One major reason Donald Trump will return to the White House is that he remained unexpectedly competitive with women in this month’s election.
Vice President Kamala Harris won a majority of female voters, but her 8-point advantage over Trump with them was only about half as big as President Joe Biden’s 15-point lead in 2020, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN.
But even as women backed Trump in surprisingly large numbers, many of them continued to express significant hesitation about his style, agenda and potential impact on their rights and democracy itself, according to both the exit polls and AP VoteCast survey, the two principal surveys of voter attitudes in the election.
Many women uneasy about Trump on all those fronts, strategists in both parties agree, put greater weight on their more immediate concerns, primarily about inflation but also secondarily about the border and crime.
“The women who were most driven by abortion, health care, democracy and freedom and rights, which pulled it all together, chose Harris overwhelmingly,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, chief strategy officer for Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color. “But in this election, the more brass tacks, immediate impact (issues) won the day.”
If there is any near-term path to recovery for Democrats, it will almost certainly begin with the women who remained ambivalent about Trump even as they helped return him to the White House.
As president, Trump faced persistent and widespread opposition from women. Over his first four-year tenure, his approval rating among women averaged just 35 percent in Gallup polling. That was well below his 48 percent average approval rating among men – and by far the worst showing across a full term for any 21st century president among women in the Gallup surveys, according to detailed results provided by the firm.
Trump regained ground among women this year largely because so many of them were dissatisfied with the results produced by his successor, Biden.
But Trump’s provocative initial round of Cabinet nominations – including three separate figures who have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct – points toward a presidency whose style and agenda could again strain his support from female voters. Almost everything Trump has done since his win suggests that his second stint in the White House could feature even more of the conflict, chaos and belligerence that alienated women, to a much greater degree than men, during his first term. And that may be the one viable lifeline available to Democrats as they try to emerge from the disappointment of the 2024 results.
Viewed through the lens of gender politics, the biggest surprise on Election Day was not that Trump ran up the score among men but that he held down his losses among women.
Strategists on both sides had expected Trump to improve on his 2020 performance with men after a campaign in which he had constantly surrounded himself with symbols of hyper-masculinity and conspicuously courted younger men through appearances on media outlets with large male audiences, like the Joe Rogan podcast. Trump delivered on those expectations by increasing his margin among men by 5 percentage points over 2020, according to the exit polls. The AP VoteCast survey, conducted by NORC for another consortium of media organizations, also showed Trump widening his edge with men by five points compared to its 2020 result.
But even with Trump’s gains among men, women still had greater leverage to decide the election’s outcome. Women have cast a majority of votes nationally in every presidential election since 1980, according to Census figures. While the Census data on 2024 won’t be available for months, both the exit polls and VoteCast agreed that women cast most ballots again this year – not only nationally but in almost all of the decisive swing states. That means if Harris had improved on Biden’s performance with women – or, in some states, merely maintained it – she could have withstood her decline among men.
Instead, Harris unexpectedly lost ground among women.
Harris’s lead among women, in fact, was the smallest the exit polls had recorded for any Democratic presidential nominee in the 21st century, except in 2004 when women backed Democrat John Kerry over George W. Bush by just 3 percentage points. (VoteCast produced a virtually identical result for 2024, showing Harris beating Trump among women by 7 percentage points, a little over half the 12-point lead that survey showed for Biden in 2020.)
Black women gave Harris overwhelming support, with both the exit polls and VoteCast showing her winning about 9 in 10 of them. But Harris ran slightly below Democratic expectations among most other groups of women. Both the exit polls and VoteCast showed her winning 57 percent of white women with at least a four-year college degree. That was a solid showing, but below the support level of three-fifths or more that many Democrats considered possible for her, especially after the sharp movement of those women toward Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
Similarly, the exit polls showed Harris winning nearly three-fifths of single women; that too was a solid performance, but slightly below Biden’s showing with them in 2020. Many Democrats expected Harris to exceed the two-thirds support Biden recorded in 2020 among young women aged 18-29; instead, Harris slipped back to about three-fifths support among them, too.
The biggest disappointments for Democrats came among two other groups of women. Both the exit polls and the VoteCast survey found that Harris won exactly three-fifths of Latina women, down in each case from about two-in-three for Biden.
White women without a college degree were an especially critical target for each side because they represent such a large share of the electorate, particularly in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that, as usual, proved pivotal to the outcome.
