Harris falls short with female voters, stunning Democrats

Vice President Harris’s strategy of riding on a surge of female support ultimately fell flat, with hints that Election Day could see a historic gender gap failing to materialize.

White women sided with President-elect Trump for the third straight cycle, and he also made inroads with Latina voters and young women. Trump improved on his 2020 margins with Latina women by 8 points, according to Edison Research. And among young women, Trump improved by 11 points compared to last cycle, according to NBC News exit polling.

While Harris won women, Trump’s gains with the voting bloc have Democrats reeling as they work to understand what went wrong on election night.

“At the end of the day, female voters across the country looked at whether they were better off than they were four years ago and they decided that they weren’t,” said Lauren Zelt, executive director of Maggie’s List, a group dedicated to electing conservative women to public office.

In the lead-up to Election Day, Republicans repeatedly pointed back to the argument that women are often the financial gatekeepers for their families, betting that large swaths of the voting bloc would prioritize the economy amid high inflation.

Democrats, on the other hand, prioritized abortion access to energize women, framing Harris’s campaign as a fight for fundamental freedoms.

“Democrats made the mistake of lumping all women together and assuming that we vote as a bloc on one issue,” said Kristin Davison, a national Republican strategist.

Democrats also acknowledge they had major flaws in their economic messaging, which many say began with President Biden.

“For some reason President Biden and the Biden team for over a year either told Americans that they weren’t experiencing what they actually were experiencing when it came to groceries, gas and household costs, or they would point to obscure economic data from the Federal Reserve or a think tank or a white paper and told people ‘No, the economy is doing fabulously’ when it’s not doing fabulously if you are lower- or middle-income and milk used to cost $1.75,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist.

“That washed onto [Harris’s] shore and she obviously had a very hard time digging out of that,” Reinish said.

Harris was hoping to maximize turnout from female voters, who have historically sided with Democratic presidential candidates. Former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Biden all won the demographic by double digits in recent cycles, according to Edison.

Harris retained the advantage over Trump this time around, but by a smaller margin than her predecessors. Her 7-point lead with women, according to AP VoteCast, was smaller than the others. Biden’s 2020 lead among women was around 12 points over Trump, according to the same pollster.

The numbers may come as a surprise to some, after Republicans were fretting in the months ahead of Election Day about what appeared to be deteriorating support for Trump among women in an election where abortion was expected to be a major motivating issue.

Trump has long struggled with the bloc, as he bragged along the campaign trail about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and mocked his female competitors. Vice President-elect JD Vance also received backlash for a past clip in which he said the country was being run by “childless cat ladies.”

“Maybe they didn’t like some of the jokes or some of the rhetoric but at the end of the day their concerns for the economy and the safety of their community outweighed that,” Davison said, referring to female voters.

Democrats hoped that the issue of abortion access would be a major motivator for women. According to preliminary exit poll data from ABC News, 19 percent of all women said abortion was their most important issue, and 42 percent of women younger than 30 said the same. But while voters were certainly concerned about the issue, it did not necessarily translate into support for Harris.

A CNN exit poll showed voters ranking abortion as the third-most important issue, behind democracy and the economy. The same poll showed 65 percent of voters saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, yet the same voters did not tie the issue to Trump and downballot Republicans.

Both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge the presence of split-ticket voting, particularly on abortion.

Trump won Florida by roughly 13 points, but 57 percent of voters in the state voted to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. The amendment came just short of the 60 percent threshold to pass. And in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, which Trump won, along with deep-red Missouri, abortion rights ballot measures saw victories.

"It just showed that after years and years of straight ticket becoming more and more of a reality, it looks as if more of the country is re-embracing the idea of the split ticket once more,” Reinish said.

Voters who picked both Trump and abortion rights ballot measures may have been deciding that, if they sided with state-level protections, they didn’t need the protections Harris was promising, said Micki McElya, a history professor at the University of Connecticut.

McElya argued racism and sexism were also major factors against Harris, an idea some Democrats have also raised as they look for answers to the Election Day results. White women supporting Trump may “think of themselves as protected” against issues that other sub-demographics of women felt would be exacerbated by another Trump term.

Women were more likely than men to say that electing the first female president was a factor in their vote, according to AP VoteCast, but a notable 4 in 10 women said it wasn’t a factor.

“I think people largely assume that, when women are on the ballot, they’re going to get more support from women,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics. “And I think we have to just acknowledge that women don’t vote for women. They don’t vote along gender lines.”

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign also struggled to make inroads with male voters, despite ramping up appeals to the demographic in the home stretch and working to dampen Trump’s machismo messaging.

Although Harris had the overall edge with young voters, young men have been moving away from Democrats for years, as young women grow more likely to identify as liberal.

Trump won men by 11 points in 2016, and President Biden narrowed that gap to single digits in 2020, according to Edison. This cycle, NBC News exit polling suggests Trump expanded his lead with male voters back to 13 points, winning majorities of white and Latino men. He also won roughly half of young male voters, compared to fewer than 4 in 10 women of the same age bracket.

Dittmar noted that Harris’s underperformance among women in the latest exit data comes as part of a broader underperformance for the Democrat overall.

“The data is telling us something, and it's not saying run away from race and gender as issues, but I fear that that's exactly the lesson that Democratic strategists are taking from it,” McElya said.