The Decibel - The complexities of gender in the U.S. election

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Before Nov. 5, many pollsters predicted that there would be a huge gender gap in the U.S. election vote, with women overwhelmingly supporting Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and men voting for the Republican choice, Donald Trump.That didn’t quite happen. Fifty three per cent of female voters supported Harris, and 46 per cent voted for Trump. In 2020, 55 per cent of women supported Joe Biden, and Trump only got 43 per cent of the female vote. So what does this mean?Dr. S. Laurel Weldon is a distinguished professor of political science at Simon Fraser University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is on the show to share her thoughts on what to make of gender data from exit polls and where feminist movements go from here.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

In a lot of ways, the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign was very gendered, even if it wasn't explicit. But America, we are not going back. We are not going back. We are not going back. Even though that wasn't gendered language in the sense of vote for me, I'm a woman. It was an intention to get people to focus on continuing progress on issues of gender and racial justice that have been kind of accomplished so far. That's Dr. S. Laurel Weldon. She's a distinguished professor of political science at Simon Fraser University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

The Republican campaign, of course, was obviously a gendered, raced campaign as well, with constant gendered attacks on Kamala. Trump saying that I will protect women whether they like it or not. I'm president. I want to protect the women of our country. I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm president. I want to protect the women of our country. I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them. And before people even voted, polls were predicting there would be a major gender gap, with women overwhelmingly supporting Harris and more men supporting Trump. But that didn't quite happen. A lower percentage of female voters supported Harris than Joe Biden

in 2020. She still had more women support her than Trump, but he did win more votes for women than in past elections. So what should we make of all this? Dr. Weldon studies the strength of feminist movements around the world. She also happens to be a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. She's on the show today to share her thoughts on what to make of gender data from exit polls and where feminist movements go from here. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Laurel, thank you so much for joining me today. A pleasure. So just to start here, I want to get your perspective as someone who studies feminist movements.

What was at stake in this U.S. election? There was a lot of possible progress on the agenda. There was the opportunity to elect our first woman president, our first African-American woman president. But beyond that, there was the promise to enshrine reproductive rights at a federal level and to make sure that some of the rollbacks in women's rights were defended against. I think there are a couple of things that are less often thought of as women's issues that were very important and that were on the agenda. One is the role of democracy and the rules-based international order. Even though we don't think of those necessarily as being women's issues, feminism has a very tight relationship with both

of those things. And another thing is that, you know, inflation and the economy are women's issues. Women need affordable living just like everybody else. And so I do think that a lot of people worried that this election would mean not just a repudiation of trans rights and not just a repudiation of feminism, but a repudiation of democracy and human rights, and that that was a bigger problem in the long term for feminists and really for everybody. This is an interesting point that you bring up, Laurel, about, you know, women's issues. Like, it's, there's nothing really like that specifically pertains to because all of these issues affect women, things affect men as well, right? So I do want to talk about the issue of abortion and

reproductive rights in particular, because this was really a big part of the campaign. In addition to like the federal level question, actually, at a state level, 10 states had ballot measures that look to protect a woman's right to choose her own health care on election night. People were voting on this as well. Seven of those measures passed, three didn't. And those were in the three states, Florida, South Dakota and Nebraska. So, Laurel, when you look at those results from election night, what do they tell you? To me, the abortion results complicate the story of the election as a rejection of gender and racial progress. For example, take Florida, where the measure failed because it didn't pass the 60% threshold needed in Florida, which is unusual. 57% of voters voted for the abortion rights measure in Florida. And while it's disappointing to those who worked so hard for that measure that it fell

short of the 60% threshold, it's still suggesting that a lot of the people that voted for Trump and for Republicans were also voting for abortion rights. And the same is true in Missouri. The same is true in Montana. The same has been true in red states where people have turned out to vote for Republicans, but also for abortion rights. I mean, it's remarkable that it would have been successful in red states if we see this as being kind of a repudiation of we're not going back, which I don't think it is. What do you what do you what do you think it is then? Well, I think that I've been thinking a lot about all the elections that have been taking place around the world. I'm a comparative political scientist and I study elections and feminism looking around the world, you can't help but notice that there's an anti-incumbent mood in a lot of places where the pandemic, you know, created a lot of inflation in a lot of countries.

