Elections have become a sexualized battlefield, and men have repeatedly demonstrated their determination to win no matter the social cost.

What Happens if the Gender Gap Becomes a Gender Chasm? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/trump-midterms-gender-gap.html Thomas B. Edsall By Thomas B. Edsall Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. July 12, 2018 545 Image A Make America Great Again rally filled an arena in Duluth, Minn., in June.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times For nearly 40 years, the gender gap in voting has been the subject of continued speculation. How much does it matter? Would it be wide enough to put Democrats in office? Now, with President Trump ascendant, the question becomes still more urgent: What happens if the gender gap becomes a gender chasm? On July 7, CNN predicted that the 2018 election would “have the largest gender gap on record for a midterm election since 1958.” On the same day, Dan Balz, my former colleague at The Washington Post, wrote: The disconnect between President Trump and female voters is serious and not getting better. That’s a potentially big problem for Republicans in the November elections. Polling data this year clearly suggests that women are moving away from the Republican Party. The potential gender gap in congressional voting has risen from 20 and 22 points in 2014 and 2016, according to exit polls, to 33 points in a Quinnipiac Poll published earlier this month. Men of all races say they intend to vote for Republican House candidates 50-42, while women of all races say they intend to vote for Democratic candidates 58-33. Significantly, white women, a majority of whom backed Trump in 2016, now say they intend to vote for Democratic House candidates in 2018 by a 14-point margin, 52-38, according to Quinnipiac. White men say they intend to vote for Republican House candidates 56-38 in 2018. Polling also suggests that Trump could do better in 2020 among men than he did in 2016, but his approval ratings among women of all races are dismal. The Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted June 27-July 2 found that men of all races approve of how Trump is handling the job by 54-45, while women of all races disapprove, 65-32, a 42-point gap. (The gap is determined in this way: If there were no difference between men and women, the gap would be zero. Using this case as an example, men are plus nine on Trump and women are minus 33, which produces a total gap of 42 points.) In 2016, Trump won white men 56.05 to 36.61, carrying white men without college degrees 61.20 to 31.82, while barely losing white men with degrees, 46.60 to 45.30, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. In 2016, Trump carried white women, 51.86 to 43.15 — winning white women without college degrees 58.17 to 37.25 and losing white women with degrees 38.38 to 55.73. You have 4 free articles remaining. Subscribe to The Times In other words, even though Trump carried both white men and women in 2016, there was still a 10.73 point gender gap among white voters. In that election Trump won men of all races 48.75 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 44.21 percent, but lost among women of all races 42.60 percent to Clinton’s 52.48 percent — for a gender gap of 14.42 percentage points. I asked Shana Gadarian, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, about the growing distaste for Trump among all women, and she wrote back: One of the things that I think that women are responding to in this current political moment is both a realization of past wrongs and the real threat of a loss of status. Gadarian pointed out that On the ground, resistance acts like the teachers union strikes, protests about family separation and marches for gun control are being fueled by women who see this administration as hostile to issues of basic decency, dignity and safety in your workplace, and compassion for children. Which leads us to a second question: Will the votes of women who are hostile to Trump eventually take him down, along with the Republican majority in Congress? Or will we see a repeat of elections in the 1980s, when Democratic hopes of capitalizing on the votes of women fizzled? EDITORS’ PICKS Silicon Valley’s Giants Take Their Talent Hunt to Cambridge What It Costs to Be Smuggled Across the U.S. Border Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist? On one level, these new findings reflect a consistent pattern that has obtained since 1980. Trump — like the two George Bushes and Ronald Reagan before him — holds a set of policy positions that split men and women. Most important, since winning office, he has opposed social welfare and safety net programs and supported a massive military buildup. In April 2017, Pew Research Center reported that men would prefer a “smaller government with fewer services” as opposed to a “bigger government with more services” 53-42, while women were just the opposite, favoring a bigger government with more services by 54-38. Gallup, in turn, found that over four decades of polling, “men favor the United States’ going to war to resolve disputes much more than women do.” Trump has added something new to the mix, something more primordial and atavistic. I wrote to Dan McAdams, a professor in the psychology department at Northwestern who studies the Trump presidency. McAdams sent me his views on Trump’s allure: Trump personifies an approach to leadership that many men find deeply appealing. It is a primal appeal to social dominance. Everybody — men and women — knows that social status can be seized through physical power and threat; the strongest, biggest, and boldest may lord it over the rest of us. But boys and men have more direct experiences of this kind of thing growing up — on the playground, for example, in gym class, in the military, and in various other socialization venues wherein male strength and bravura are praised and deeply prized, even as they also evoke fear and submission. McAdams cited the comments of the primatologist Jane Goodall, who compared Trump’s behavior to that of a chimpanzee. “In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Goodall told James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic in 2016. In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position. Along similar lines, Christopher Boehm, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California, wrote a February 2016 New Scientist article about his views of Trump: For my money, I turn to primate politics and the tactics of alpha males. His model of political posturing echoes what I saw while studying Tanzania’s wild Gombe chimpanzees. One stood out: Goblin, an alpha male. He threatened or attacked rivals who looked like they might challenge him, often acting sharply and pre-emptively. Similarly, Trump knows who and when to attack to maximize intimidation. In an attack, the male chimp’s long black