How Gender Redefined the 2024 Election

The presidential race’s gender dynamics have dramatically transformed in recent weeks—not only because a woman will almost certainly lead the Democratic presidential ticket, but also because the GOP chose a vice presidential candidate outspoken about his notions regarding family formation and women’s societal roles.

President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid earlier this month, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s subsequent ascension, means that there will likely be a woman facing Trump for the second time in the last three elections, going back to 2016 when Hillary Clinton carried the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. This November will no longer offer the expected rematch of the 2020 election, between two older white men. Instead it’s one older white man and a Gen X woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage—once again raising questions of what women, and particularly women of color, can achieve in the United States.

“When you are a Black woman running for office in a high-level leadership position, there is this trope of the ‘angry Black woman,’” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, describing the “tightrope” that Harris must walk: not bowing to “bullying” pressure while also not seeming aggressive.

But if Harris will need to avoid appearing too angry, masculine outrage is one of Trump’s campaign strengths. Trump embodies a particular expression of masculinity, one that emphasizes macho toughness and even anger. His choice of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate reinforces that vision of not only a man’s role in society but expectations of women.

“He has otherized women throughout his political career,” Walsh said of Trump. “He has questioned their place in politics … always implying they’re not smart enough, they’re not supposed to be there, this isn’t their space.” By portraying himself as Trump’s successor—and by extension the future of the Republican Party—Vance is indicating that “men belong here” in the political sphere, while “women do not,” Walsh said.

The choice of Vance could appeal to young men, who increasingly lean toward Republicans. The Republican National Convention’s macho trappings—including celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan praising Trump as “the toughest of them all” and Trump walking onstage on the final night to the song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”—presented a vision of a masculine party that could engage young male voters. Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal found that men between the ages of 18 and 30 support Trump and Republican control of Congress this year, unlike in 2020, when they supported Biden and Democrats.

GOP Senator Josh Hawley hypothesized that young men may be shifting to the right because of specific concerns regarding their future, particularly whether they will be able to find a good-paying job and buy a house. “People want to own something and have some kind of control over their life,” Hawley said. “For a lot of people, young people especially, that just seems so far out of reach.”

Young men may be hearing something from Republicans that Democrats are not offering them: a clear vision of their place in society. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said that the Democratic Party has been “far too afraid to have a conversation with young men about the future of maleness and masculinity.”

“There’s a lot of men in crisis today because things have changed incredibly rapidly,” said Murphy. “Democrats need to construct a much more responsible version of masculinity than the one being proffered by Republicans.”

Divorced men are also trending toward the right, a pattern that American Enterprise Institute scholar Daniel Cox recently attributed to uncoupled Americans being “more likely to develop a tribal approach to politics, a tendency to see the political interests of men and women as fundamentally at odds.” He added: “More than any time in the recent past, American politics is pushing men and women apart rather than bringing them together.”

But even as he may embody a form of masculinity that appeals to alienated young men, Vance’s position on the ticket could also estrange women voters. “Not only has Donald Trump spent most of his life insulting women and degrading them whenever possible, he has deliberately picked a running mate … whose attitudes towards women are so outside the mainstream that many women will turn their back on that whole ticket,” argued Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Vance’s previous comments about childless Americans have garnered renewed interest in recent weeks. Beyond his now-infamous 2021 comments on the “childless cat ladies” supposedly running the Democratic Party—a view that he has largely reiterated in recent days—Vance has repeatedly disparaged childless Americans. He has suggested that they should pay higher taxes, should not have the same voting power as people with children, and are “sociopathic.”

In 2021, Vance said that “we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” suggesting that “millennial feminist writers” who focus on their careers over having children are “sad, pathetic, lonely” people. For his part, Trump said on Monday that Vance “loves family” but continued that people without children are “every bit as good as anybody else that has the most beautiful family.”

Vance’s eye-catching comments are not exclusively directed toward women: In 2019, he praised the “positive role” that fatherhood played in turning “relatively driftless” young men into “rooted” and “grounded” members of society. But the onus of pregnancy and child-rearing is often borne by women, giving Vance’s words a gendered dimension. GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski told Politico on Tuesday that she found Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” to be “offensive.”

“If the Republican Party is trying to improve its image with women, I don’t think that this is working,” she said.

Conversations around childlessness and motherhood have become increasingly fraught in recent years, thanks to the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to an abortion. Fourteen states have a total abortion ban in place, while four more have barred the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. The new developments in the presidential race may bring abortion access—already a critical campaign issue—even closer to the front of voters’ minds. This year, Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion clinic, and she has supported abortion rights more explicitly than Biden, who earned criticism from some advocates for his hesitance to even use the word “abortion.”

“She is probably the most powerful messenger that we have in the country on the issue of abortion rights and reproductive freedom,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to electing women who support abortion access. “The vice president at the top of the ticket brings an energy and excitement for women voters who know that this issue has such an impact on their lives.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have hammered Vance on his previous comments opposing abortion access. In 2021, he defended the lack of exceptions for incest and rape in a Texas abortion ban, saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Vance has also voted against legislation that would expand access to in vitro fertilization, and his office recently broke off bipartisan negotiations to make childbirth more affordable, The Washington Post reported.

Still, Harris is not guaranteed universal support from women. White women supported Trump by a narrow margin in 2016, and their support for him increased in 2020. Some Harris supporters are hoping to minimize that gap in 2024 and specifically to mobilize white women; a Zoom rally last week titled “White Women: Answer the Call” had roughly 200,000 participants and raised millions of dollars. Similar Zoom events in support of Harris by the groups Win With Black Women and Win With Black Men have ginned up enthusiasm—and money. Being a woman of color may excite potential supporters enough to counteract opposition based on her race and gender.

“Harris’s race and gender are actually an advantage for the first time in presidential politics,” said Tresa Undem, a partner in and co-founder of PerryUndem, a public opinion research firm that has conducted polling on women’s election turnout. “I don’t think magically we’re going to get a big majority of white women suddenly voting for Harris, or for Democrats. But I think a change by a few percentage points can make a change in an election.”

The overturning of Roe in the interim between 2020 and 2024 may also motivate white women to support the Democratic nominee, particularly if they believe that Republicans want to further restrict reproductive access nationally.

“In 2016 and 2020, white women couldn’t really believe that their reproductive freedom could be taken away from them—they now can see it,” Democratic Senator Tina Smith said. “They know that it’s been done. So there’s a sense of what is at stake here that I think is dramatically different.”

She added that the sudden prospect of electing the first woman president had resulted in women voters’ “pent-up enthusiasm and excitement and hopes and dreams” being “released all at once.”

“People want to feel the joy and the possibility of politics. They want to feel that there is something that’s happy and productive about it. And that’s been missing, and it’s now there,” said Smith. “Everybody can feel it. They can see it in the sparkle in [Harris’s] eyes as she goes out there and is ready to make the case.”