Women will decide the future of America

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Where candidates spend the final few weeks of the presidential campaign says a lot about the nature of the race and how it might be won or lost. Vice President Kamala Harris is spending the remainder of her campaign courting women who could become key swing voters in 2024, just as less-educated white men were in 2016.

Harris is calling on women voters to embrace both sides of the campaign trail. Last week, for example, she held a series of moderated conversations with former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to reach suburban voters in the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The moderators were two more conservatives: a politician and an expert.

The idea was to remind women—regardless of their political affiliation—that they can and should vote their conscience in an election that pits a pro-abortion candidate with a history of sexual assault against a former female prosecutor who has made a career as a defense attorney. women’s rights. As Cheney, who called former President Donald Trump dangerous and untrustworthy, put it: “If you care at all, you can vote. . . and you will never have to say a word (about your choice) to anyone. . . millions of Republicans will do so on November 5 (by voting) for Vice President Harris.”

It’s an effort that speaks to how gendered politics has become, not just in the US but around the world. In countries such as the UK, Germany, Poland, South Korea and elsewhere, an ideological divide has opened up between young men and women, with male voters moving to the political right and female voters moving to the left. In the US, Gallup polling data shows that after decades in which both sexes were roughly equally distributed across the political spectrum, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries.

In the US, this became evident in 2016, when in places like the industrial heartlands of the Midwest, there was a silent majority of angry white men who abandoned their traditional Democratic Party affiliations and voted for Trump. This time, women are outraged, not so much because of the loss of factory jobs, but because of the threats to abortion rights and economic risks posed by Trump. And if the polls and political strategists are right, they could flock to Harris in droves.

Consider an NBC poll in mid-October that, like many others, put the overall race in a dead heat between Harris and Trump, both of whom had 48 percent of the potential vote. While Trump leads, as usual, among white people in rural areas, and Harris wins among black voters and young people, the big gap is along gender lines. Harris leads among female voters by 14 points. And given that close elections typically decide who can boost turnout, Harris is doubling down on women.

In recent weeks, she has rallied Taylor Swift’s supporters on TikTok, revealed her home health plan on View (a popular daytime television show watched almost exclusively by women) and emphasized access to abortion rights, which has been a winning message for her since the beginning of her campaign. Indeed, one of the most influential moments in the presidential debate between the two candidates was when Harris described with genuine passion how unconscionable it was for women working one or two jobs to board a bus to travel to another state to get an abortion. .

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who polarized many women voters when she ran for president as the Democratic nominee in 2016 (her jokey comment about not staying home to bake cookies scared off many mothers), housewives), Harris attracts support from women voters in every subgroup. Even many white working-class women whose husbands are most likely to vote for Trump prefer her, perhaps because she talks to them about kitchen issues such as the cost of living crisis. Her plan to expand the child tax credit in particular was a success.

Even if Trump weren’t such a polarizing candidate, targeting undecided female voters is a smart political strategy. Women register to vote in the United States at higher rates than men. Moreover, in every presidential election since 1980, the share of eligible adult women who voted has exceeded the share of eligible adult men who voted.

But while 2024 has already been called a “gender” election, class could still play a significant role in how women vote. There is no doubt that college-educated women, both white and especially women of color, will support Harris. Working-class white women, especially Catholics or evangelicals, are a tougher sell, as evidenced by the fact that in some rural areas of the Midwest and South the race is neck-and-neck.

In fact, according to Washington Monthly’s gender gap tracker, the vice president lost some of her lead among women in the penultimate week of the race, even as Trump increased his lead among men. This means that Harris’ current gender advantage is more similar to Hillary Clinton’s in the race against Trump, rather than the advantage enjoyed by Joe Biden or Barack Obama during their victories.

Identity politics is about to be put to the test.

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