{"id":754,"date":"2024-11-11T15:12:50","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T15:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/?page_id=754"},"modified":"2024-11-15T15:31:34","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T15:31:34","slug":"how-did-gender-matter-in-2024","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-3-voters\/how-did-gender-matter-in-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"How did gender matter in 2024?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Prof. Regina Lawrence<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She teaches and writes about news coverage of politics, policy, and gender. She is the author of three books, including\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u2019s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail<\/em>\u00a0(2009, Lynne Rienner Publishers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email:\u00a0rgl@uoregon.edu<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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U.S. Election 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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25. Seeing past the herd: Polls and the 2024 election<\/a> (Dr Benjamin Toff)
26. On polls and social media<\/a> (Dr Dorian Hunter Davis)
27. How did gender matter in 2024?<\/a> (Prof Regina Lawrence)
28. The keys to the White House: Why Allan Lichtman is wrong this time<\/a> (Tom Fisher)
29. Beyond the rural vote: Economic anxiety and the 2024 presidential election<\/a> (Dr Amanda Weinstein, Dr Adam Dewbury)
30. Black and independent voters: Which way forward?<\/a> (Prof Omar Ali)
31. Latino voters in the 2024 election<\/a> (Dr Arthur D. Soto-V\u00e1squez)
32. Kamala\u2019s key to the polls: The Asian American connection<\/a> (Nadya Hayasi)
33. The vulnerability of naturalized immigrants and the hero who \u201cwill fix\u201d America<\/a> (Dr Alina E. Dolea)
34. Did Gen Z shape the election? No, because Gen Z doesn\u2019t exist <\/a>(Dr Michael Bossetta)
35. Cartographic perspectives of the 2024 U.S. election<\/a> (Prof Benjamin Hennig)<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Gender is a perennial feature of presidential politics. As Melody Rose and I argued<\/a> in our study of Hillary Clinton\u2019s race for the White House in 2008, it just tends not to be noticed until a woman shows up on the presidential stage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate in August of 2024, many were watching for how she would navigate the delicate and treacherous \u201cdouble bind<\/a>\u201d: The no-win situation created by contradictory expectations for women leaders who must somehow be \u201ctough enough\u201d for the job while still appearing \u201cwomanly enough.\u201d Many (myself included) also thought that Harris might struggle with how to frame her candidacy as an historical first\u2014especially since she would have been the nation\u2019s first non-White female president. But Harris barely mentioned her gender (or her racial identity) on the campaign trail (Nor did she talk much about the LGBTQ+ community and the ways transgender people were being explicitly targeted by the Trump campaign and its allies). Ultimately, any double-bind difficulties Harris faced paled in comparison to other factors that hobbled her campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest of these was simply the context in which she became the Democratic nominee: Entering the race late, with just over three months to campaign, and hamstrung by her association with the deeply unpopular Biden presidency, Vice President Harris faced a serious uphill battle that could have stymied any candidate. The question hanging over it all the morning after the election was: Would a (White) male Democratic candidate have done better?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research shows that being female is not an automatic political disadvantage. Rather, gender is one factor among many that can affect electoral outcomes, including the candidate\u2019s political party and the top-of-mind issues for voters. Moreover, as research by political scientist Angela Bos and her colleagues found, U.S. voters hold increasingly positive stereotypes<\/a> about women in politics (and increasingly negative views of male politicians). Yet in 2024, the U.S. presidency still represented, as Hillary Clinton famously put it after her loss in 2016, the \u201chighest, hardest glass ceiling.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how did gender matter in 2024?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Kamala Harris rarely talked about gender (or race) explicitly, Donald Trump worked overtime to attract male voters, and, especially in the waning weeks of his campaign, to trigger negative gender (and racial) stereotypes. He repeatedly referred to Vice President Harris as lazy, unintelligent, and unqualified. He eschewed mainstream media appearances in favor of niche media, especially podcasters with predominantly male audiences such as Joe Rogan and Logan Paul. And he went much further than any candidate in modern history to evoke toxic masculinity in voters by performing it himself, in increasingly flagrant ways\u2014perhaps most notably by boasting that he would \u201cprotect\u201d women \u201c<\/a><\/a>whether the women like it or not<\/a>.\u201d Trump\u2019s surrogates made his gendered messaging explicit. As the clock ticked down toward Election Day, conservative activist Charlie Kirk posted<\/a> on the social media platform X, \u201cIf you want a vision of the future if you don\u2019t vote, imagine Kamala\u2019s voice cackling, forever,\u201d Kirk added. \u201cMen need to GO VOTE NOW.\u201d This messaging ricocheted through an online environment marked by \u201cfaster, uglier\u201d online attacks<\/a> on Harris. Ultimately, young men aged 18-29 voted for Trump<\/a> by an 11-point margin\u2014a bigger gender gap than among the general electorate overall\u2014and Trump made gains with Black and Latino men as well. The liberal-leaning news outlet Vox declared<\/a> the day after the election, \u201cWhen the final votes are counted\u2026we might have a new way of referring to the 2024 election: The Year of the Man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, 53% of the 2024 electorate was female, and reproductive rights were top of mind for young women<\/a>. Harris relentlessly reminded voters of former President Trump\u2019s role in the Supreme Court\u2019s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization<\/em> that overturned Roe v Wade<\/em>, and of Republican intentions to roll back reproductive rights further. The gender gap<\/a> among younger voters was striking, with 58% of women aged 18-29 voting for Harris<\/a>. But while women overall voted predominantly for Harris, white women once again buttressed the presidential glass ceiling. As they did in 2016 and 2020\u2014and, in fact, in nearly all<\/a> presidential elections since 1952\u2014a majority of white women voted for the (male) Republican candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, gender clearly mattered in 2024: In Trump\u2019s messaging and the misogynistic attitudes it likely evoked among a certain swath of voters, and, on the other side, in high support for Harris among younger women concerned about reproductive rights and among the LGBTQ community<\/a>. Ultimately, it was almost impossible to review the results\u2014in which Kamala Harris consistently underperformed with almost every group and in nearly every geographic area compared with Joe Biden\u2019s 2020 campaign\u2014without seeing the imprint of race and sex on the results. Yet while it is tempting to treat the results of the 2024 presidential election as a referendum on Americans\u2019 readiness for a female president, we should be careful to remember the highly unusual circumstances in which Harris\u2019s campaign was fought. Whether any Democrat associated with the Biden presidency could have won in 2024 isn\u2019t clear. What is clear is that gender, as always, was a significant feature of the presidential stage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Regina Lawrence Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She teaches and writes about news coverage of politics, policy, and gender. She is the author of three books, including\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u2019s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail\u00a0(2009, Lynne […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1010,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-754","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nHow did gender matter in 2024? - Election Analysis - United States<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-3-voters\/how-did-gender-matter-in-2024\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How did gender matter in 2024? - Election Analysis - United States\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Prof. Regina Lawrence Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. 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