As women have gained ground, men — especially white men — have watched their over-representation in corporate America’s top roles decline. Thirty-nine percent of men in a Pew Research study said they believe men are doing worse at getting a well-paying job and 28% say they’re not doing as well getting leadership positions in the workplace. A majority of men don’t say women’s gains come at their expense, but about a third of Republican and Republican-leaning men do.
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