The Gender Divide in America’s Election: Why Working-Class Men Are Flocking to Trump

The 2024 presidential race reveals a striking gender divide, as working-class men gravitate toward Trump while women favour Harris.

This year’s presidential election appears to be among the closest in American history, but it’s already historic for the wide divergences – in presidential preference and larger values – between men and women. A Suffolk University/USA Today Poll released Wednesday shows Donald Trump leading among male voters by a 53-to-37 per cent margin, while Kamala Harris leads among women by a mirror-image 53 to 36 per cent margin. (Overall, the poll has Harris ahead by just 1 percentage point, mirroring virtually every other poll, which shows the race to be tied.)

Harris’s greatest hurdle is winning over working-class men. College graduates clearly favour her; those with postgraduate or professional degrees favoured her inercent margin, while those who went to a trade school (which offers instruction in blue-collar jobs) favoured Trump by a 63-to- one recent poll by a 63-to-29 p25 per cent margin.

In the mid-20th century, working-class men provided the core of the Democrats’ voting base, the epicentre of the New Deal coalition that anchored the party from 1932 through 1968. In the three decades following World War II, as a consequence of high rates of unionisation and the absence of foreign competition, which could bring down domestic wages, working-class men often made enough to support their families even if their spouses didn’t work outside the home. They often made enough to become homeowners. (In fact, there’s a historic correlation between cities with high rates of unionisation and high rates of home ownership. In the decades following World War II, the city with the highest rate of working-class homeownership was Detroit, centre of the unionised auto industry. Today, it’s Las Vegas, centre of the unionised hotel industry.)

But the economy that enabled working-class men to support families and become homeowners has largely vanished from the American landscape. With union membership reduced to a bare 6 per cent of the private-sector workforce (down from roughly 40 per cent in the mid-20th century), with technological and robotic production reducing the need for workers in manufacturing, construction, and perhaps soon in transportation (all male-dominated occupational sectors), and with much formerly U.S.-based production offshored to other nations, the kind of remunerative blue-collar or manual labour jobs that enabled their grandfathers to support their families and perhaps send their kids to college no longer exist. And as the blue-collar middle class of their grandfathers’ generation has vanished, the income and wealth gap between college graduates and workers with only a secondary education (high school) has widened precipitously.

The very legitimate economic anxieties of working-class men appear to be even greater among young working-class men, who see a future in which their skills may be in even less demand. They also see an economy in which remunerative jobs in such female-dominated occupations as teaching and healthcare will likely expand, not contract, even as the professional jobs historically closed to women are becoming filled with just as many females as males.

All this has left no small number of young American men – predominantly working-class – prey to the anti-feminist, hypermasculine appeals of the far-right. The two speakers at this summer’s Republican National Convention given the task of bringing Donald Trump onstage for his climactic acceptance speech were the president of the cage-fighting mixed martial arts league and the most celebrated actor in what passes for professional wrestling, Hulk Hogan. And last week, while speaking in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Trump went into a 12-minute digression about the leading professional golfer of the 1950s and ’60s, Arnold Palmer, and the reputed size of his penis. In a sense, Trump was confirming a thesis put forth in a 2020 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Eric Knowles (a psychology professor at NYU) and Sarah DiMuccio (a researcher with a doctorate in social psychology) that compared data on support for Trump with data on male insecurity.

In particular, Knowles and DiMuccio looked at the kind of data that generally eludes political scientists and political reporters (present company included). They sought out the Google Trends search data for the 12 months immediately preceding the 2016 election for erectile dysfunction, penis size, penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and Viagra—gender-affirming care, of a sort—and labelled them as indices of Precarious Manhood. They produced a map of the United States showing where those Google searches were most common (Appalachia and the Deep South). And by running the standard statistical regression analyses, they found a strong predictive correlation between the rates of those Google searches and the votes for Donald Trump in 2016 (though, of course, those were also votes against Hillary Clinton).

As I’m more of a Marxian than a Freudian, I think the roots of this anxiety are economic, not psychological. That said, Harris’s initial economic platform stressed bolstering what she termed “the care economy.” It called for boosting the tax credit to families with children (to $6000 a year for families with children under the age of one), providing affordable childcare and free pre-kindergarten, and more recently, providing assistance to families that have to care for their elders as well. All necessary, progressive and long-overdue measures of social provision, but what their appeal is to young men who believe they’ll lack the monetary wherewithal to form families or long-term relationships is, to put it mildly, unclear.

I’ve argued that Harris needs to boost what I’ve called “the build economy” alongside the care economy, stressing her commitment to creating remunerative jobs in blue-collar occupations. She has enlarged her agenda to include some such proposals, such as providing the financial resources to build 3 million new homes over the next four years. However, she has chiefly advanced this as a way to address the nation’s very real housing shortage while pointing out only secondarily that it would also create many thousands of construction jobs.

The drift of working-class young men to the far right isn’t solely an American problem, alas; it’s apparent in most nations with developed economies that are transitioning from production to information-age employment. Absent the kind of economic policies that can provide such young men with hope of a secure future, they’ll be prey to demagogues who create scapegoats against whom they can rage. Donald Trump is providing a masterclass in such scapegoating as Election Day draws near; it may yet return him to the White House.