WASHINGTON — We are inching toward Election Day, and hundreds of thousands of early ballots have already been cast in Wisconsin. The so-called “gender gap” — how men and women vote differently for Republicans and Democrats — has been growing for years. But how much it will impact the outcome of this election remains to be seen.
“Women have been tilting to the Democratic party regardless of who the nominee is, and men have been tilting to the Republican party regardless of who the nominee is,” said Mordecai Lee, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The most recent Marquette University Law School poll of likely voters in Wisconsin showed 54% of women have a favorable opinion of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to 40% of men. For Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, 38% of women have a favorable opinion of him, compared to 50% of men.
At a recent breakfast in Washington, D.C. hosted by WisPolitics, experts gathered to discuss the presidential race. A top issue for Democrats is abortion.
“Sixty-five percent of self identified Democratic voters in Wisconsin are women,” said Craig Gilbert, former chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s D.C. Bureau.
“My sense of it is actually that the gender gap is due to Dobbs more than it is to Harris being in the race,” added Lilliana Mason, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “I think having Harris in the race makes the stakes of the election more clear to voters.”
And while Trump polls better on issues such as the economy and immigration, Lee said politics in Wisconsin have been revolutionized by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
“It's highly possible that the abortion issue will determine who wins Wisconsin, and therefore probably who becomes president,” Lee said.
"Probably the best way to think about it is prohibition," Lee explained. "A hundred years ago, America had a constitutional amendment that prohibited liquor, and it was an extremely emotional issue, both for people who were pro and people who were against, and there were substantial chunks of the electorate who didn't care what a politician's other views were, or even if that politician was corrupt or honest. They were single issue voters. Some of them were single issue voters to keep prohibition, to vote for pro-prohibition politicians, or those who are anti-prohibition, who wanted to repeal the constitutional amendment and really didn't care about anything else except that. And so, I think we've reached that stage in America, just a century later, where we're going to be seeing the abortion issue as dominant as prohibition was in the first couple of decades of American history."
During his first term, Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who formed the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris has made restoring abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign.
"I suspect that we're going to see a major impact on the ultimate result in Wisconsin due to that — due to women who are economically conservative, they lean right, but that the abortion issue, just in a sense, negates everything and will affect how they vote,” he said. “But the thing about Wisconsin voters is that they insist on being unpredictable."
The last two presidential elections were won by a margin of about 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, and Lee said we can expect this one will be “razor sharp” too.