The unexpected gender dynamic shaping the 2024 election

For most women voters, the idea that they need protection by a man would be “clumsy and dated and just irrelevant…from anybody,” said Republican pollster Christine Matthews. “But from him in particular, it’s cringiest.”

Trump’s pledge to protect women offered a kind of Rosetta Stone for how his campaign hopes to reduce his deficit with female voters to Vice President Kamala Harris, who leads among them by double-digits in most national and swing state polls. “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump insisted at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last week. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

In one sense, Trump has a favorable backdrop for this argument, noted Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Polls, Cox said, generally show that women do feel more anxiety about their lives – and the position of women in American society – than they did a few years ago. Trump is hoping to focus that anxiety on physical security – especially the threats he says women face from crime and undocumented immigrants.

As Matthews noted, this is similar to the arguments Trump aimed at women during his reelection campaign in the summer of 2020. At that point, he argued that Joe Biden and Democrats would threaten the physical security of what he called “the Suburban Housewives of America” by forcing their neighborhoods to accept more low-income housing that implicitly would be filled with non-White families. To underscore the point, Republicans gave a prominent speaking role at the GOP convention that summer to a White couple from suburban St. Louis who faced criminal charges after brandishing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their house.

The problem Trump faces in emphasizing physical security, both Cox and Matthews agreed, is that the heightened anxiety evident in polls among women is driven by a different set of concerns – about which many see Trump not as the solution, but as the problem.

“There is this growing sense of anxiety among a lot of women, single women, about their rights, their freedoms, the opportunities they will have in American society,” said Cox. “It is a little ironic that Trump is using this language because a lot of those same people would point their finger directly at him for making the lives of single women more difficult.”

It was revealing that in his remarks last week, Trump insisted that women would feel so safe they “will no longer be thinking about abortion.” That was an implicit acknowledgement of how many female voters remain outraged by the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned the constitutional right to the procedure. And that may prove an insuperable barrier for Trump even among some of the women who say in polls that they trust him more than Harris to handle crime and immigration.

“Many women feel Dobbs, and by extension the former President, has put women’s lives at risk and heightened their anxieties about women’s rights,” Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political scientist who studies gender and politics, said in an email. “But the President went on to tell women not to be worried about reproductive rights. It probably came across as dismissive of their concerns.”

As revealing as Trump’s emphasis on physical security was the openly paternalistic language in which he delivered his pledge. That was only the latest example of his campaign signaling its support for traditional gender roles. At the GOP convention in July, Trump surrounded himself with symbols of hyper-masculinity such as pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship President and CEO Dana White, who has been caught on video publicly hitting his wife. Vice presidential nominee JD Vance has repeatedly championed family arrangements in which women focus on childbearing through his derision of “childless cat ladies” and his musing that parents should receive extra votes to cast on behalf of their children.

“The messaging on gender coming out of the campaign broadly is very much about reaffirming traditional roles for women and for men,” Cassese said.

To an extent that is not often discussed, attitudes toward those traditional roles now separate the two parties’ voters in an era when culture not class has become the principal glue binding each side’s coalition.

“Trump’s assertion that he is ‘a protector’ of women taps conservative conceptions of hierarchical gender roles in which men are protectors and providers who exercise power in the public sphere while women are nurturers and caregivers whose proper place is in the private domestic world,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-profit organization that studies US attitudes toward cultural change.

Those attitudes are evident in a wide array of polls in recent years that have found most Republicans – including not only a significant majority of GOP men but even a substantial share of GOP women – to be resistant to rethinking traditional views of gender roles at home and in the workplace.

In polling earlier this year, for instance, the non-partisan Pew Research Center found that 83% of Trump-supporting men and 55% of his female supporters say the obstacles that inhibited women from advancing in US society are now “largely gone.” Over 60% of Trump-backing men and 54% of his female supporters agreed that “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.” Nearly half of the Trump men and about 3-in-10 of the Trump women even said they were uncomfortable with women who do not take their husband’s last name after marriage.

In a national AEI survey released last week, 60% of Republican men and about 40% of Republican women said women asking for equal treatment are really seeking “special favors.” Most Republican men and women also agreed that society no longer needs to do more to ensure equal rights for women.

In a survey last year, Politico and Ipsos found that a majority of both Republican men and women agreed that, “Traditional family structures, with a wage-earning father and homemaking mother, best equip children to succeed.”

Polling by Tresa Undem, who conducts surveys for progressive groups, has likewise found that big majorities of Republicans agree that “women are too easily offended”; that “most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist”; and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.” Most Republican women agreed with those sentiments as well.

In PRRI polling this year, nearly half of Republicans agreed with two absolutist statements about gender roles. The first: “In a truly Christian family, the husband is the head of the household and his wife submits to his leadership.” The second: “Society is better off when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for.” In each case, about 4-in-10 Republican women agreed with those sentiments.

