CNN —
Democrats are facing the threat of a gender gap that
could imperil the traditional advantage among younger voters that the party has
enjoyed for decades and that President
Joe Biden likely needs to defeat former President Donald Trump.
While Democrats are counting on a big backlash among
younger women against the rollback of abortion rights to help propel Biden, a
backlash among younger men against changing gender roles could help lift Trump.
Both younger men and women are broadly discontented with the
economy and Biden’s job performance, polls show. But the anger and frustration
over the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to abortion
provides Biden a powerful tool to expand his support among young women unhappy
with him on other fronts, strategists in both parties agree. For many younger
women, pollsters say, the loss of abortion rights has become not only a threat
in itself, but a symbol of a broader attempt to reverse women’s gains in
economic status and pressure them back into more traditional gender roles.
Meanwhile, Biden faces a dual challenge with younger men: Not only
is abortion less of a motivating issue for them, but there’s evidence that many
of them are receptive to the messaging of Trump’s “Make America Great Again”
movement, with
its implicit promise to restore traditional racial and gender hierarchies.
In a striking new
Pew Research Center national survey, for instance, fully two-fifths of the
men younger than 50 who are supporting Trump agreed that women’s gains in
society have come at the expense of men. That was not only more than double the
share of younger Biden-supporting men who agreed with that sentiment, but
considerably larger even than the share of older Trump-supporting
men who agreed.
All this suggests that while cultural attitudes may help Biden
overcome economic discontent among younger women, an amorphous but insistent
sense of cultural marginalization may reinforce Trump’s economic inroads among
younger men.
Researchers say democracies across the Western world are
experiencing a widening partisan and ideological gap between younger men and
women. In a much discussed article
earlier this year, Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch pointed to
survey data in a variety of countries showing that young men were far more
likely to identify as conservative than young women. “In countries on every
continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women,” he
wrote.
That gap has widened in the US, too, though the evidence shows that
it is growing more because young women are ideologically moving to the left
than because young men are moving to the right. Merged annual results from NBC
polls conducted by a bipartisan team of Democratic and Republican pollsters
document the trends.
In 2013, the share of young men aged 18-29 who called themselves
conservative very slightly exceeded the share who identified as liberal, while
the reverse was true for young women, according to results provided by Public
Opinion Strategies, the GOP half of the partnership that conducts the NBC poll.
For each gender, though, the balance between conservatives and liberals was
nearly even.
In their 2023 results, the pollsters found that young men had
shifted slightly left, with slightly more now identifying as liberal than
conservative. But, over that same 10-year period, young women had sped
leftward: In the 2023 results, three times as many of them identified as
liberal than as conservative. In 2013, the share of self-identified liberals
among young women exceeded the share among young men by 5 percentage points; by
2023, that gap was nearly four times as large.
These shifts over time have produced a situation where younger men
are still more liberal than older men on most issues, but not nearly as liberal
as younger women. The
annual youth poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy school offers perhaps the best snapshot on the
gender divergence among younger adults.
In this year’s survey, young men were 15 points more likely than
young women to support building Trump’s border wall, 12 points more likely to
say same-sex relationships are morally wrong and 11 points more likely to say
Israel’s response to Hamas in Gaza has been justified. Still, in each case,
only a minority of younger men endorsed those conservative viewpoints.
But while younger men have moved only modestly to the right on most
public policy issues, they have more clearly shifted in their willingness to
identify with the Republican Party. The latest annual Harvard youth survey
found that among young men, Democrats now only have a 3-percentage point
advantage in party identification, down from 22 points as recently as 2020. Among
women, the Democratic identification edge over that same period grew from 20 to
26 percentage points. (The NBC surveys likewise found the Democratic advantage
narrowing among younger men and widening among younger women over recent years,
though the changes were not as dramatic as in the Harvard poll.)
“There is not a ton of evidence that young men are more likely to
identify as conservatives, but there does seem to be a growing affinity for
Republican identity,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on
American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
That growing receptivity to the GOP could contribute to a wider
gender gap among young people than in recent elections. The latest Harvard poll
showed that among likely younger voters, Biden led Trump by about 2-to-1 among
women, almost exactly his advantage in the Harvard Poll at this point in 2020.
