It may seem like a long time ago, but just two days before the debate a national poll from The New York Times/Siena College showed Donald Trump ahead of Kamala Harris by a point.
One reason why Harris fared relatively poorly in that poll: a very weak showing with men.
Are the gender crosstabs in The New York Times‘s poll reflective of all of the recent polling? Is Harris cratering with men? Or do other polls tell a different story?
The Washington Monthly Gender Gap Tracker has the answers!
But first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:
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Trump Doesn’t Understand Tariffs, But He Knows Enough to Be Menacing: Contributing Writer David Atkins details Trump’s poor understanding of the economics of trade. Click here for the full story.
Harris Shows How to Dismantle a Would-Be Dictator: Contributing Writer Margaret Carlson analyzes the Democratic nominee’s debate performance. Click here for the full story.
Kamala Harris Is Good at This: My look at how Harris baited Trump to flip the script on inflation, immigration, and Afghanistan. Click here for the full story.
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Before getting into this week’s gender gap numbers, let me explain a few tweaks I made to the Tracker.
The Gender Gap Tilt: To better illuminate who is getting the better of the gap, in addition to the overall Gender Gap number, I’m including what I call the Gender Gap Tilt.
The Gender Gap number is the overall distance between the margin among women and the margin among men. So in last week’s Tracker, Harris averaged a 10.9 lead among women and Trump averaged a 5.8 lead among men, creating a total Gender Gap of 16.7 points.
The Gender Gap Tilt number is the difference between the female and male leads. Harris’s lead with women in last week’s Tracker was 5.1 points greater than Trump’s with men, so the Tilt was Harris +5.1.
Revised September 5 numbers: If you’re looking at last week’s newsletter, you’ll see the Gender Gap was reported to be 16.2, not 16.7 as I said above. That’s because I’ve adjusted the original number for two reasons.
I noticed that one of the polls previously included, Big Village, only gives a gender breakdown for “All Adults,” and not for the more relevant categories of “Registered Voters” and “Likely Voters.” So I took Big Village out of the Tracker.
And two polls released this week were mainly sampled before Labor Day, in the period covered by last week’s Tracker. So I added those to last week’s set of polls and updated the numbers.
With no further ado, here are the new September 12 and revised September 5 trackers.
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WASHINGTON MONTHLY GENDER GAP TRACKER
SEPTEMBER 12 EDITION
GENDER GAP: 19.1 (change from last week: up 2.4)
GENDER GAP TILT: Harris +0.7 (down 4.4)
OVERALL AVERAGE
Harris: 48.1
Trump: 47.3
Margin: Harris +0.8 (down 2.3)
FEMALE AVERAGE
Harris: 52.4
Trump: 42.5
Margin: Harris +9.9 (down 1)
MALE AVERAGE
Trump: 52.5
Harris: 43.3
Margin: Trump +9.2 (up 3.4)
SEPTEMBER 5 EDITION, REVISED
GENDER GAP: 16.7
GENDER GAP TILT: Harris +5.1
OVERALL AVERAGE
Harris: 49.0
Trump: 45.9
Margin: Harris +3.1
FEMALE AVERAGE
Harris: 52.5
Trump: 41.5
Margin: Harris +10.9*
(*This isn’t 11 because of rounding quirks with the Harris and Trump female averages)
MALE AVERAGE
Trump: 50.3
Harris: 44.5
Margin: Trump +5.8
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Harris’s overall lead in the polls included in the Tracker dropped from 3.1 to 0.8 points. (Reminder: The Tracker does not include every national poll, but only those which publicly provide gender data.)
Why? Because Trump nearly eliminated Harris’s edge in the Gender Gap Tilt, doing almost as well with men as she did with women.
And that was largely because Trump improved with men. The female numbers didn’t move much.
Of note: The New York Times‘s poll, which commanded outsized attention, played a significant role in buoying Trump’s male margin.
Harris scored a very low 39 percent with men in the Times poll. That’s the only poll in this week’s set of Tracker polls, out of six, in which she fell below 40 percent with men, and only the second such poll in the Tracker to date.
In turn, the Gender Gap Tilt in the Times poll, Trump +6, is the best for Trump in any Tracker poll so far.
Still, we can’t peg the Times as the sole culprit for Harris’s weaker standing. In the September 5 Tracker, nine of the 11 polls included had a Gender Gap Tilt toward Harris. But this week, that’s only true for three out of the six included.
Just like last week, we are seeing wildly different gender gaps among the various polls. We cannot yet draw any clear conclusions whether Harris will be able to match the male levels of support of victorious Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or sink to the level of defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But these polls do tell us how gender may shape the final outcome.
When Harris did better with men two weeks ago, her overall lead was decent. In the past week (most of this week’s Tracker polls were sampled between September 3 and 6), as male support ebbed, the race became a near-tie.
All of this data came before Tuesday’s debate. Next week we will see if the debate made any immediate impact, and if any such impact varied between the genders.
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Bill
The post Trump Gains in Week Two of the Gender Gap Tracker appeared first on Washington Monthly.