And even though Canada and the United States both did has the most overwhelming impact on presidential elections is inflation. Now, many people would say, of course, inflation was coming down. Why weren't people recognizing the strong performance of the Biden administration on inflation? Why did they blame Joe Biden for inflation? But I think that kind of misses the point that when prices have increased by, you know, 20%, it's causing a lot of pain. And people said that the number one thing for them was the economy. So it's also important to remember that what people thought they were doing was to try to get a better life for themselves and that they were not happy with the incumbent.

So, you know, in New Brunswick, we have the first female premier. You know, we have had some, you know, advances in some places where the anti-incumbency advantage advantaged women. So just as an anti-incumbent mood in the U.S. advantaged, you know, Biden a little bit in 2020, we now see an anti-incumbent mood benefiting Trump. And I think it's important that we don't over-interpret this election as being like a really vindication of all this sort of backlash and anti-woke stuff that is on the Republican side, because that's not what people said they voted about. They said they voted about the economy. Even though there's a lot that I guess comes along with that vote. There is a lot. But, you know, political scientists say one vote, many dimensions. You

know, politics is complicated, but you only have one vote. And so casting the vote is complicated in the first place. And interpreting the vote is also complicated. Okay, so let me ask you this. When you see that data from exit polls, including things like how women voted, what do you make of it? Yeah, so there's been lots of talk about exit polls. And I joined some of my colleagues who are wanting to wait for what we call the validated results before we spend too much time really thinking about exit polls, because there are some real weaknesses in exit polls. So for example, in 2016, and you'll still see this today that many people talk about the quote, unquote, 52% of white women who voted

for Trump in the exit polls. But if you go and look at Pew, it's just you can just look online, it's available. This is a research center, the research center. Yes, they did a study of the validated votes that they made sure to actually look at who actually voted. So much better quality analysis. They still find that white women broke slightly for Trump over Clinton in 2016. But it's a different story when it's 47, 45, than you say a majority of white women. It's just a different narrative. You mean those numbers are so close that it doesn't you can't really extrapolate much from that? Yeah, I mean, their conclusion in that piece is that, you know, women broke evenly, basically, for both sides, white women, this is sort of white women as a group. And that's another story to, to get into, which is that, you know,

we really need to be thinking carefully about the nature of political identity in groups when we're making these arguments. Like I've heard some people saying, oh, you know, we can blame, you know, Latinos or black men or white women. And I think it's really critical not to think about these groups as monoliths, because I think that if we want to understand why Trump won, we won't understand it as long as we are thinking in a very crude way about identity. And when you say in a very crude way, I guess, can you break that down for me a little bit? What would that entail? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, let's say we say, you know, women voted for Trump. Let's just say that it's not true. Women voted for Kamala Harris and women as a group usually have been voting for Democrats for a couple of decades. Then some of the kind of breaking down of that into,

OK, white women voted for Trump. So, you know, that helps a little bit, right? Because in the sense of, you know, women vote for one way, if you look at them by race, you see a different outcome. But how many women voted because they were voting on their identity as white women, and that's very strong. But lots of women have stronger identities that pertain to their religious identity, for example. So if we want to understand the biggest divisions in this election, class and religion actually look like the big ones. And you can't understand either of those phenomena without getting a kind of intersectional analysis together, everybody has intersectionality. And when we apply an intersectional lens, we have to apply it to all of these groups. And when you break down, let's say, the 2016 election, for example, by religion, what you find is that the biggest divisions, like if you want to understand why did white women vote the way they voted, religion is the big driver. Some 75% or 80% of white evangelicals and white evangelical women voted for Trump. You know, so again, if we want to know why did these people do what they did? Why did Latino men in this case vote more for Trump than for Harris? So there's a lot of speculation that maybe the kind of hyper masculinity of the Trump campaign appeal to these

groups. If we want to understand human behavior, we have to try to see how people see it from their point of view. Yeah. So I think that, you know, paying attention to class, paying attention to religion, as fundamental divides that are important in understanding our gender and racial vote, not just as a kind of demography is destiny type of argument, but rather asking, what was the appeal? And I guess I want to pick up on some of the things that you were saying there, Laurel, because something that we can't ignore was the fact that Harris was the first black and South Asian woman to run for president, right? And only the second woman. So why didn't they make a bigger deal of representation? Well, I don't think they needed to make a bigger deal of representation. Like,

