Women will decide America’s future

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Where candidates spend the last few weeks of a presidential campaign says much about the nature of the race, and how it might be won or lost. Vice-president Kamala Harris is spending her remaining campaign time courting women, who may be the key swing voters of 2024 in the same way that less educated white men were in 2016.

Harris is making an appeal to women voters that aims to reach across both sides of the aisle. For example, she held a series of moderated conversations last week with former Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney, aimed at appealing to suburban female voters in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The moderators were two other conservatives, a politico and a pundit. 

The idea was to remind women — no matter what their political affiliation — that they can and should be voting with their conscience in an election that pits a pro-life candidate, found to have committed sexual assault, against a female former prosecutor who has made a career of defending women’s rights. As Cheney, who has called former president Donald Trump dangerous and untrustworthy, put it: “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote . . . and not ever have to say a word to anybody [about your choice] . . . there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5, [voting] for vice-president Harris.”

It’s an effort that speaks to just how gendered politics has become not only in the US but around the world. In countries such as the UK, Germany, Poland, South Korea and elsewhere, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women, with male voters moving to the political right and female voters to the left. In the US, Gallup poll data shows that after decades when the sexes were each spread roughly equally 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 apparent in 2016, when there was a silent majority of angry white men in places such as the Midwestern industrial heartland who ditched their traditional affiliation with the Democratic party and voted Trump into power. This time around, it’s women who are angry — not so much about the demise of factory jobs as the threats to abortion rights, and the economic risks posed by Trump. And if the polls and political strategists are right, they may show up in droves for Harris.

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 have 48 per cent of the potential vote. While Trump has his usual lead among white people in rural areas, and Harris polls higher with black voters and the young, the big divide is on gender. Harris leads among female voters with a 14-point margin. And given that close elections are usually about who can rally turnout, Harris has been doubling down on women.

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

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who was polarising to many female voters when she ran for president as Democratic candidate in 2016 (her flip comment about not staying home to bake cookies turned off many stay-at-home mothers), Harris attracts support from women voters in every subgroup. Even many working-class white women whose husbands are likely to vote Trump favour her, perhaps because she talks to them about kitchen-table issues such as the cost of living crisis. Her plan for expanded child tax credit in particular was a hit.

Even if Trump were not such a polarising candidate, targeting female swing voters is a smart political strategy. Women are registered to vote in the US at higher rates than men. What’s more, in every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of eligible female adults who have voted has exceeded the proportion of eligible male adults who have done so.

But while 2024 is already being called the “gendered” election, class may yet play a significant role in how women vote. There’s little doubt that college-educated women, both white and particularly women of colour, will turn out for Harris. Working-class white women, particularly those who are Catholic or evangelical, are a harder sell, as evidenced by the fact that the race is neck and neck in parts of the rural Midwest and south.

In fact, according to the Washington Monthly’s Gender Gap tracker, the vice-president lost a bit of her lead with women in the penultimate week of the race, even as Trump widened his margin with men. That means Harris’s current gender advantage looks more like Hillary Clinton’s in the race against Trump rather than the margins enjoyed by Joe Biden or Barack Obama during their victories.

The politics of identity are about to be put to a nail-biting test.

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