Will gender be the defining story of the 2024 US election?

Before we get to it, a quick programming note: while the countdown to election day is over, we’re not going anywhere. This newsletter will continue twice a week until inauguration day but with a new name: White House Watch, with a special edition tomorrow to kick us off. Thank you for joining us on this journey to election day.

For a final time, welcome to US Election Countdown, brought to you from the battleground state of Wisconsin. As we await the first election results, let’s dive into:

America’s moment of reckoning is finally here, and the election results are likely to paint a vivid picture of the US’s deep divisions. The most consequential divide, though, could be over gender. [free to read].

Women have flocked to Kamala Harris as she’s made her campaign a crusade for protecting reproductive freedom two years after the US Supreme Court struck down the national right to obtain an abortion in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Men, on the other hand, have increasingly drifted to Trump, who has tapped into their anxieties and grievances, and sought to connect with them over traditionally masculine pastimes such as golf and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Not to mention his bromance with billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk.

Trump has also repelled many women as he struggled to distance himself from the Dobbs decision. On the campaign trail Trump has repeatedly pledged to “protect women” — saying last week that he would do so “whether they like it or not”.

At one of Harris’s final campaign rallies on Sunday in East Lansing, Michigan, Deborah Matlock, 58, was thinking of her daughters.

“They need abortion rights. They need female healthcare,” she said. “It feels very life and death.”

Dobbs has been a galvanising force. Last time I was in Wisconsin, Democratic officials and organisers told me about how the battle over abortion rights had sparked an underground movement, with some women gathering secretly in their homes to keep other community members — and their husbands — from knowing they support Harris.

At least one pro-Harris ad has capitalised on this sentiment, reminding women voters that who they vote for is private.

Figures vary across polls, but NBC last week showed Harris beating Trump by a margin of 57 per cent to 41 per cent among women, but Trump leading Harris by 58 per cent to 40 per cent among men.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

Behind the scenes

As Americans go to the polls, bankers, traders and investors are gearing up for a surge in volumes and increased volatility — especially in bond and currency markets.

The dollar weakened yesterday as global investors sharply reined in bets on a Trump victory.

Yields on US government debt, which move inversely to prices, were lower and the Mexican peso strengthened after a closely watched Iowa poll showed an unexpected surge in support for Harris.

More broadly, markets have already priced in potentially large swings across several asset classes, and Wall Street banks will be buzzing to handle any unexpected moves tonight and throughout the rest of the week.

“I will be glued to my screen,” Vikram Prasad, Citi’s global head of credit trading, told the FT’s Harriet Clarfelt and Nicholas Megaw. “We’re really co-ordinating across the entire organisation.”

The early focus as the polls close will be on bond and currency markets, which trade through the night. While stock futures will also be moving, they tend to be more reliable indicators in the morning, before the New York market opens.

Ed Al-Hussainy, senior rates analyst at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said:

The initial reaction is almost always a head fake. Equity markets collapsed after Trump was elected [in 2016]. That lasted a day and then they rallied.

The approach that I like to push is: ‘don’t try to get that initial move right’. It happens too fast.

Datapoints

For our final datapoints, I thought we should do one last check on the polling and recap the money race.

Harris has a razor-thin 1.5 percentage-point lead over Trump nationally, according to the FT’s poll tracker, meaning they are neck-and-neck in the polls and the election could go either way.

In the seven swing states, the candidates are separated by 2 points or less, so the race is deadlocked across the battlegrounds, too. Harris is leading Trump slightly in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump has a tiny edge in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The two are tied in Nevada.

As for the money, this election will be the most expensive in history. Nearly $4bn has been raised by the campaigns and their affiliated groups as of mid-October: $2.2bn in support of Harris and $1.7bn for Trump.

Individual donors have driven the Democrats’ fundraising efforts, especially after Harris entered the race in July. On each of the first two days after Harris announced her candidacy, she received more than 600,000 donations — more than Joe Biden received on any day of his 2020 campaign. About 6 per cent of funding for pro-Harris groups has come from billionaires.

However, megadonors have been essential for filling Trump’s war chest, making up more than a third of the Republican’s total haul.

Viewpoints