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Standing in a seemingly endless line of people donning Harris-Walz branded camouflage hats, pink knit beanies, and “Hotties for Harris” T-shirts, 36-year-old Jenn Cookson was brimming with excitement.
“I’m just a die-hard Kamala fan and Walz fan,” said Cookson, an acquisitions specialist at the U.S. Defense Department, as she waited for U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally on Tuesday. “I’m not going to lie, when I see her speak today, I’m totally going to cry.”
Emotions are running high among American voters just days before the election on Nov. 5, which polls suggest will be a toss-up between Harris and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Both candidates are making their final pitches to galvanize potential voters, but their target audiences look quite different.
Democrats and Republicans “are now engaged in a battle of the sexes,” said Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “This is the first time I can remember where they’re really not competing for the same voters at all,” she added.
Gendered voting preferences are nothing new. For decades, women and men in the United States have differed in their political views, with women leaning Democratic over Republican, and young women in particular growing steadily more progressive while their male counterparts have remained the same. That split has been thrown into the spotlight this presidential election—the first since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022—as both Harris and Trump champion starkly different visions of womanhood and masculinity on the campaign trail.
“The Democrats are making it about abortion rights and about women’s rights in general,” Lawless said. “The Republicans are making it more about men being left behind and not being sufficiently supported by the Democratic administration.”
That approach has seen Trump’s team, known for its “grab ‘em by the pussy” and “childless cat ladies” comments, lean into hypermasculine messaging and often crude rhetoric about women and gender roles. In just the last few weeks, Trump has praised the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitalia and mocked CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who is gay, by calling him “Allison Cooper.” Last year, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. Now, he is casting himself as a protector of women—“whether the women like it or not.”
To court upward of tens of millions of largely young male potential voters, Trump has appeared on at least a dozen podcasts and shows with overwhelmingly male audiences, including the immensely popular Joe Rogan Experience. Stephen Miller, a top Trump advisor, built on that kind of messaging in an interview with Fox News, in which he remarked that a vote for Trump would be a stamp of manliness.
“The best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve,” Miller said. “Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your dating life will be fantastic.”
It’s a vision of gender roles that stands in sharp contrast to that espoused by Harris, who has made reproductive rights a key feature of her campaign and uses the catchphrase “we are not going back”—including in a campaign ad that nodded to the women’s suffrage movement. Reproductive rights also dominated the conversation when Harris appeared on the popular podcast Call Her Daddy, which has an audience of some 5 million people, most of whom are women under the age of 45.
“We are looking at, I think, different Americas depending on who wins here,” said Christine Matthews, a pollster who has worked for Republican candidates with expertise on swing voters, particularly those who are women. “The question is: Will there be enough women and men who agree that ‘we should not go back’ to propel Kamala Harris to victory?”
If Harris is indeed propelled to victory, she would make history as the United States’ first woman president. But unlike former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called attention to her gender when she ran for president in 2016, Harris has largely downplayed her identity on the campaign trail.
“Political leaders are always performing their gender,” said Hilary Matfess, a political scientist at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies whose work focuses on political violence and gender dynamics. “It’s a little bit trickier for women to try and walk that tightrope—demonstrating that they’re strong, and tough, and masculine enough to get the job done without people thinking, ‘Oh, my god. She’s such an unrelatable bitch.’”
Both Trump and Harris are rallying potential voters at a time when younger women across the United States have grown increasingly progressive in the past two decades. But their male counterparts—who tend to tilt conservative over liberal—have not shifted with them.
Those patterns have long guided campaign strategies for Democrats and Republicans. The formula of success for Democrats “is to win women by more than we lose men,” said Celinda Lake, one of the two lead pollsters for the Biden campaign in 2020. “The Republican formula is the opposite: win men by more than they lose women.”
That longstanding gap in presidential voting preferences between men and women largely tracks with what we’re seeing ahead of this election, experts and pollsters said, despite both candidates’ more targeted outreach. “Even though both campaigns are leaning heavily into messaging to one gender or the other, the overall gender gap is well within the norm,” Matthews said.
But those numbers could prove decisive in key swing states, where polls indicate that Harris has stronger support among women, while Trump has stronger support among men. Dawn Teele, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, noted there are simply more women in many key battleground counties and that overall women voter turnout is slightly higher than men.
“Even a small preference for the Democrats among women in some of these swing states, in some of these swing counties, can make a difference because there’s more of them,” she said.
Women might broadly lean Democratic, but there remain deep divisions within the demographic, particularly along racial, age, location, and educational lines. Those dynamics were on display in both 2016 and 2020, when the majority of white women voted for Trump.
One such voter is Maureen Sullivan of Hoboken, New Jersey, who made waves in 2016 for penning a New York Times op-ed explaining her decision to vote for Trump. As a white, college-educated, Catholic mother who grew up in a pro-union household, voting for Trump “was an easy choice,” she wrote, citing economic issues, school choice, and how he would “come into office less burdened by party loyalties.”
Sullivan, who said she grew up in a traditional Democratic household but has mostly voted Republican, plans to back Trump again this year. “We’ve seen the world [become] a lot more dangerous place than it was when Trump was president,” Sullivan told Foreign Policy. Under a Trump administration, she would want to see low taxes, a strong economy, and changes with crime and the border, she said.
“I just don’t think [Harris] has what it takes to be president,” said Sullivan, who noted that she watches the news constantly. She likened Harris to an “empty pantsuit.” “I try to find something in her that convinces me that she would make a decent president, and I just haven’t seen it. She can’t speak. She doesn’t seem to have any ideas. She certainly can’t communicate them if she does have ideas.”
A recent poll found that nearly 60 percent of college-educated white women said they will back Harris this election. But 55 percent of white women and 70 percent of white men without college degrees said they will vote for Trump.
And with just a few days to go before the election, both conservative and liberal women are already turning out in force. Women are already outpacing men in battleground states, resulting in a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far, Politico reported.
While waiting in line to hear Harris’s speech on Tuesday, 51-year-old Renee Dotson, who works in local government, said that she was “glad” the Democratic presidential candidate was a woman of color. “But, like, more importantly than her gender and race is the current conditions that we’re facing as Americans right now and how that can really be diminished,” she said.
“We’ve already had a taste of what presidency looks like under this other candidate, and there’s no need to revisit that,” she said. “Nothing good came from it.”
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