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Gender Gap and Turnout [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-10-07  

The Brookings Institute has published new analysis by Elaine Kamarck that sets forth historical data regarding how gender gap may influence the upcoming election: How Gender Gaps Could Tip The Presidential Election in 2024.

Some highlights of the article. EK starts by stating the best demographic polling data relates to gender because it is the easiest to get a meaningful number of participants; thus, reducing the polling margin or error. She goes on to say that reporters stop there when there is another step to make this data meaningful — historical voting turnout rates:

If men and women turned out to vote in equal numbers, then we would expect that, for instance, if men preferred Trump by the same margins as women preferred Harris, their votes would cancel each other out, and, bottom line, the gender gap would not matter. But in fact, in recent elections, women have turned out more than men, thus affecting the gender gap. In the last presidential election, women accounted for 54.7% of the electorate and men accounted for 44%.

EK then goes through the battleground states, but I will only post Pennsylvania (please read the rest in the above link):

Let’s start with the must-win state of Pennsylvania. In a recent Marist poll, women supported Harris by 55% to 43% for Trump, while men supported Harris by 44% and Trump by 54%. In the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania, women accounted for more votes than men—they were 53% of the electorate, and men were 47%. There were a total of 6,915,283 ballots cast in Pennsylvania in 2020, most of which were cast by women, amounting to 3,665,100 votes. If the 2024 gender gap in turnout remains close to what it was in 2020, and the preference polls for 2024 remain the same, that would be 2,015,805 votes for Harris versus 1,575,993 votes for Trump. Given that nearly everyone in the electorate is a man or a woman, if the gender gap in presidential preference in 2024 was applied to 2020 turnout numbers, Harris should win Pennsylvania by 114,794 votes or 1.69%. In fact, in 2020, Biden won the state by 1.2% or 81,660 votes.

Now, I image the high quality “likely voter” polls already take the historical gender turnout discrepancy into account. However, the “likely voter” polls probably are not recognizing that this election is historical because of a woman running for president coupled with the abortion/choice issues.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/7/2275375/-Gender-Gap-and-Turnout?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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