2024 Could See the Largest Gender, Education Gaps in Voter Preference in History

As early voting kicks off and Americans head to the polls, the country could see one of the most starkly divided electorates ever. The dynamic that is most shaping 2024, according to polls, are the gender and education gaps that are shifting men and women further and further apart politically, which has usually not been the case. According to a new breakdown of an NBC News poll by Public Opinion Strategies, the gender and education divides are driving both candidates’ strengths in the final days of the campaign as men move starkly toward President Trump and women overwhelmingly favor Vice President Harris. According to the analysis, women lean toward Ms. Harris by a 14-point margin, while men favor Trump by a 16-point margin. Both men’s and women’s level of educational attainment has an even greater effect on their voting preferences. Men with no college degrees favor Trump by 28 points, while men with a bachelor’s degree or higher favor Ms. Harris by eight points. Women with college degrees plan to vote for Ms. Harris by a stunning 38-point margin, while Trump has just a three-point lead among women without a college degree. On gender alone, men and women are split by 30 points — which would be the largest gap in voting preferences between the genders since women won the right to vote more than a century ago. Men with college degrees and those without college degrees have a 36-point gap between them in voting preference, while women both with and without college degrees are split by a 41-point difference. The analysis of the NBC News poll by Public Opinion Strategies was conducted by pollsters Jeff Horwitt and Bill McIntruff. They say Ms. Harris’s momentum is gone as these voters sort themselves deeper into their ideological camps. “As summer has turned to fall, any signs of momentum for Kamala Harris have stopped,” Mr. Horwitt told NBC. “The race is a dead heat.” Mr. McIntruff said Ms. Harris’s biggest problem is that as she is the “incumbent,” so to speak, she is facing headwinds for the historic unpopularity of the Biden administration. Ms. Harris’s edge with college-educated voters could be a boon for her in critical swing states, specifically North Carolina and Pennsylvania both have higher percentages of college-educated residents than the country at large. Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia fall just below the national average. In North Carolina — which Democrats view as the state most likely to be a Harris 2024 state that was previously a Trump 2020 state — Ms. Harris is running a much more competitive race than in other swing states like Arizona and Georgia. The FiveThirtyEight polling average has her just 0.3 percent behind Trump in the state, and the highly rated Quinnipiac University poll found Ms. Harris is up by two points in the state as of Wednesday. The former president has serious strength of his own, to be sure. Trump has made gains among uneducated voters that would seem unbelievable to someone just ten years ago. President Clinton won white, non-college voters by a few points in 1992, though Trump is now poised to win them by the largest margin for a presidential candidate in history as the group has slowly shifted away from the Democratic Party. Trump’s problem, however, is that the group with whom he performs best — those without college degrees — are a shrinking population that have seen their political engagement decline in recent decades. In 1980, white voters without a degree made up nearly 70 percent of the electorate in 1980, but in 2020 that had fallen to just 39 percent.

2024 Could See the Largest Gender, Education Gaps in Voter Preference in History

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