I think everybody could tell that she was the first woman of color to run for office, and Trump certainly made it front and center. I guess I'm wondering about this kind of in the context of Clinton's campaign. Like, we remember those signs, like her one of her slogans was I'm with her. Like it was a much bigger deal in 2016. So I guess why the difference now? Well, I do think that people are worried that Kamala Harris's gender and race would play against her. And they worried about that with Obama and they worried about that with Clinton. I think Harris was right not to emphasize her gender or race in an explicit way, in the sense that the people who would have supported her for her gender and race were already aware

of it. And the people who were less comfortable with it were going to feel like she was playing the race card, as Trump was claiming. But she didn't. They claimed she played the gender claiming, but she didn't. They claimed she played the gender card, but she didn't. But I think Trump was, you know, the one who was making her race and gender a subject of the election. He did that in pretty stark terms, right? I think most of us will remember he reshared a post someone else had made that suggested Harris had basically used sex to

get ahead in her career. So I guess, what is it about this moment, like culturally, Laurel, that allowed for this rhetoric to be used in such a mainstream way that, you know, they kind of they understood that even if it maybe wasn't popular, it wasn't offensive enough to turn off voters? Well, I do think that's one of the reasons why the election is seen as being so important for gender and racial justice, is that the Trump campaign and Trump and J.D. Vance normalized the ability of people to say really horrendous racially and gender biased things out loud. And why did Trump do this? Trump did this because this animates his base. So racial resentment has long been a big part of Trump's base.

And by that, I mean, there's a series of, you know, kinds of questions that are aimed at getting at why people voted a particular way and what degree of sort of animus you have towards immigrants or people of color. And Trump voters have scored high on those measures of racial resentment. There's a bit of a debate how much of racial resentment compared to other things played into support for Trump. But I don't think anybody thinks it played no role. We'll be back after this message. So, Laurel, when Trump was elected in 2016, elected the first time, women organized the Women's March for the day after he was inaugurated.

Right. I think we remember those images of that massive gathering. How likely do you think it is that we'll see that kind of protest again this time? I think it's very likely that we will see protests to the specific things that Trump does. I think it was shocking to people that Trump won that first time. In the aftermath of that shock, there was a kind of coalition of people who wanted to affirm that the Trump agenda was not a majority agenda. This election, it's not as much of a surprise. They will mobilize, and I feel pretty confident that they will mobilize against specific measures that are taken.

Yeah. So it's interesting because you're saying it, you know, you can see it maybe coalescing around specific issues. I guess when we look at broadly how social movements tend to form and this kind of movement like the Women's March, it's often kind of a collection of different ideas too, though, right? I guess, can you talk about that and how that social movement would form either around, you know, a single maybe main idea or around a plethora of ideas? Well, we know that social movements in general form based on issues and relationships. So social networks bring people into protests and actions. So, you know, people get on the buses at church and go to vote.

People go with their friends who take them to vote, their social networks. These are important determinants of who votes and also who participates in political protests. People are drawn to participate by particular issues. So if you remember the Women's March, the slogan was actually not one thing, even though it was called the Women's March. You know, people had these signs that came from the Women's March that articulated the broad agenda. You know, women control their own bodies. Love is love. Black lives matter. So it brought a whole bunch of issues together under one kind of rubric. and that rubric was opposition to Trump. So the issues

that brought people together were that we can all agree that we oppose this person because of this issue that brings me into this coalition. And let me ask you then, like the next step of that, how do social movements grow from there? Like, what does the research tell us, I guess, about how to how to build more solidarity between people? The challenge in building solidarity for any movement is to overcome differences of opinion and to overcome kind of the forces of inaction. And inaction is overcome through social networks. But the bringing people together to cooperate is complicated. When people are complex, groups are complex, and they rarely agree on everything. So one tactic that has worked for a lot of social movements is to say, we don't agree on everything.