hair stands on end as he charges at his rival, which may either race up a tree screaming or stand and fight. Trump’s competitors have mostly been racing up trees. In a similar vein, Alex Castellanos, the Republican media consultant best known for his notorious 1990 “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms, addressed the gender gap in response to my inquiry: “We are in the middle of an unprecedented political and cultural gender war,” Castellanos, a strong Trump supporter, declared. “On one side of this war, we have Trump, alpha males and the women who love them. On the other side are beta males and the women who want to be them.” In Castellanos’s view, the Trump side flies the flag of manliness and strength which it sees as necessary to hold the world together and keep it from continuing to unravel in uncertain and perilous times. It is fighting to preserve not just manly strength but gender itself, the cultural differences between male and female. The other side is seeking to overthrow the patriarchal hierarchy that has run the world since we lived in caves. It seeks to create a sexually egalitarian world by extinguishing gender and its differences. Castellanos argues that Trump, is the last hope of those, like me, who would preserve the old patriarchal hierarchy. That’s why white college educated suburban women hate him: he is the political embodiment of the regressive threat to the evolution of postmodern female identity. Simply put, Trump’s alpha dog manliness and strength are a threat to the evolving independence and power of women. He “would take women back.” He represents the world as it was, where women were kept “in their place.” Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, sees the same traits in Trump that Castellanos sees, but with a less adoring gaze. Pinker emailed in response to my inquiry, that Trump is almost a caricature of a contestant to be Alpha baboon: aggressive, hypersensitive to perceived threats to his dominance, boastful of his status and physical attributes (including his genitals), even the physical display of colorful big hair and a phallic red tie. Men may identify with such displays. Why, Pinker asked, would men be more pro-Trump now than they were when he first took office? Pinker answered his own question: The latest battle of the sexes has the media, educational, and workplace establishments sympathizing with women and demonizing men. Much of this is justified and long overdue, given how women are exploited and discriminated against, but it may leave some men feeling defensive, belittled, and eager for a champion. This may especially affect lower-status men. High-status women may justifiably protest their treatment at the hands of high-status men, but lower-status men may feel less sympathy for them, particularly if they feel demeaned and disenfranchised. How much, then, can Democrats and liberals bank on the votes of women to block the Trump agenda in 2018 and to vote him out of office in 2020? History is not encouraging on that score. The modern gender gap first drew sustained public attention in 1980, after the election of President Ronald Reagan. At the time, many political strategists thought it would diminish Reagan’s re-election prospects in 1984. To give one example, Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, published “Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President” in January of 1984. That did not happen. The false assumption was that women were becoming more Democratic. In reality, men were becoming more Republican. Karen Kaufmann, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and John Petrocik, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri, were among the first to show that men were moving to the right and that it was this movement that drove the gender gap. In their 1999 paper, “The Changing Politics of American Men: Understanding the Sources of the Gender Gap,” Kaufmann and Petrocik demonstrated the growing conservatism of men — a process that had actually begun in 1968. The accompanying graphic derived, in part, from their paper, tracks partisan identification from 1952 to 2016. Among women, allegiance to the Democratic and Republican parties remained relatively constant. For men, however, Democratic loyalty declined sharply from 60 percent in 1964 to 43 percent in 2016, while Republican partisanship grew from 32 to 49 percent. Kaufmann and Petrocik write: Men have become increasingly Republican in their party identification and voting behavior since the mid-sixties while the partisanship and voting behavior of women has remained essentially constant. The shift of men, particularly white men, to the right, played a crucial role in another pivotal election, the 1994 “Gingrich revolution,” when they began to vote Republican in congressional elections the way they had been in presidential elections. In 1992, men had voted 52-48 for Democratic House candidates, relatively similar to the 55-45 margin cast by women, according to New York Times exit poll data. In 1994, however, men voted for Republican congressional candidates, 58-42, while women stayed in the Democratic camp, 53-47. The result: Republicans took over control of the House for the first time in 42 years. Bringing this back to the present, I asked Kaufmann in an email, “What do men see in Trump that women fail to see?” She wrote back: Trump, in deed and word, is all about men, white men in particular, but men generally. This is rare. The public sphere is filled with conversations regarding the disadvantages faced by racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community and women. Few candidates, however, are idiotic enough to vocalize the blame for all of this injustice on white men, but white men are always the implicit comparison group. Trump has no problem attacking racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and women when he feels justified. Men have a vocal advocate in Trump, and when he combines his pro-man message with his appeal to working-class racial anxiety — it’s a winning message for him, particularly among white working-class men. What this suggests is that even though polling shows Trump and the Republican House majority facing headwinds — largely because of opposition from women — white men have in recent decades shown remarkable devotion to the Republican Party and may still tip the scales. Men’s commitment to protecting their status — their dominant position in the social order — cannot be counted out in 2018 or 2020. Elections have become a sexualized battlefield, and men have repeatedly demonstrated their determination to win no matter the social cost. The outcome of the next two elections will show whether women are equally determined to fight tooth and nail. 545 Comments The Times needs your voice. We welcome your on-topic commentary, criticism and expertise. I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.