How to win men's votes without backing down on women's rights

The gender gap isn't just about gender issues

Kamala Harris seems very likely to win women but lose men in every age bracket, and many (though not all) polls show an especially large gender gap in the youth cohort.

But while I’ve read a lot of commentary over the past 12 months about the widening gender gap, many of the writers who tackle this subject are, in my opinion, not sufficiently attentive to the question of the underlying fact pattern. You can find surveys showing that young women have become dramatically more liberal, and you can also find data showing that young men have become more likely to vote Republican.

You can reconcile those hypotheses by saying that most Democrats now self-identify as liberal, and the party’s leaders have adopted more liberal positions on most policy issues. This could lead young men to become more Republican-leaning without shifting their ideology, while young women become more left-wing without changing partisanship. But it’s also possible that one or the other of these sets of surveys is just wrong. Zack Beauchamp’s March article on the gender gap discourse was one of the few pieces I’ve read to acknowledge that different surveys are actually giving us different results.

The statistical margin of error gets bigger the thinner the demographic slice, so the margin of error on polls like that Gallup/Axios one above is really quite large. Most people aren’t reading the cross tabs of every single poll, and one concern is that random outlier results get a lot of discussion while we ignore other polls that show a steadier youth gender gap. In other words, the actual scale of the phenomenon is not fully understood, and neither are we sure whether the issue is women moving left or men moving right. My personal favorite most-trusted source of survey information does say, however, that younger men are more GOP-leaning in 2024 than in previous cycles, and this is especially true if you consider the racial and ethnic diversity of the under-30 cohort.

So, my best guess is that this is, in fact, happening.

But why? A lot of the best writing on this subject from people like Alice Evans and Ruxandro Teslo specifically focuses on gender issues as the source of gender opinion divergences. And that certainly belongs in the mix. But a point that I think is under-appreciated, especially in practical partisan politics, is that gender gaps in opinion aren’t necessarily driven by gaps in opinions about sex and gender. Across a broad swathe of policy questions, ranging from nuclear energy to the death penalty, men and women have, on average, different opinions. Which means that if you want to try to get male votes without compromising on progressive commitments to gender equality, you can probably pull that off by taking positions men tend to agree with on other issues.

Men and women have different opinions

This is a post about broad public opinion, and we are dealing in generalities.

Texas is more conservative than Massachusetts, even though there are plenty of individual exceptions. African-Americans are loyal Democrats, but there are millions of Black Republicans. By the same token, men are taller than women, but there’s a lot of overlap in the distributions. As I wrote in my post on workplace norms, men and women also have different personalities in formal psychometric inventories. These differences vary somewhat across countries, but notably are larger in countries with more gender equality.

These differences in personality relate, I think, to pretty well-known differences in taste. I think we understand that certain movies appeal more to a male audience than to a female one and vice versa.

And I think most people agree that a lot of these differences in taste relate to violence. America’s public elementary schools are probably the place most infused with progressive sensibilities, but it’s still the case that on playgrounds across America, you find more boys engaged in “rough and tumble play” than girls. Boys, more so than girls, turn every stick into a toy gun or sword, depending on the stick. And as teens and young men, they commit the vast majority of violent crime. But in addition to being wildly more likely than women to commit assault or murder, or to threaten to do so for the purposes of robbery, men are much more likely to become soldiers or police officers who deploy violence in socially validated ways.

Under the circumstances, it’s not so surprising that men and women also exhibit differing political opinions about deploying violence, with men generally more enthusiastic than women.

For example, if you’d asked people about the war in Korea or in Vietnam or the two wars against Iraq, most of them would’ve cited specific features of that particular war to explain whether they support it, but there’s a systematic gender gap in support for all these wars. I find that a little bit surprising! But once you point out the gap’s existence, nobody is surprised to learn that it’s men who are more supportive of wars.

Partisanship and violence

Note that you wouldn’t necessarily expect gender difference in support of the Korean War to lead to a gender difference in partisan voting patterns, because it was the Truman administration fighting that war. But I’ve increasingly heard it voiced, exclusively on the left, that antiwar campus protesters are always correct — a view that clearly can be held or expressed by men, but that I think (again, on average) much more aligns with women’s general antipathy to violence.

Harris’ campaign has done a lot to reach out to male voters, particularly younger ones and Black and Hispanic voters who they feel should be gettable for Democrats. But I think her most striking pitch to men was her line at the convention about her commitment to ensuring that the United States has “the most lethal fighting force in the world.” Many on the left (including, to be clear, leftist men) did not like this line, and I saw a lot of puzzled “who is this for?” commentary about it.

But I think it’s obvious who it’s for!

