Democrats Face Growing Gender Divide as Men Shift Toward Trump and GOP
By Max Taves
Poll after poll keeps reaching the same conclusion: Women
are moving left; men, right into Donald Trump’s arms.
“This is the most gendered election America has seen — and
the split has only deepened with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic
ticket instead of Joe Biden,” Axios recently reported.
While Vice President Harris had the support of 56% of women
in a head-to-head race against Trump in a mid-August CBS News poll of registered voters, only 45% of
men said they’d support her. Trump led by nine points among men in that poll.
In battleground states, the partisan gender divide was wide
four years ago. Now, it’s wider.
On election day 2020, Trump had a 6-point advantage against
Biden among men in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada, per New York
Times/Sienna College data. By mid-August 2024, Trump had a
15-point advantage over Harris among men in those same states, according to a
Times/Sienna survey of likely voters.
What’s happening?
Clearly, American men, increasingly young ones, think Trump
and his cocktail of conservative policies will better address what ails them —
economic anxiety, depression, addiction, overdoses and some vague,
ballyhooed crisis over the meaning of Millennial masculinity.
But men need to rethink their budding bromance with the
Republican Party.
The problems men face aren’t spread evenly across American
political geography. Men who live in states where Republicans reign suffer
more. And the dismal differences between red and blue states are measurable,
significant and not coincidental.
Cancer will kill 611,720 Americans this year, per
federal projections; and men will disproportionately die from it. But
cancer won’t kill them at equal rates. Men who live in red states — which spurn environmental protections
and public health spending — have the
highest rates of death from cancer (and Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cirrhosis, kidney failure, heart disease and influenza).
GOP polls repeatedly reject and weaken workplace safety
rules, and men die on the job at the greatest rates in their states.
But higher risk doesn’t mean more reward there: Men earn lower wages in red states than in blue
states.
Conservatives constantly accuse liberals of denigrating the
“traditional family,” so you’d think marriages would last longer in their
states, where, after all, more people attend church every Sunday and pray.
But no. Marriages fail more often in Republican states.
Men care about law and order, we hear — and nobody outdoes
Republican tough talk on crime and punishment. However, men who live in
Republican states are more likely to be murdered. The
average man in Senator Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina is 86% more likely to be killed than in
Governor Gavin Newsom’s California.
Over the last two decades, suicides have risen, hitting men hardest but not
proportionately. Men in Republican states kill themselves more often than in
Democratic ones.
Despite GOP pro-life talk, men in red America live shorter lives. So do the mothers of
their children, who die more often from pregnancies. So do their newborn sons and daughters.
“Infant mortality rates … are consistently higher under
Republican-controlled state legislatures than under non-Republican-controlled
ones,” a 2022 peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine found, concluding these differences were not accidental
but, in part, the result of Republican legislation.
Policies matter.
If men peer behind the curtain of Republican machismo,
they’ll see a party with little to offer them besides bluster, AR-15s, coal
plants and, maybe, menthol cigarettes.
But when it comes to their pocketbooks, their sanity, their
safety, their health and even their marriages, men should realize: Republican
states are hotbeds of the misery they’re trying to escape.
Max Taves is a
lifelong Californian, a concerned citizen and an award-winning reporter and
business columnist for the Wall Street Journal, CBSi-CNET, Village Voice's LA
Weekly and Law.com.