White House fight boils down to battle of the sexes

Kamala Harris leads by 11 points among women – by 51 per cent to 40 in the latest YouGov poll, but Donald Trump holds an even more dominant 18-point lead among men – by 54 per cent to 36.

Kamala Harris is polling higher among women but Donald Trump has a big lead among male voters. Picture: AFP.

The 2024 American election will be decided by a battle of the sexes, as polling for The Times shows a gender gap growing between voters since Kamala Harris stepped into the race against Donald Trump.

Harris is set to be confirmed as the Democratic presidential nominee next week after President Biden’s decision to quit the race, so the contest for the White House is between a man and a woman for only the second time.

Harris leads by 11 points among women – by 51 per cent to 40 – in the YouGov poll of 1,170 registered voters taken on July 22-23. But Trump holds an even more dominant 18-point lead among men – by 54 per cent to 36 – producing a net gender gap of 29 points.

Underscoring how swiftly male and female voters have shifted in a matter of days, a YouGov poll taken just before Biden’s announcement that he was stepping aside showed a gender gap of 12 points. Biden led by four points among women, while Trump had an eight-point lead among men.

Carl Bialik, US politics editor at YouGov, said: “The gender gap has widened since Harris became the likely nominee – both because she is doing better than Biden was among women, and because she is doing worse among men.”

The divide mirrors that between Trump and Hillary Clinton at the 2016 election, the only other presidential race to pitch a man against a woman.

A survey by the Pew Research Center revealed a gap of 26 points, with Trump winning male voters by 15 points and Clinton winning women by 11. With two men back on the ballot as Biden beat Trump in 2020, it narrowed to seven points, the Pew survey found.

Asked about Biden’s decision to step aside after his calamitous debate performance against Trump a month ago, one female voter said she had felt “shock, and then immense gratitude that we have an honourable man in charge who made the choice to put country first”.

“Then excited because now I feel we have a chance to eradicate the orange clown from the political sphere for good,” she said.

Underlining the nagging doubts among many voters, however, one woman told the survey that she was “terrified that the country won’t elect a female president no matter who she is and Trump will be elected”.

The poll showed a marked drop since the 2016 election in the proportion of voters who feel that the US is ready to elect a woman to the highest office. In the Times/YouGov poll, 54 per cent of voters said the US was ready to elect a woman as president, down from 63 per cent in a YouGov survey in 2015.

“It’s striking that the number is going down,” said Bialik. “Men and women say the country is ready at about the same rate, which suggests they have similar views about sexism and tolerance for women leaders among the country’s voters. You might hope for nine years of progress, instead you see a significant drop.”

Only 37 per cent of men have a favourable view of Harris, compared with 57 who view her unfavourably. Trump’s polling was the same among women, with 37 per cent viewing the former president favourably and 57 per cent holding an unfavourable view.

Harris is expected to pick a white man as her running-mate as she seeks to broaden her appeal to male voters.

The Times