The Gender Gap That Wasn’t: Turns Out, Identities Don't Matter - Life Experiences Do

For months, we were told that the 2024 election would be defined by a massive gender gap. The logic was simple: Trump is deeply unpopular with women, abortion is on the ballot, and Kamala Harris is the first black female presidential nominee from a major party to run in a general election. If ever there was an election where gender politics would dominate, this was it.

Except… it didn’t.

Turns out, the much-hyped gender gap ended up looking pretty much like every other modern presidential election. Trump got 45% of the female vote, up a few ticks from 42% in 2020 and 41% in 2016. Women still leaned Democratic - Harris won 53% of their vote - but that’s down from Biden’s 57% in 2020. That so-called “suburban women revolt” against Trump? Not exactly an uprising. And the idea that women would flock to Harris en masse just because she’s a woman? Also a nope.

So What Happened?

For starters, people don’t vote based on identity politics as much as pundits would like to believe. 

The fact is pundits focus on the demographic breakdowns, which they get through polling because it gives them something to talk about. It's nice to be able to cite numbers from a poll, and it makes it a hell of a lot easier to convince your listeners you know what you're talking about. Over time, talking about it so much made them think that there was actually something there. They drink their own Kool-aid.

Sure, there are always segments of voters who are motivated by representation, but broad coalitions don’t form around demographics alone. If they did, Hillary Clinton would have crushed Trump in 2016. Instead, she got 54% of women - basically what Democrats always get.

Voters, women included, care about the same kitchen-table issues everyone else does: the economy, crime, cost of living, healthcare, and yes, abortion rights. But those issues don’t always translate neatly into a straightforward “women vs. men” voting pattern. Economic concerns cut across gender. So does dissatisfaction with the political status quo. And when it comes to reproductive rights, even though most voters support abortion access, they don’t all prioritize it the same way at the ballot box.

The Limits of Identity Politics

There was also a fundamental misread of how much identity politics would motivate and/or energize voters. Just because a candidate shares some demographic similarities with someone doesn't mean they'll get their vote. 

This is just wishful thinking based on pollThink - A cognitive bias in whichindividuals shape their understanding of reality based on poll numbers, particularly demographic breakdowns, leading them to prioritize and interpret the world through those visible statistics rather than underlying, less quantifiable factors. 

Pundits get so used to looking at the numbers - the demographic breakdowns - they become convinced that these breakdowns are what matter. Some get so used to thinking in terms of crosstabs that they build their whole political reality, and the assumptions that stem from it, on this foundation.

But ultimately, this is the same faulty thinking we did in 2016. We thought that women would vote in droves because Hillary Clinton was a woman and people are motivated to make history. I suppose we thought that, in part, because it was so exciting when Barack Obama made history. Possibly, the media wanted to believe it because it's super exciting and generates headlines when it happens.

But, just because someone can make history doesn’t mean they will inspire voters to show up in droves. If being the first woman on a major-party ticket was the game-changer, Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide. Likewise, if racial representation alone were a decisive factor, Barack Obama’s coalition would have been easily replicable (it clearly hasn't been). But political reality is more complicated than that.

As a side note - if there ever had been a perfect year to use running a female candidate to be the first female president as a major motivator, that would have been 2020. That year was the 100th anniversary of women having the right to vote. That could have made an excellent marketing campaign motivating women to vote for the first female president. Instead, it was a missed opportunity taken by a lackluster candidate (sorry, I love Joe, but come on he was four years too late!) to beat Trump, who at that point almost anyone probably would have beaten.

The problem isn’t that gender or race don’t matter in elections - it’s that they don’t matter in the way that campaigns sometimes wish they did. Identity can be a motivating factor, but it rarely overrides broader concerns. People vote on how they feel about their lives, their futures, and which candidate they trust (or, more often, distrust less) to handle the issues that matter to them.

Just because 80% of XYZ group of people feel such and such a way about this and that thing doesn't mean they feel that because they are an XYZ group. It's not about shared demographics, if anything at all, it's a shared life experience. We just can't see life experience quantified on a data sheet. But we can see race, gender, and age, giving the faulty appearance that this is the predictor that matters.

It's almost like we're looking at it from a backwards perspective.

In the same way, just because people agree with something in a poll doesn't mean that that is what will decide their vote. Something like 70% of people want campaign finance reform. No one, however, is deciding their vote based on that issue(Okay, honestly, I probably would but that's rare).

Then What Does Matter?

Everything - but nothing is the only thing that matters. It's all accumulative.

The key thing is finding the things that will matter most to enough people to get the votes needed to win - then getting people to believe you're the one that's going to do them. 

There are three questions people care about in politics:

• Who you are

• Why people should believe in you

• What you're going to do

But keep in mind, these three questions are answered in many ways over time and all of those things the campaign does build up to an accumulative image that is the answer to these questions. 

Most times, unfortunately, there won't be a magic bullet. You can never fully know what will be the thing that drives someone's vote. Sometimes it's personality, sometimes it's a general message, sometimes it's a specific issue. It all builds into an accumulative image and all the pieces matter.

But whatever it is, it has to matter for it to have any effect. And general platitudes and nice phrases, unless they can somehow capture the zeitgeist, they just aren't enough. They never were and they never will be.

It's not enough for a campaign to be acceptable, you have to be motivational.

In politics, people need a reason to take the time to vote and to have the faith to do so.

Barack Obama was motivating, Bill Clinton was motivating, and yes Donald Trump was too. Hell, even Joe Biden gave people a pretty good motivation - getting rid of Trump.

Incidentally, a big part of any non-incumbent's motivating factor is always change. 

An incredible number of people voted for both Barack Obama twice and Donald Trump. They seem incredibly far apart and tell you that the change is often the number one factor motivating voters in presidential politics.

I think we probably all agree that was the biggest factor of this election and the biggest problem with the Harris campaign. Kamala Harris was the Vice President in an administration that presided over the highest inflation we have had in decades. There was no distance between her and the administration, and thus no change as a motivation when change is the number one thing people wanted.

It's not enough to be doing okay in the counts and crosstabs. It's not enough to have a message that is acceptable to a plurality of the electorate. You need to have a message and a candidate, a slate of issues, and positions that are motivating - that give people a reason to lend you their vote.

"Politics is always all offense and anyone who says anything else is always going to lose eventually."

- Me