Given the virtual certainty of Trump’s gains with men, Harris needed to improve at least slightly with these blue-collar women to hold Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the three states Trump dislodged in 2016 from what I termed “the Blue Wall.” But she could not meet that test.
Nationwide, both the exit polls and VoteCast showed Trump beating Harris among those working-class White women by roughly the same two-to-one margin he carried them over Biden in 2020. In the crucial former Blue Wall states, the exit polls showed Harris basically replicating Biden’s support among these women from 2020, while the VoteCast had her slightly losing ground.
The principal explanation for Harris’ disappointing showing among so many groups of women isn’t hard to find. In the exit polls, even more women than men expressed negative views about the economy.
Previously unpublished results from the exit polls provided by the CNN polling unit underscore just how broadly that economic discontent reached: the share who described the economy as “not so good” or “poor” reached three-fifths among White women with a college degree, two-thirds among Black women, three-fourths among Latina women and nearly four-in-five among the White women without a college degree. Biden’s approval rating in the exit polls was lackluster to poor among all those groups except Black women as well.
The Harris campaign and other Democrats had hoped that two other dynamics would counter that widespread discontent over the economy and the outcomes of Biden’s presidency.
The biggest issue they were looking to was abortion. In the exit polls, big majorities of women in each of those groups said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. In the 2022 midterms, the first election after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision rescinded the nationwide right to abortion, the vast majority of women who support legal abortion voted for Democratic candidates, especially in gubernatorial elections across the swing states that again proved decisive this year.
But in this election, Harris could not match that support among voters who endorse legal abortion. Nationwide, about 1 in 4 women who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time voted for Trump, according to the exit polls. Trump won at least that many pro-choice women in all seven of the most hotly-contested swing states, the exit polls found.
Trump’s insistence that he would allow states to set their own rules on abortion and reject a national ban may have helped him moderate resistance from pro-choice women. But strategists in both parties agree the biggest factor was that other issues eclipsed abortion for many of the pro-choice women who backed him.
Voters “seemed to say in 2024, ‘I may not agree with some Republican positions on abortion, but I can look beyond that if they satisfy me on fiscal or border issues,’” Republican pollster Nicole McCleskey wrote in a memo released last week. “That was not the case in 2022 – the economy and border issues were likely not as ripe, and the Dobbs decision had an emotional shock value. It was a different case in 2024, as Democrats had failed for two additional years to heed voter concern over inflation and the border. And voters had ample time to absorb and reconcile the Dobbs decision in light of other issues impacting their daily lives.”
The new exit poll data from the CNN polling unit buttress that conclusion. Those results found that a strikingly large percentage of female voters who said that abortion should remain legal also expressed negative views about the economy. Trump won a significant share of those conflicted voters: 1 in 4 of the Latinas, nearly half of the college-educated White women and over three-fifths of the blue-collar White women who want abortion legal but were negative on the economy voted for him. (Only 1 in 9 of the Black women in that category backed him.)
If there is a single master key that explains Harris’ defeat in 2024, it might be found there, in the very large number of pro-choice women who backed Trump because they were disappointed by their economic experience over the past four years, and thought he could deliver better results for them.
“I just think that for many women, self-interest as opposed to collective identity is the answer” for their decisions to support Trump, said Republican pollster Christine Matthews. “Is my self-interest my collective freedom of rights as a woman – or is my self-interest that I have to put my groceries on my credit card and cannot feed my family?”
The primacy of economic concerns also helps explain an equally striking finding from the new analysis of exit poll data by the CNN polling unit. Solid majorities of Black, Latina and college-educated White women described Trump in the exit poll as “too extreme,” as did over two-fifths of the White women without a college degree. But among the White women without a college degree who described Trump as “too extreme,” almost 1 in 5 voted for him anyway. So did 1 in 6 Latinas who called him too extreme and even nearly 1 in 10 White Women with a college degree who viewed him that way. (Only 2 percent of Black women who described Trump as extreme supported him.)
Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate White women, said that women who believed Trump would deliver more economic security for their family actively resisted information that could make them uncomfortable about voting for him.
Even if shown clips of Trump making threats in belligerent language that repelled them, or promising extreme policies that they questioned, “They thought he was just being hyperbolic,” Payne said. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him — a strong economy — and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it.”
With Trump returning to the White House, though, it will be harder for voters ambivalent about him to avoid all the aspects of his political persona they don’t like.
