What the 2020 gender gap is really all about

If current polling is any indication, the 2020 election will see an unprecedented gender gap. But the divide between female and male voting patterns isn’t just about sex; it’s about sexism.

One party has become the home of aggrieved men, running and electing an overwhelmingly male slate of candidates while accepting virulent misogynists and even putting one in the White House. The other is the party of a growing number of female candidates and increasingly feminist politics — not exactly the stuff of Gloria Steinem’s wildest dreams but policies that at least are intended to allow women to control their own bodies and stay economically afloat.

This polarization is as much about an embrace of appealing ideas as it is a rejection of the opposing ones. And that doesn’t reflect well on American men — or bode well for American women.

First, the numbers. Eric Levitz at New York magazine breaks them down, and they are stunning: While many political scientists and casual observers alike believed that President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward immigrants and people of color would drive down his support among Black and Latino voters, polling indicates his support from those groups has in fact increased — but only among men. While according to Pew Research Center Trump won 14% of the Black male vote in 2016 (and virtually none of the Black female vote), 19% of Black men now say they approve of his job performance, according to Gallup. And some Democratic strategists say they’re worried that Trump could pull in a significant minority of Black male votes. Among Hispanic voters, the numbers are even starker. According to Pew, 35% of Hispanic men say they plan on voting for Trump or are leaning toward voting for him, compared to 23% of Hispanic women. And Hispanic voters are a key demographic in several battleground states, accounting for nearly one in five eligible voters in Florida and about one in four in Arizona.

That said, voters of color still support Democrats by a much wider margin than White voters. But even among White voters, the gender dynamics are telling: CNN polls show that Biden has led among White women registered voters by an average of 13 points since April — with Harry Enten writing that this makes for a more than 30-point gender gap among White voters compared to a 20 point gap in 2016.

Gender gaps in politics aren’t new. But the breadth of this gap, and its shift in just four years, is striking.

The big question is why. Yes, Trump is a misogynist. Yes, women’s economic security is increasingly under threat by a reactionary, anti-feminist Republican Party. Stripping away reproductive rights, for example, isn’t just about a woman’s ability to plan or end a pregnancy but about whether she can finish school, pursue her dreams and control her financial, familial and professional future.

Yes, women would benefit from the Democratic Party’s platform of an increased minimum wage (most minimum wage workers are women) and affordable childcare (women are much more likely than men to be the primary caretakers of children). But all of this was true back in 2016, too. The Trump promise is implied by the life Trump himself lives: you can enjoy all of the benefits of a sexist culture — the hot wife, the money, the power, the ability to belittle and degrade women — with none of the obligations of morality or decency.

The key to understanding 2020 is perhaps the inconvenient fact that most voters don’t vote on policy alone; they vote on feelings, culture and an amorphous set of highly unscientific factors. No one is entirely rational, and many people vote according to who they feel represents them, not necessarily whose platforms would best serve their interests. And sometimes, they vote against the party they feel embodies what they most oppose.

The entire ethos of “Make America Great Again” is about going back to a time when women largely didn’t compete with men in the workforce, when marriage was culturally compulsory and when married women were largely charged with making men’s lives easier: raising the children and tending to the home so that a man could go work. Under Trump, the GOP has become the party of cartoonish machismo. For a certain kind of man — for a lot of men, apparently — that doesn’t look like chauvinism; it looks like freedom. And for a certain kind of woman — most women, apparently — that looks like an immediate threat that must be countered.

Almost four years of Trump have shed a brighter light on what’s at stake for women.

With greater reproductive independence has also come greater financial independence for women, which in turn gives us more freedom in the rest of our lives. As a result, many women are marrying later or not at all (and often not partnering with men). We’re having fewer children. We’re much more likely to work outside the home. And we’re increasingly demanding the policies that would accommodate our lives, rather than trying to jam our lives into a policy landscape that was not built for us.

At the same time, more is being asked of men. A paycheck is not sufficient to earn a man full-time at-home support and unquestioned partnership; women increasingly expect men to be involved fathers, supportive husbands and, because patriarchal norms aren’t dead yet, at least as financially secure as we are. A lot of men can’t offer all of that — or don’t believe they should have to. Women are no longer forced to settle for them.

The disruptions of Covid-19 have perhaps brought this into sharper relief, as schools shuttered and working parents were suddenly charged with homeschooling and all-day childcare. These additional at-home burdens, along with cooking, cleaning and other domestic work, have fallen largely on women. Part of the gender gap may be that mothers have long done more at-home work than fathers, and now both mothers and fathers wish their partner would do more in the midst of this crisis — which, from a mother’s point of view, would involve splitting at-home labor equally, and from a father’s may look more like the traditional setup of a working dad and a stay-at-home mom.

Democrats, with their large number of elected women and a platform that includes universal early childhood education, seem to be listening to what these mothers are asking. Republicans, with an overwhelming number of White male elected officials and their embrace of “traditional” family values, appear happy to facilitate a gendered division of labor.
The fundamental difference in 2020 is this: Women are yearning for a future we’ve never seen. A large number of men, it seems, are harkening for a past that was never so great for women.