Election Guest Essay: The Battle of the Gender Gap

The 2024 election began Nov. 3, 2020, with Joe Biden’s defeat of then-President Donald Trump. From the moment the last votes were cast and the last campaign staffers hit the hay from election-day exhaustion, the battle lines of our current election were drawn — for better and for worse.

Last night — four years, two days and billions of dollars later — the 2024 election came to an end. Now, with over 150 million votes cast and polls closed in all 56 states and territories, Donald Trump is once again president-elect of the U.S.

While election workers across the country continue to count the ballots — a herculean task in a country where the vote count has again hit the highest turnout rate in a century — the rest of the country, and really the entire world, waits with bated breath for the impending results.

Whatever the results may be in the final count, one major theme that’s emerged from this year’s elections is a growing divide between men and women — most famously in the attacks on Vice President Harris as a “childless cat lady.”

While the presidency is always the top-ticket item, it was far from the only issue on the ticket this year. 

At the federal level, ballots included 34 Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, while at the state level there were 11 governors’ races and thousands of local government and state legislature offices up for grabs. These races boasted record-high levels of female candidates up-and-down the ballot.

Vice President Harris is, famously, the second-ever woman to lead a major party in a U.S. presidential election, following former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in 2016 — an election also run against Trump.

But the 2024 election has taken a gendered tilt in a way even the 2016 election didn’t.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade by Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case two years ago has supercharged opinion on both sides of the political aisle, positioning Democratic Party candidates as the unquestioned backers of abortion rights and, increasingly, women’s healthcare writ large.

Men — in particular white men — have continued to back Republican candidates at high rates. While pre-election polls showed Harris solidly winning women as a group, Trump’s core base of support has become increasingly male dominated, buoyed by conservative policies and misogynist rhetoric aimed at boosting male turnout.

Even with the Harris campaign’s attempts to win back male votes through Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’s Midwestern charm and football coach approach, the gap between the sexes remains wide, as Trump leads even with younger male voters.

The trend of starkly-gendered politics has been slowly creeping into American political discourse over the last few decades but has intensified since Trump’s first presidency. Polarization over issues like the Jan. 6 insurrection, abortion, IVF and the future of democracy have blurred former lines between issues and coalitions.

As the parties have coalesced further around their current slates of policy positions, women have continued to shift away from Trump’s Republican party, with even strident Republicans like former Representative Liz Cheney switching allegiance to the Democratic ticket.

Our elections, though, are a part of a wave of global trends. This year saw more people than ever participate in elections worldwide, with more than half of the world’s population able to go to the polls across 77 countries — including the U.S. 

One major contributor to this trend has been a rise in gender’s influence on political affiliation. This is particularly true in other developed democracies like South Korea, where political differences between men and women were not only a major election story, but the main narrative of election results.

Although the worldwide percentage of women in the world’s legislatures has increased year after year, the implementation of political policies — abroad and in the U.S. — has become more and more contingent on the political coalitions built around and against the gender divide, especially around abortion.

As analysis of the 2024 election continues, what is nevertheless certain is that the increasing split between men and women in both global and domestic politics is sure to play a crucial — if not defining — role in the future of American political discourse.

Michael Clausen is a fourth-year student studying history, political science, conflict studies and Spanish. He is the president of the Loyola College Democrats and serves as Political Director for the Illinois College Democrats. 

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