But among likely male voters, the survey found that Biden led Trump by just 6
points, a precipitous, and perilous, decline from his 26-point advantage in the
2020 survey at this point.
Other respected sources on voting results in 2020, such as the exit
polls, found that Biden didn’t win young men that year by as much as Harvard
projected, which would mean his decline now is less severe. Still, pollsters in
both parties say their own data track the same movement the Harvard poll
identifies, with Biden largely holding his lead from 2020 among younger women,
but slipping among younger men, including not only White but Black and Latino
younger men.
The good news for Biden is that younger women turned out at much
higher rates than younger men in 2020; in fact, the gap between female and male
turnout that year was wider for younger adults than in any other age group,
according to analysis of Census Bureau data by William Frey, a demographer at
the Brookings Metro thinktank. But Biden has so little margin for error in the
battleground states that the level of erosion among younger men that he’s
experiencing in polls still poses a grave threat to his reelection.
In explaining the growing youth gender gap, analysts point to
several factors. One is diverging priorities between young men and women. Even
more young women in the Harvard youth poll expressed negative views about
Biden’s economic record than young men did, but the women were far more likely
than the men to cite abortion as a key factor in their vote. “The difference is
young women are voting more on culture and rights, such as abortion, and young
men are probably going to be more compelled to vote on economic reasons,” said
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute and
author of the forthcoming book, “The
Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape our Democracy.”
As with all generations, Trump’s belligerent style also contributes
to the widening gender divide. “Younger men admire the strength of Trump, but
what younger men think is strong, women think is chaotic, crazy and divisive,”
said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who polled for Biden’s 2020 campaign.
Trump also has a significant tactical advantage in that he tends to
be portrayed much more positively than Biden on the YouTube channels, podcasts,
Reddit threads and TikTok videos that constitute the principal source of
information for many young men, noted John Della Volpe, who directs the Harvard
youth poll. (In that survey, young men were substantially more likely than
young women to say they rely on YouTube as a major source of news.) “The media
ecosystem specifically among young men is [a place] where Joe Biden doesn’t get
a break and Trump is stood up as an anti-hero,” said Della Volpe, who is advising
a newly formed super PAC trying to boost Biden among young people.
Trump has leaned into that advantage by identifying with entertainment that
disproportionately draws younger men, like the Ultimate Fighting Championship
match he attended as his first public event following his felony conviction in
New York.
Trump may also be drawing from deeper wells of changing social
attitudes. Last week’s Pew finding that two-fifths of younger males backing
Trump believe women’s gains have come at men’s expense is only one of many
recent poll results suggesting more young men are bristling against the rising
demands for gender and racial equity.
The new Pew poll, for instance, also found that more than
four-fifths of the younger men supporting Trump asserted that all the obstacles
blocking women’s advancement in society have been eliminated — more than double
the share of Biden-supporting younger men who agreed. (In this case, older men
backing Trump were as likely to endorse that statement as younger ones.) Nearly
two-thirds of the younger men supporting Trump also agreed in the poll that
“society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority”
— equal to the share of older Trump men and more than triple the share of
younger Biden men. In
an AEI poll this spring, the share of all young men who say efforts to
promote gender equity have gone too far reached about 1-in-5, more than double
the level in 2017.
Survey evidence also shows resistance, particularly among younger
White men, to the growing demands from minority groups for more racial equity
in education, employment and other settings. In that same AEI poll, over
three-fifths of young White women said their race has made their life easier,
but far fewer young White men said the same (only about 2-in-5). Conversely, in
this year’s Harvard poll, nearly three-fifths of men (of all races) agreed that
society is placing too much emphasis on racial identity; only about two-fifths
of young women agreed. Exactly three-fourths of younger men supporting Trump in
the Pew poll rejected the idea that Whites benefit from advantages in society unavailable
to Blacks.
This backlash against a changing society only extends so far:
Though the
“tradwife” movement in social media celebrates women reverting to
roles as homemakers and mothers, in the Harvard Poll only about 1-in-6 younger
men (and 1-in-10 younger women) agreed that women should prioritize having
children over entering the workforce. Deckman noted that compared to older
generations, young men today “have been raised by their mothers and aunts
and grandmothers, who have gone on to hold jobs and be professionals and they
are used to seeing women as leaders.”