It’s for people who think January 6 was bad, abortion should be legal, and Trump seems mentally unstable, but who also believes that the world is an inherently violent place and that prosperity and social stability hinge on the willingness of “good guys” to organize and use violence for constructive purposes. Harris is reassuring doubters — mostly, though, not exclusively men — that she’s not one of those people who would shy away from killing others in defense of American society.

This extends beyond questions of war and peace. Men are more likely than women to believe that legal gun ownership is good and also more likely to believe that letting the government execute people for certain offenses is good. Most of these differences in political opinion are small, but they exist across this whole suite of issues. And sometimes they are large. In the 2022 General Social Survey, men were 14 percentage points more supportive of the death penalty than women (though most surveys show a smaller gap). But whether we’re talking about war, gun control, police brutality, or the severity of punishments for crime, men are more pro-violence.

I think it’s easy to see that alongside whatever else is happening with gender roles in American society, the salience of these disagreements in partisan politics is increasing. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden proudly expanded the federal death penalty. By 2023, the Biden Justice Department is declining to seek the death penalty against members of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang — an example I highlight because it underscores principled skepticism rather than a concern about racial bias in application.

I would note that these gender gaps are actually pretty small in size relative to the gender gap in interest in the NFL or other matters of pure taste. In the political domain, partisan identity is heavily shaped by demographic cross-pressures (race, educational attainment, religious observance), and many people’s policy views are downstream of partisan identity.

Differences on science and technology

This suite of violence-related issues is where I think we have the clearest empirical and theoretical understanding of what’s going on.

On the other hand, there is a huge and well-known gender gap in views toward nuclear power. This is a rare issue where the 25-point gender split is actually much larger than the 16-point partisan split. It’s even larger than the 17-point split on abortion rights.

Compare that to answers to the GSS question asking whether respondents agree or disagree that “a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works.” Public opinion has become much more supportive of working moms over the years, and now 77 percent of women and 66 percent of men disagree with that statement. The 11-point gender gap on that explicitly gendered question is large — about three points bigger than the war/peace gap. But it’s smaller than the nuclear energy gap!

The nuclear gender gap has attracted a good deal of academic research over the years, mostly linking it to gender differences in attitudes toward risk, but I’ve never found that particularly persuasive. On violence-related issues, people disagree about what the government should do but generally agree as to what they are disagreeing about. The whole crux of the nuclear disagreement is that advocates of nuclear energy don’t think it’s risky compared to the risks of extracting, transporting, storing, and burning fossil fuels.

Other GSS findings include the fact that women are more supportive of increasing spending on poor people (five points) and health (six points), but less supportive of increasing spending on scientific research (four points). That’s a small gap, but it’s notable because men are generally more skeptical of spending and more politically conservative overall. I also think it’s an important one to consider in terms of political tactics, because Democratic Party politicians do, in fact, support higher levels of science spending, and Republican Party politicians generally do not. Talking more about positions that you already hold is a lighter lift than changing positions on something like the death penalty.

Opportunities, if you want them

Almost all of the Democrats I know have a bunch of policy positions they personally would hate to compromise on, but many then insist that issues don’t matter in politics and everything is just vibes. I think that’s wrong, and my main point here is that if Harris in particular, or Democrats in general, want to improve their performance with male voters, that doesn’t necessarily mean engaging in weird psychodrama about shifting gender norms. You can just say stuff that men agree with on a wide range of subjects.

For example, men are more concerned about preserving free speech versus avoiding harmful speech. In the GSS, you even see that women are more eager to specifically censor leftist speech, even though men are more conservative on average.

So if Harris said something about how “cancel culture” is bad, people need to be thicker skinned, and students should embrace free speech, there are probably men who’d like to hear that.

She had a good moment talking about her gun the other day, where she mentioned specifically that it’s a handgun for self defense. Democrats’ instinct when trying to sound moderate about guns is often to talk about hunting, but the legitimacy of law-abiding civilians arming themselves to shoot bad guys is actually the crux of the issue. As I said, the “most lethal fighting force” line was good. I would advise her to talk more about that. Democrats normally bring up the Biden administration’s efforts to boost battery and semiconductor manufacturing in terms of good jobs. But on some level, the subtext of this industrial policy push is that we want the United States to be able to mass-produce remote-controlled airborne killing machines, and that doesn’t work if all the batteries and chips are made in China. Harris could make that part of the text of her pitch. More broadly, a decent chunk of the Biden-Harris administration climate agenda could be reasonably characterized as investments in science — including the science of carbon capture, advanced geothermal, and of American men’s favorite energy source, nuclear fission. She could also come in out favor of a significant effort to research geoengineering.

These are all ideas that I think are consistent with her existing issue positions, they’re just not what she’s normally talking about. And I think talking more about these issues — particularly if she can get coverage in media outlets that men pay attention to — is an underrated approach to influencing male vote choice relative to talking about sex and gender roles.