Opinion | Gender and Education Are the New Fault Lines of American Politics

You’ve probably heard a lot about the gender gap in presidential politics by now. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are two vastly different candidates, and that has made the gap so intense that this election has become a battle between the sexes. So what else is there to know?

A lot. And this most of all: In modern presidential politics, the gender gap has never been wider, but it gets particularly large when we break out gender by educational attainment.

We are truly looking at two different Americas when we dig into the views of men without college degrees and women with college degrees. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically and experience essentially separate economies, and therefore give priority to distinct sets of character traits and issues.

Let’s take a closer look. Women with college degrees, who are generally more financially secure than other women, name abortion as one of the key issues deciding their vote, while both women and men without degrees tend to focus more on issues affecting their day-to-day finances or safety. While inflation affects everyone, it hits non-college-educated voters who feel they are falling behind hardest, especially now that the unemployment rate has been rising among those with less than a high school diploma.

Our research indicates that economic issues matter deeply to many men without a college degree, who respond strongly to populist messages aimed at acknowledging their anxiety, sense of loss and resentment.

These two groups also consume media in entirely different ways, which affects what they see and hear. Men — including those without college degrees — often spend time on X and Reddit, and many listen to podcasts and YouTube personalities concentrating on gaming, sports and politics. Women are more likely to frequent TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Many seem more focused on content about personal growth, true crime and style.

With the contrasts in priorities and worldview between these two groups, it makes sense that they would have different voting patterns, and the presence of a woman on the Democratic ticket has only accentuated that. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center shows non-college-educated men choosing Mr. Trump at a rate of 55 percent to 39 percent; college-educated women are nearly the inverse, favoring Ms. Harris by 61 percent to 34 percent. The gap may be even bigger by Election Day; it could be the largest in history.

This isn’t a new trend. College-educated women have consistently voted for Democrats at high levels for years. But the divergence between non-college-educated men and college-educated women this year seems likely to surpass even its 2016 level.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to non-college-educated men is part of what’s driving this shift. Before 2016, the gap between college-educated women and non-college-educated men was not as broad. But while Joe Biden made inroads among non-college-educated men in 2020, gaining 5 percent more of their vote compared to Hillary Clinton’s share in 2016, current support for Ms. Harris among men without college degrees has dropped back down almost to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 levels. This could certainly in part be due to gender biases; non-college-educated men tend to be less receptive to the idea of women in executive positions. A study found that men without college degrees are least confident that a woman has what it takes to run a major American company (78 percent are confident compared to 91 percent of college-educated women). Our research suggests that they worry whether women are strong enough, can be respected by foreign leaders and are able to boost manufacturing.

This campaign in particular shows that both parties have problems with key demographics. Years ago, Democrats could count on support from male union workers, but Mr. Trump is increasingly winning over those voters — not only because of his direct, emotional appeals to their anxiety and values, but also because Democrats have struggled to establish a compelling enough populist economic message or break into the media ecosystem that non-college-educated men consume.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, seems to have an especially potent attraction for some of these working-class voters. “Increasingly, Republicans are the party of working- and middle-class people,” said Mr. Vance, whose family’s working-class background could be a powerful tool to bring in these non-college-educated men who turned to Mr. Biden in 2020, particularly white ones.

As for Ms. Harris, she is particularly appealing to educated women. Republicans used to be stronger than Democrats with college-educated women, but that started to change in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan. Contemporaneous research indicated that educated women were more secular and more progressive on social issues than other voters at the time. They also supported government programs to provide a safety net and opportunity for all (sound familiar?). They opposed the Reagan tax cuts and deregulation and feared war. But many stuck with the Republican Party through the 2000s as part of the “security mom” coalition. We saw echoes of this in 2022 when Republican candidates in New York and elsewhere were able to leverage safety concerns to win over enough of these women to prevail on Election Day.

Ms. Harris has been able to use abortion rights to bring back some women with college degrees who might otherwise have stayed with the Republicans. She already had a record of defending reproductive rights, and this year, she visited swing states to speak about abortion. Even in the early days of her campaign, she focused on abortion rights, vowing to restore the rights that had been enshrined in Roe v. Wade and organizing events in battleground states devoted to the issue. Women with college degrees were already a core base for Ms. Harris and the Democratic Party, but these moves helped increase her support among women of all ages. She and her campaign know that she needs to register and turn out voters who favor abortion rights to offset the non-college-educated men Mr. Trump is poised to win.

While it might seem impossible for a candidate to appeal to both non-college-educated men and college-educated women, there are areas where policies and messaging could bridge the gap.

A populist message, for example, could win more men without college degrees without alienating college-educated women, as anti-corporate sentiment is common among voters across the political spectrum and can play into concerns about both economic issues and freedom from control. Either party could leverage this sentiment.

Both groups seem to want investments in public education and job skills training. Many in both groups are worried the next generation will not be as well off as the one before. Many want clean air and water and worry about pollution. Non-college-educated men tend to want to preserve natural areas for recreation like hunting, our data indicates, while college-educated women are particularly concerned about climate change. Both groups seek more respect and power, our research shows, and both see politics as a zero-sum game. The divide between these two groups seems unlikely to change before Election Day, but for either party to bridge the gap in the long term, it will need to work to appeal to both groups.

The story of this election could well be the gender gap between those Americans who went to college and those who didn’t. As the candidates consolidate support among their base, the divide between college-educated women and non-college-educated men seems almost impossible for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump to overcome. The big question for America going forward is, can these two groups be brought together after a campaign that has only driven them further apart?