Donald Trump, Kamala Harris lean into gender gap

In the hours-long carnival of bombast and vulgarity that was Donald Trump’s “celebration” rally in New York, one undercurrent remained consistent: boorish machismo.

Male speakers roared and raged from the podium. They made belittling and misogynistic jibes about Kamala Harris’ race and intelligence, or cracked undergraduate jokes about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage”.

A businessman, Grant Cardone, called Harris a fraud and said she and her “pimp handlers” would destroy the country, portraying her as a prostitute rather than accomplished prosecutor, attorney-general and vice president.

Retired pro wrestler Hulk Hogan beat his chest and ripped his shirt on stage (again), while Tesla billionaire and Trump bank roller Elon Musk raised his arms, made guttural sounds and boasted about being “dark gothic MAGA”.

UFC boss Dana White made another appearance, describing Trump as “the most resilient, hardest working human being that I’ve ever met in my life.”

The event exuded a bygone stereotype of masculinity. Meanwhile, Harris’ campaign has focused on appeals to women – and men – over reproductive rights, including on-stage appearances in the past few days by Beyoncé and Michelle Obama.

In an election already heavily divided along gender lines, the two presidential contenders could not have made the differences more stark ahead of the final week of this campaign.

In State College, Pennsylvania, Trump welcomed members of the college’s wrestling team to the stage, telling the crowd: “I don’t know if this platform can hold them ’cos that’s a lot of muscle!”

And at a late-night rally in Michigan on Friday, he went so far as to mention his campaign advisers’ concerns about his struggles with women.

“They say we’re doing unbelievable with men… Men like me. They say women don’t,” Trump said. “And I say they do, because we’re going to protect [them] from the criminals coming in from the border. They said, ‘Sir, please don’t say you’re going to protect women … because it doesn’t sound really well’. I said, ‘I think it sounds fine’. We want to protect. That’s our job. So I think I should override my experts.”

But research shows women do have reservations about Trump. A CBS News poll on Sunday found 40 per cent of registered female voters believe the Trump campaign was paying too much attention to men’s issues. At the same time, 40 per cent of registered male voters felt the Harris campaign was paying too much attention to women’s issues.

There is debate about the extent of Trump’s popularity with men, particularly younger men and those most likely to actually vote. But the gender gap is real, and both camps are leaning into it. “Clearly the Trump campaign has made a calculation they’re going all-in on men,” Republican pollster Brenda Gianiny told CNN. “Their strategy is they’re fine with that gender gap.”

But just as Trump has ramped up his push for male voters, the Harris campaign is using its final stretch to galvanise women to vote in record numbers in the hope of offsetting the Republicans’ gains.

It’s a strategy that some political experts believe might just work. After all, in every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of eligible women who voted has exceeded the proportion of eligible men who voted.

In the 2020 match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for instance, about 81.7 million women cast a ballot (54 per cent) compared with 71.2 million men (46 per cent).

“Women are much more reliable voters than men – there’s just more of them, and they vote at a higher rate than men,” says anti-Trump Republican and political strategist Sarah Longwell. “So if I’m going to stake my campaign on a demographic, I would stake it on women more than I would stake it on the low propensity male voters that Trump is trying to turn out.”

While Trump spent three hours recording a podcast with alpha-male provocateur Joe Rogan on Friday, keeping his fans in Michigan waiting, Harris taped a show with Brene Brown, whose work on embracing vulnerability became a catchcry for millions of women around the world.

Earlier this month, the vice president appeared on Call Her Daddy, a podcast targeting Gen Z and millennial women that was one of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify last year, second only to The Joe Rogan Experience.

It’s also no coincidence that in recent days, Harris has leaned in hard to the two themes that staved off the expected Republican red wave in the 2022 midterm elections: democracy and abortion.

On Thursday night in Georgia, she joined former president Barack Obama to warn about the dangers of a second Trump presidency by highlighting claims by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly that his old boss “wanted the kind of generals Hitler had”.

At a rally in Texas on Friday night, giant screens were emblazoned with slogans such as “Trust women” as Harris shared a stage with Beyoncé, an icon of national femininity in the US.

And on Saturday, Michelle Obama made her first appearance on the 2024 campaign trail to make an impassioned plea to voters about the far-reaching consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to curtail abortion rights in America – a decision that was made thanks to the conservative justices Trump appointed. Notably, the former first lady’s pitch wasn’t just to women but also “the men in our lives”.

“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”

Harris, however, has played down the notion of a widening gender gap. “It’s not what I see in terms of my rallies, in terms of the interactions I’m having with people in communities and on the ground,” she told reporters this week.

“What I am seeing is, in equal measure, men and women talking about their concerns about the future of our democracy; talking about the fact that they want a president who leads with optimism and takes on the challenges that we face, whether it be grocery prices or investing in small businesses or homeownership. So, I’m not actually seeing that kind of disparity, and I intend to be a president for all Americans.”

But Harris knows that in order to win the White House, she must win women by more than she loses men.

But in recent weeks, polls have suggested that the Democrats’ traditional support among black men might be slipping in some of the key battlegrounds that will decide this election, making her task all the more challenging.

“There is some work to be done to make sure that those folks actually show up to the polls,” says Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, the executive director of the Georgia Democrats, whose Deep South state has one of the highest proportion of black voters in the nation.

“We’ve got to give those folks a reason to want to engage in this process in a way that we haven’t done in the past. And that’s a challenge I think that Democrats are accepting, which is the reason why you’ve seen the Vice President recently come out with an agenda that is specifically talking to people like me in the electorate who have not heard an economic agenda that is tailored to their concerns until now.”

Whether there’s enough time to bridge the gap is yet to be seen, particularly when Republicans have been aggressively targeting the “bro-vote” for months.

What’s more, Trump’s emphasis on law and order, his support for gun rights, and his anti-transgender and anti-establishment rhetoric appeals to those who feel overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream values.

The irony, says Richard Reeves, the founding president for the American Institute for Boys and Men, is that Republicans are winning on style but with little substance in terms of male-oriented policies.

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Democrats, on the other hand, have plenty of substantive policies for men, but don’t frame them in such a way, he says. The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which secured plenty of jobs for working-class men, is one example.

“There’s this very weird moment we’re in right now where you’ve got Republicans talking a lot about the importance of men but not doing very much, and Democrats who potentially have a lot of policy ideas in their locker but refusing to talk about them as ‘pro-male’ policies,” he told CNN.

“They genuinely think that to come out and have a pro-male policy agenda would undermine their claim to be a party on behalf of women.”

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