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Going into Election Day, pollsters predicted a potentially record-setting gender gap driven not only by women energized by abortion, but also by men flocking to support Donald Trump. That didn't happen, or rather it didn't quite happen. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben reports on what we know and are still trying to figure out about how men factored into this year's presidential race.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: At one of Trump's final campaign rallies, Scotty Dunleavy explained why he was feeling confident.
SCOTTY DUNLEAVY: I feel like there's a lot more at stake this election than last election.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
DUNLEAVY: So more people are going to feel more of a need to vote this time around, too.
KURTZLEBEN: Scotty is 18. He's barely known American politics without Donald Trump. So I asked him, what's his perception of how Trump has changed politics? He thought for a bit and then called in a reinforcement.
DUNLEAVY: All right. I can bring my dad in here.
KURTZLEBEN: Oh.
Scotty's 50-year-old dad, Nathan, illustrated how powerful young men's pull toward Trump was.
NATHAN: I have to admit to you, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. We've been to the last two. He's really the drive behind coming here. He's more enthusiastic about this. And I have noticed even the kids in his class, at his school, they're more enthusiastic about this than I would say some of my own peers.
KURTZLEBEN: It would be wrong to say that men alone gave Trump the win. Men did prefer him by 13 points while women preferred Harris by eight, according to exit polls. But those polls also show that men and women both swung toward Trump this year.
Some subgroups of men did show big shifts, however. For example, exit polls and others showed young men swung hard toward Trump, boosted by new voters like Scotty. The more complicated question is, why? Trump got a lot of attention for his interviews with influencers popular among young men. He in fact cited his 18-year-old son, Barron, as a fan to some hosts, like streamer Adin Ross.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: He's a great young guy. But he's a big fan of yours.
ADIN ROSS: What's up, Barron? Yeah, Barron's awesome. He's a great kid.
KURTZLEBEN: One open question is how much that strategy won over those young men. On the one hand, Trump won several swing states by only a point or two, so he only needed a marginal boost. But Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, takes a different view.
DAN CASSINO: Things like talking about cryptocurrency, going on the Joe Rogan show - but I don't think that's the compelling story, because if that were the case, what I think we would have seen is an increase in turnout among young men. And we just didn't see that.
KURTZLEBEN: A lot of those young men who broke for Trump are also Latino men, another group that appears to have moved sharply toward Republicans. Mike Madrid is a Republican pollster focusing on Latinos.
MIKE MADRID: People say, well, there seems to be this youth problem. And I was like, yeah, the Latino problem is your youth problem (laughter). I mean, not entirely, but there's so much overlap that you can't extricate one from the other.
KURTZLEBEN: Some older Latino men also flipped toward Trump of course, but one of Madrid's main points was that any voter has a lot of identities. He pointed to another divide among Latinos.
MADRID: Latinos have one of the largest or - if not the largest gender gaps in the country, at least as it relates to race and ethnicity. We attribute that in large part to the fact that we also have the largest diploma divide, the fact that our women graduate from college at rates far greater than our men.
KURTZLEBEN: And that's what's complicated about dissecting election demographics. Associations are easy, but causality is much more difficult. After all, which part of Trump's pitch appealed to Latino men? And is that different from what appealed to other non-college men? And all of this leaves another big question that will take time to answer - how much did the candidates' genders play into voters' choices, especially men voters - to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, a lot.
CELINDA LAKE: We had two of the most qualified women ever, and neither one of them made it. I mean, Biden, we know already, got more men than Harris or Clinton got. There's no question about that. And I think that's a lot the gender of the candidate.
KURTZLEBEN: The most exact election data, much more so than exit polls, is called validated voter data. Those numbers showed a wide gender divide in 2016 and then a narrower one in 2020, when Trump ran against a man. That led many to infer that some men were willing to vote for Biden but not Hillary Clinton because of sexism. The 2024 data won't be out until next year. For now, Republican pollster Whit Ayres says maybe sexism played a decisive role this year.
WHIT AYRES: It's a woulda, coulda, shoulda thing (ph). You can't dismiss it, but I'm not totally convinced that a popular Democratic woman could not win.
KURTZLEBEN: And it will be four more years until Democrats have a chance to prove him right.
Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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