Across all these questions, evangelical Christians are often the most supportive of these conservative views about the proper role of women. In the PRRI polling, for instance, about three-fifths of evangelical Christians agreed with the statement that men are the head of the household in truly Christian families. “On the whole, most Republican and White evangelical women share their male counterparts’ sentiments about gender essentialism, hierarchy, and defined social roles,” said Jones.

Trump’s protector language offers yet another way in which he is signaling his sympathy for the world view of evangelical Christians. But those voters are already supporting him in overwhelming numbers and turning out at high rates. “Is there a sliver of white evangelical Trump-supporting women who might feel some comfort by this protector message? Maybe,” Undem said in an email. “But that’s not who Trump needs to get. Trump needs to get suburban women.”

Cox says that if there is an audience beyond evangelicals for Trump’s argument, “The appeal is going to be most effective to married women, particularly those in more traditional social arrangements.”

Cox said he sees Trump’s “protector” case as an extension of the symbols of traditional masculinity that the former president stressed at the GOP convention. “In very Trumpian fashion, it’s a very unsubtle attempt to say you have real reason to be afraid for your physical safety…and I’ll be the one to be the hard a** here,” Cox said. “I will do the things that Democrats are too weak and ineffectual to do. That kind of message of very traditional masculine strength and directness – some voters will find that appealing.”

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake believes some working-class White women, especially older ones, will respond to Trump’s relentless insistence that undocumented immigrants threaten their safety, such as when he darkly declared in Wisconsin last weekend that such immigrants will “walk into your kitchen [and]….cut your throat.”

“Immigration tied to safety is a concern, particularly for older, non-college, protection-oriented women,” Lake said. “That reaches into independent and Democratic-leaning women.” Many of the working-class White women most receptive to Trump’s message on safety have also tended to prioritize economic over cultural concerns (like abortion or women’s rights) and are open to him because they believe the cost of living was more affordable under his presidency, strategists note.

Trump is presenting himself in a very conventional “Father Knows Best” kind of frame: the strong man who provides the protection that women need because they are inherently vulnerable. His problem is that most voters outside the core GOP coalition are generally comfortable with the changes in gender roles and family dynamics since the “Father Knows Best” era in the 1950s.

In the PRRI polling, for instance, about 7-in-10 of all women and men who do not identify as Republicans rejected the idea that women should submit to their husbands in a Christian marriage, and three-fourths of non-Republican women (as well as two-thirds of non-Republican men) rejected the idea that society is better off when men and women stick to jobs they are “naturally suited for.” In the Politico/Ipsos polling, only 1-in-4 independent women and 1-in-7 Democratic women agreed that “traditional family structures” served kids best.

The critical question for both sides is whether any gains for Trump among the blue-collar and older women drawn to his economic record and “protector” messaging will be erased by a backlash among the single, college-educated, younger and Black women mostly repelled by that message and his overall record on women’s rights. “What older women hear as protection, those women hear as control,” said Lake. “And they sure as heck don’t want to put Donald Trump in control of their lives.”

Trump’s implication that women need protecting taps into the same emotions that have made abortion such a powerful issue for so many women, Undem said. Many women view the restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court enabled – with Trump’s nominees providing the pivotal votes – as a proxy for a broader attempt to reverse the increased freedom women have won over the past few generations. “For pro-choice suburban women, abortion is their number one issue….because of women’s rights, health and safety, and autonomy,” Undem wrote in her email. “Here’s what’s ironic. One of Trump’s biggest weaknesses is that so many women want protection and autonomy from HIM literally as President! And [from] what he represents – the government taking control over their bodies and putting their lives at risk.”

Matthews is also skeptical that Trump will move many women voters not already leaning his way by fanning their fears of immigrant crime. “To me, this is not new,” she said. “This is just a sort of rehash of what he tried in 2020. It strikes me as an arsonist who sets a fire and then says, ‘I’m the only one who can put the fire out.’”

Harris is amassing big margins among all the groups of female voters most likely to recoil from Trump’s insistence that they need protection. The latest Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics youth poll found Harris leading Trump by 47 percentage points among young women – an advantage about half again as large as Biden’s lead over Trump among young women in the institute’s fall 2020 survey. State and national polls often find Harris leading Trump among college-educated White women by a bigger margin than Biden won them in 2020 (especially in the critical Rustbelt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). And despite their own economic struggles, Black women continue to present a wall of overwhelming resistance to Trump.

Harris will likely need to secure every last vote she can from women because polls suggest Trump could run even better than he did in 2020 among men. The GOP nominee may style himself as women’s protector, but it is the women who see him as a threat to their rights and autonomy who may protect the Democratic hold on the White House.