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“Men want to feel like they can provide for the household,” Matt told my colleague Katie Stallard at a Trump rally in Salem, Virginia on 2 November. “It’s insane how hard it is now, as a man, to support your family.” It was, Barger said, “almost impossible to allow your wife to stay at home and raise kids while a man wants to provide.” The world as it is, he said, “makes men feel small” and forces women to work outside the home – “out of their roles.” He is 33 years old. Compare those words to 24-year-old Sophie’s at a Harris rally in Philadelphia two days later: “For me it’s women’s reproductive rights,” she said when asked by Katie what the most important issue in the election was.
The so-called gender gap in US politics – the difference between the voting intentions of women and men – is nothing new. There’s been one in every presidential election since 1980. The first two presidential elections in which Donald Trump stood for office – 2016 and 2020 – didn’t offer up a noticeably larger gap than other presidential contests of the past either. The 11-point difference in 2016 (the first time he stood against a female Democratic nominee) equalled that between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole in 1996, according to global polling company Edison.