It’s noteworthy that since Trump’s emergence as the Republican Party’s dominant figure, he and the GOP faced their biggest deficits among women while he was actually in the White House – and dominating the news. Biden’s 15 percentage point lead over Trump among women in 2020 was the largest the exit polls had recorded for any Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1996. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats amassed an overwhelming margin of 19 percentage points among female voters in the exit polls. That was even larger than the GOP advantages among men in their 2010 and 1994 Congressional landslide wins.
By contrast, Republicans kept their losses among women much more manageable not only in Trump’s victory this year, but also in the 2022 midterm elections. That year, the exit polls found that Democratic congressional candidates nationwide won women by exactly the same modest 8-point margin that Harris did in 2024.
Those results reflected a critical dynamic: While Trump was out of the White House, voters increasingly viewed his presidency primarily through the lens of what they didn’t like about Biden’s – particularly the sense that both the cost of living and security at the Southern border had deteriorated since Trump left office.
But Trump famously never won positive job ratings from a majority of voters at any point during his first term – even as he delivered the conditions on economy and the border that many viewed more favorably against the backdrop of their discontent with Biden. The question for the GOP will be whether Trump’s support will recede again, particularly among the female voters ambivalent about him, once that backdrop is removed and he again takes center stage.
Even amid his decisive victory, there are some warning signs on that front for Trump. In his initial round of nominations and appointments, Trump has empowered immigration advisers committed to aggressively pursuing his mass deportation plan; nominated anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Health and Human Services Department; and picked a Defense secretary nominee who has said women should be withdrawn from combat roles.
Many of these ideas could unsettle female voters. In the exit polls, only a little over one-third of female voters said they supported mass deportation of undocumented migrants, far less than the level of support among men. Polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center last year found that about 7 in 10 women believe children should be required to obtain vaccinations before attending public school. That majority includes about 8 in 10 of White women with a degree and about 7 in 10 of those without one, according to detailed results provided by Pew. If the Trump administration moves to restrict access to the abortion medication Mifepristone, as anti-abortion groups are urging, he could face pushback from the big majorities of women across racial and class lines who continue to believe abortion should remain legal.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that even if Trump advances down these fronts, he will lose support among his ambivalent female supporters. Matthews says, for instance, that many of the blue-collar women who backed Trump might not recoil from Kennedy’s criticism of the medical system. Though many women are expressing unease about mass deportation, Trump’s claim that immigrants are driving crime may provide him considerable leeway to pursue his agenda, particularly among the blue-collar White women who proved most receptive to that argument. And, as many strategists point out, the women who moved toward Trump tend to be those who pay the least attention to conventional news sources – raising questions about how much they will hear or learn about much of what he does.
Above all, Trump will be well positioned to hold support from the women who ambivalently backed him if he delivers on their top priority: bringing down their cost of living.
“Nothing trumps economic insecurity in America,” said Tresa Undem, who polls extensively on attitudes about gender for progressive organizations. “The inability to afford three meals a day, to pay rent, get medicine, literally live or die – that comes before all else. But voters are very impatient … they expect Trump to deliver economically. They expect to see material benefit in their lives – significant economic relief – in the next couple years.”
Delivering that relief won’t be easy. Even though the rise in prices has slowed substantially over the past year, there’s no sign of prices actually falling (something, economists warn, could trigger a recession if it actually occurred). If anything, most mainstream economists believe Trump’s proposed agenda of broad tariffs and mass deportation will push prices higher.
Fernandez Ancona says that if women continue to feel economically strained after Trump takes office again, Democrats will have a greater opening to engage them on the other aspects of his agenda that still concern them – at least if the party can penetrate the non-traditional communications channels that offer the best way to reach many of those women.
“Ultimately it’s a confluence” that could again weaken Trump’s position with women, Fernandez Ancona said. “If the cost(s) of every day goods don’t go down or continue to go up, if women can’t get Plan B and or abortion medication, or are seeing the effects of the vaccines that their kids can’t get, then I think we have a shot at holding him accountable for those things.”
When Trump was first elected over Hillary Clinton, a volcanic eruption of shock and anger among female voters fueled the massive women’s march in January 2017 that set the tone for four years of Democratic “resistance” to his first presidency. Now, as Trump prepares for a second term that by all indications could be even more tumultuous than his first, the most that Democrats can probably hope for among women is a slow burn.
