Dems see signs for optimism in gender gap in early vote

There’s a new kind of gender gap in the 2024 election: Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men.

It’s giving anxious Democrats — who see female voters as key to a Kamala Harris victory — newfound hope heading into the final week of the campaign.

Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.

It’s impossible to know who these women are voting for, including whether Democrats are winning over unaffiliated or moderate Republican women disillusioned with former President Donald Trump. But the gender gap has been one of the defining features of the 2024 campaign, and Harris allies see the lack of a surge of male voters as an encouraging sign.

“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart. “I never would have bet on that.”

Democrats’ burgeoning optimism over female turnout comes as Harris zeroes in on moderate suburban women — and particularly non-college educated, white women — in the final days of the campaign, aiming to drive them to the polls with the enthusiasm they showed in the midterm elections, right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris stepped off the battleground campaign trail on Friday to deliver an abortion-focused speech in Texas, which has arguably the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, and she’s continuing this week to hammer a message focused on the economy and what she argues is Trump’s lack of fitness for office, all top issues for women.

“It’s unprecedented excitement,” said Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens. “I’m out knocking doors, you get to people’s doors, they really feel like this is a moment for their daughters, and that has been very resonant.”

In Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, there is at least a 10-point gap between men and women in the early vote, according to POLITICO’s analysis and data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Similar gender data is not available for other battlegrounds, including Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

And polling continues to show that driving up female turnout is, on the whole, helping the vice president. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 19 percentage point lead among suburban women, up from 10 points in October and now-President Joe Bidens’ six-point lead in 2020. At the same time, Harris has cut Trump’s 27-point margin of victory in 2020 with white women without a college degree in half, a recent Marist Poll shows.

“I was on a call with our Michigan folks last week, and they were talking about how they’re just making inroads in places that they wouldn’t have expected to based on this stage in the election, and they’re getting positive receptions at doors that they might have thought would be hard doors,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible Project. “And I think a lot of that has to do with the gendered elements of this election.”

For Democrats, the surge in women voting comes as a welcome counterbalance to fears over increased GOP turnout during early voting. Democrats have dismissed Republicans’ early successes as a shift in vote methods, not as a sign of a coming red wave. Democrats also aren’t seeing a surge in the “bro vote” — the low-propensity, MAGA-supporting men Trump and his allies are leaning on to win them the election.

“We’re confident we’re going to win, and it’s not because we’re running away with it,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters Tuesday. “It’s because we’re confident we’re on path to win a very close election.”

Trump, meanwhile, has seen success in his pleas for Republicans to vote early — a practice he has long detested and said helped cost him the election in 2020, but that his party is increasingly embracing. In Nevada, for instance, Republicans are continuing to outpace Democrats in voting early, a phenomenon that hasn’t happened in recent memory.

Trump campaign spokesperson Anna Kelly, in a statement, said the Harris campaign is “truly circling the drain,” arguing that they are “surging in early voting.”

“President Trump is winning or tied in every battleground state,” Kelly said.

It’s also not clear that the increased turnout among women is uniformly beneficial for Democrats, given the significant numbers of Republican women who are showing up to early vote as well.

“We are seeing an increase in Republicans of all types, gender — men and women — voting. It’s just that women are still ahead and keeping pace,” said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who tracks early voting data as part of his United States Election Project.

The substantial female turnout also comes as a reversal of fortunes for Democrats, who just months ago were fretting Biden’s lackluster performance among women. And Democrats are particularly encouraged by what they’re seeing in the early vote data from young women of color, who they saw register to vote in droves after Harris entered the race and who have become increasingly engaged in the political process over the last three months.

“They really want a woman candidate. They really like Harris. They really like having a woman of color run,” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners and a Democratic pollster who worked with the Biden campaign. “They’re really strong on the abortion issue. They’ve long followed her on the abortion issue, and they also like her approach to leadership and economics, and they don’t have the internalized sexism that older women voters do.”

POLITICO’s analysis of early voting data in Pennsylvania found that women registered as Democrats made up nearly a third of early votes this year from people who did not vote in the state in 2020.

According to TargetSmart’s analysis, Black and Latino women under the age of 30 are not only showing up at higher rates than their male peers — but by even a larger margin than they did in 2020. That finding is echoed by internal data shared with POLITICO by the progressive, women-focused organization Supermajority, which is targeting many of these women: More than a third of the 3.6 million low-propensity women the organization is focused on turning out have already voted, which Democrats see as a good sign given that infrequent voters tend to vote later or on Election Day.

“These are women who don’t normally show up. That [they’re showing up] that early in October is a good sign,” said Jess Herrera, Supermajority’s senior director of communications, creative, and digital. But she cautioned the work is not done, adding, “This group of women is winnable, but they are not won yet.”

In North Carolina, women are outpacing men among registered voters in the state, although it is Republican women who have voted more than any other group so far, the POLITICO analysis found. But Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, cautioned against reading too much into what either dynamic says about the overall electorate with six days of early voting and Election Day to go.

“The best predictive power will be after 7:30 next Tuesday evening,” he said.