Countless news stories in the final week of the campaign suggested a surge in female support and turnout might propel Kamala Harris to win the presidency.
It seemed like the perfect constellation of factors were in place for that to happen, too. Not only was Harris campaigning to be the country’s first female president; but she was running against an openly misogynistic opponent. Donald Trump also made numerous sexist statements and took credit for the unpopular Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
What happened?
There were always reasons to be deeply skeptical of that narrative, though. After all, some of those same factors fueled stories about Donald Trump’s ostensibly insurmountable deficit among women during the 2016 campaign. Yet, I spent the early morning hours after that election writing an analysis of why the gender gap ultimately doomed Hillary Clinton.
That 2016 postmortem piece noted that Clinton’s 13-point margin of victory among female voters was right in line with Barack Obama’s performances in 2008 and 2012. Donald Trump, however, won a larger share of male voters than any candidate since George H.W. Bush won the 1988 presidential election in a landslide.
This year, Harris won women by an even smaller margin than Clinton did in 2016. Her 8-point lead among female voters, according to exit polls (53% to 45%) also significantly underperformed Joe Biden’s 15-point advantage among women voters in the Biden-Trump 2020 election (57% to 42%).
Weak gender solidarity
Harris’ underperformance among female voters fits a familiar pattern: Gender solidarity is a relatively weak factor in women’s support for female candidates. Before she entered the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton had hoped to buck that trend and “inspire an unbeatable wave of women to come out and vote.” But she had her doubts, noting in her 2017 memoir:
Gender hasn’t proven to be the motivating force for women that some hope it might be.
Clinton’s concerns were correct. John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and I showed that women did not rally to Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. But men shifted to Trump – especially men with more sexist attitudes. We also noted that only about a third of women in September 2016 said that their gender was “extremely important” to their identity, while 61% of Black Americans said their race was “extremely important.”
Those findings confirmed past research showing that race is much more important than gender in how people vote. Nancy Burns and Don Kinder, for example, wrote the following back in 2012:
The social organization of gender emphasizes intimacy between men and women; the social organization of race emphasizes separation between whites and blacks. Separation fosters solidarity among African Americans. Integration impairs solidarity among women.
Jane Junn also argues that race typically trumps gender in her influential analysis of white women’s long-standing support for Republican presidential candidates. In doing so, she called on political analysts to:
… consider the positionality of white women as second in sex to men, but first in race to minorities, and the invocation of white womanhood in political rhetoric and practice as a potential explanation of the Trump majority [among white women voters in 2016].
Those of us who followed her advice were not surprised, then, that Trump won 53% of white women voters against Harris in both the exit polls and in the AP Votecast’s enormous survey of over 120,000 voters.
I concluded my 2016 post-election piece by speculating that it will probably take more gender-based solidarity for a female candidate to shatter the highest and hardest glass ceiling in the world. The 2024 election has again proved this point.