Let's not assume that we, you know, share every element of our identity. This is particularly movements on the left. And you can build trust by having a diverse coalition. I would just say on the right, solidarity tends to work a little differently. There, it's more of like aspirational identity. Like we all want to say this is the party of like white Christian millionaires. And even if we're not white Christian millionaires, it appeals to us in our high status era to kind of sublimate those other elements of our identity and find ourselves as represented to claim that

we are represented by this seemingly high status group. So it's a different kind of an appeal. Yeah. I guess I'm thinking back to what you were talking about a little bit earlier where, you know, well, we can blame, oh, you know, this segment of the population for why the vote went a certain way, you know, blaming white women or Latino men or something. And that act of like, you know, calling people out for that and kind of placing blame, I guess that doesn't feel particularly productive. Is there is there a better way to kind of do that? Yeah, I agree with you. That's not the way to go forward as we try to understand what happened. You know, voters who voted for Trump because they felt like he would be better on the economy or stronger on foreign policy, even if believing that Trump

would be stronger on foreign policy was a gendered assessment to some degree, it's not going to be conducive to changing anyone's mind to try to shame them or call them a name. So again, to kind of go back to what I was just saying about how you build coalitions, you know, understanding where people come from and trying to create space in your movement for people who can change their minds, who can come to adopt new ideas, can see their identity in a new way. That's a long-term process, though. That's not something that's going to happen fast. In terms of changing that person's mind, we know from social psychological experimental evidence and other types of evidence that confronting people with facts that are opposed to their view doesn't change their mind. It tends to make them more entrenched. So we have to make sure that openness to dissent continues to characterize

the most successful movements. Just very lastly here, Laurel, one of your areas of research is feminist movements. So I guess I'm wondering if you kind of take a step back from the specifics of this election that we've been talking about, and if you can like kind of look at the wider context for us here, how would you describe the strength of feminist causes in America right now? And maybe even more broadly, even worldwide? How do you see that? You know, my research looks at the spread of feminism around the world. And one of the things that it shows is that over four or five decades, we've seen a massive spread of feminism around the world growing, intensifying, becoming more politically successful, driving advances in women's rights in a wide variety of areas from economic justice

to reproductive rights to violence against women in most countries in the world. Most countries in the world now have a feminist movement, and in many places it's a strong and vibrant movement. And in some ways that can make us feel a little complacent, and I think it has made people feel a little complacent about the kind of the role of feminism in the world. You know, feminism waxes and wanes in individual countries. And by that, I mean, the power of the ideas, the power of the organizing, the, you know, organizations make mistakes, they have political allies in government, or they don't, they're repressed, or they don't, they operate in a democratic context, or they don't. And we also know that democracy is very closely tied

to feminism. And, you know, last year for the first year, we saw a turning point for democracy in the world. For the first time, growth in autocracies outnumbered growth in democracies, according to Freedom House, which has been tracking this for decades. So it's quite concerning from the perspective of being worried about democracy because it's like oxygen for feminism. Feminism needs democracy and democracy, I think, also needs feminism. And I think if we can just remember women's voices and presence and ideas have power. And so I guess I'm optimistic that as long as women keep turning up, as long as women and their allies keep turning up, their voices will prevail. Laurel, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to think these things through. Before we go, we know there are a lot of questions about the U.S. election and what this all means for Canada. And we want to hear from you. The Globe's correspondents and columnists who cover American politics are taking your questions live today, Tuesday, November 12th at 1 p.m. Eastern. You can watch that on the Globe's main site. And you can send them your questions. Head to tgam.ca slash US election questions.

That's tgam.ca slash US election questions. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.