But if young men aren’t moving back to 1950s expectations in large
numbers, the surveys showing male unease with women’s increasing independence
and authority make clear that something is stirring. “Looking
across different surveys and different questions, we can debate about the
degree to which it is changing, but there is no doubt we are seeing movement,”
said Cox of the AEI.
This pushback among young men comes after activism around racial
and gender equality in the past few years reached
its highest level since the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the rise of
the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements and more forceful advocacy in LGBTQ
communities. (In the Harvard poll, one-fourth of young women identified in some
way as LGBTQ, more than double the share of young men.) It also comes amid
continuing evidence that women are navigating the transition to an
information-based economy better than men: Women now account for about 60% of
all four-year college graduates and nearly 65% of graduate degrees, according
to the latest federal statistics.
In her upcoming book, Deckman sees the #MeToo movement as the
galvanizing force initially propelling more Gen Z women toward liberal
activism. That first impulse, she said, has been reinforced by Trump’s 2016
electoral success, despite his extensive history of misogynistic statements and
behavior. The sharp turn right on social issues in red states, punctuated by
the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the nationwide right to
abortion, has provided another spur to activism.
Anna Dean, co-founder and co-CEO of the group LOUDwomen, is one of
the young female activists Deckman profiles in her book. Dean, now a rising
senior at Harvard, helped to start the group in high school in Bentonville,
Arkansas, when she noticed that young women and racial minorities were dropping
out of school debate activity after biased treatment by the judges. When Trump
was elected, she said, the young women felt the same sexist or racist behavior
they were fighting in their schools was “reflected on the news when we hear
Donald Trump speak.” The Dobbs decision, she said, underlined the sense among
the young women that their rights were eroding, even as many of them had
reached educational milestones unmatched for older women in their families.
When relatives or acquaintances tell Dean she is living the
“wildest dreams” of earlier generations of women by attending Harvard, she said
she often thinks: “OK, yeah this is awesome but at the same time I don’t have
the same rights you did when you were my age. I am doing things my ancestors
could have only dreamed of, but at the same time I don’t have the same health
care rights.”
Della Volpe says that from his research and focus groups, he
believes that younger men are not so much hostile to the movements demanding
more rights for women or LGBTQ people as wondering where that leaves them. “I
have empathy for them because in large measure they are just trying to figure
life out,” he said. “And they sense and feel, sometimes accurately, sometimes
inaccurately, that while they are trying to figure life out that they are being
judged by people — that they are projected to be inferior or bad or ignorant,
or worse, racist or homophobic. I think that’s a big part of this.”
Such anxieties and grievances about social change have always
provided the waters that Trump fishes in. The ability to identify the currents
of discontent about change — cultural, racial or economic — in each group that
he is targeting may be Trump’s greatest skill as a politician. Just as the
former president has powerfully appealed to White voters who feel marginalized in
a more racially diverse America, or to blue-collar factory towns that feel left
behind by the transition to a metro-based information economy, he’s also
showing a magnetic pull for the men who feel eclipsed by women’s growing
prominence in the workplace and society.
Most younger men don’t necessarily hold favorable views about Trump
personally, noted Cox, but many are receptive to his broad message that elites
in modern US society are discriminating against him and his followers. “That
grievance is what binds them [to him] when very little else does,” Cox said.
By contrast, said Deckman, for younger women who
believe opportunity and power in US society are still too much tilted toward
men, “Donald Trump is the embodiment of many of the things they are opposed to.
… They are sick of old White guys running everything.”
That sentiment doesn’t easily translate into
enthusiasm for Biden, the other “old White guy” in the race. Dean said
that despite the distaste for Trump, even young women in her activist circles are
more likely to talk about their frustrations with the current president than
their fears of the prior one.
Given the risk that Biden won’t match his 2020
performance with young men, he has an urgent need to rekindle that flagging
enthusiasm among young women. “He’s got to make up for the defection of young
men by winning young women by more, and he’s got to get every young woman he
can out to vote,” said Lake, the Democratic pollster.
Biden’s best hope of avoiding a catastrophic decline
in his youth support is that the number of young women Trump repels exceeds the
number of young men he attracts.
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