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With just 61 days until election day, Republican strategists are likely keeping a close eye on gender polling as Vice President Kamala Harris continues to enjoy support from a majority of women while former president Donald Trump struggles to hold onto women supporters.
Post-Democratic National Convention, Harris has managed to increase the percentage of women supporting her by three points, according to polling from Reuters/Ipsos.
That could be attributed to Democrats’ push for reproductive freedoms, including abortion, which is among a top concern for voters this election cycle.
Meanwhile, Trump is losing support from women and instead picking up more from men. The former president had a five-point increase in support from men post-DNC.
But Trump still only holds a roughly five-percentage point lead over Harris among men while Harris holds a 13-percentage point lead over Trump among women.
Preliminary polling shows 54 percent of women support Harris, while 41 percent support Trump – a larger gap than during the 2020 election.
“The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women, Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster told The Hill.
Historically women support Democratic candidates more often than Republicans. But Ayres said that the “traditional gender gap” could become a “gender chasm”.
In the 2016 presidential election, 54 percent of women supported Hillary Clinton while 41 percent supported Trump.
In 2020, that gender gap narrowed with 55 percent of women supporting Biden while 44 percent supported Trump
Current preliminary gender data shows that Trump and Harris are divisive on generational lines. A New York Times/Sienna College poll found that voters 18 to 29 are likely to have the largest gender gap.
A poll of voters in six swing states conducted in August found that young women favored Harris by 38 points while men favored Trump by 13 points.
Young women are more likely to be liberal than other age groups of women. Some cite exposure to the #MeToo movement, and watching their federal right to an abortion be revoked in 2021 as catalysts in their ideology.
For Trump’s campaign, controversies like JD Vance calling women without children “childless cat ladies” or Trump’s ties to people at the Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, add fuel to the fire of young women supporting liberal candidates.
Some pollsters predict that the 2024 presidential election will be defined by its large gender gap – unless Republicans manage to narrow that gap with support from women.
So far, Trump and his campaign have tried to do that by advocating for reproductive freedoms like access to IVF, the abortion pill and refusing to instill a national abortion ban.
