The Republican Party Has Officially Written Off Women

In choosing Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made his campaign strategy clear: boys, boys, boys.

White working-class men were key to Trump’s victory in 2016, and Biden’s ability to peel off some of their support was one reason he won in 2020. Now Trump seems to be doubling down on the strategy of catering to disaffected men—mostly white ones, but also Black and Hispanic men and young men. He’s doing so to some degree in policy, promising to close the border to immigrants, whom he paints as physically dangerous to vulnerable white women and economically threatening to the forgotten white men.

But Trump is just not much of a policy guy; he’s an entertainer and a symbol-maker, equal parts savior and avenger, a man onto whom fans can project all sorts of hopes and inclinations. And as such, his appeal to men is much more about masculine performance and cultural signaling than about expertise, competence, or even a loose plan of action.

Which is why Vance, perhaps the least qualified and least experienced vice presidential nominee in decades, may have appealed to Trump. Vance brings no practical skill set to the ticket. Yes, he could pull more money from Silicon Valley billionaires, but he doesn’t promise to deliver any key state (Ohio, where Vance is a senator, was already Trump’s) or bring along any new demographic (white men are already Trump’s). Instead, he supplies youth and vigor, masculine embitterment, and white male rage. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.) And that, Trump’s campaign has banked, is enough to win the election. Perhaps it’s even enough to give the MAGA movement a second life once Trump is gone.

MAGA is a movement of both gender traditionalism and cartoonish machismo, rejecting the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush’s evangelical Christianity for the muscular reactionaryism of Jacked Jesus. Trump’s sexism and his poor treatment of women in his personal life have been extensively documented; Vance has been outspoken about his particular ire for women who have an insufficient number of children, as well as for mothers who work outside the home. (Vance has three children and, until his candidacy was announced, his wife worked a demanding job at a law firm.)

He has complained that childless women have too much power, griping, “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He has argued that “a healthy ruling class” must be made up of people with children. And since he has also suggested that mothers shouldn’t prioritize working in demanding roles—“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted just after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—he has insinuated, effectively, that the ruling class should be made up of men.

These views are, obviously, alienating to a lot of women. But they may be surprisingly appealing to disaffected men who feel that their rightful place at the top of the social, political, economic, and familial hierarchies should be restored.

A lot of recent data has, in fact, shown that there is a huge self-defined masculinity gap between Republicans and Democrats, with Republican men much more likely than Democratic ones to say that they are “very masculine” (54 percent vs. 33 percent), according to a 2022 American Enterprise Institute survey. According to that same survey, Black and Hispanic men look a lot more like Republicans than Democrats when it comes to ideas about their own manliness: 55 percent of Black men and 52 percent of Hispanic men also say they are “very masculine.” In 2023 a Politico magazine/IPSOS poll of just over 1,000 people found that one of the biggest predictors of support for Trump is a belief that men are besieged by an anti-male culture—that men’s roles and masculinity itself are under attack. Trump performs his tough-guy routine for this group of men, who hold tight to their masculine identities. Vance speaks directly to them.

In Vance’s Republican National Convention speech, his first as the VP pick, the Ohio native emphasized this men-first strategy. He stressed that Americans need a leader who “answers to the working man.” This election isn’t about him, he intoned: “It’s about all of us, and it’s about who we’re fighting for.” Who is that? He listed off three archetypes: “the autoworker in Michigan,” “the factory worker in Wisconsin,” and “the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio.” Women, of course, are autoworkers, factory workers, and energy workers. But these jobs are heavily coded as blue-collar and male, and it’s not hard to read between the lines and see that when Vance speaks about the working class, he means exactly what he said early on in his speech: that he’s talking about the working man.

As for women, well, Vance did say, “Our movement is about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.” Which is an interesting way to introduce his own mother on the national stage but hardly a familiar, inspiring, or even particularly accurate picture of American women, single moms or not. The women that Vance talked about were all members of his own family. In fact, the only time the word woman showed up in his speech was when he was talking about his grandmother, and the only working woman he referenced was his wife (“Usha, an incredible lawyer and a better mom”). Men, on the other hand, merited specific mention as tradesmen who had lost their jobs, as the patriots who had signed up for military duty after 9/11, and as the workers a Trump presidency will answer to. It’s hard to believe that this wasn’t an intentional nod to the people Vance hopes will get behind him.

Even before picking Vance, Trump was running way ahead with men. In early July, after his debate against President Joe Biden, Trump saw a surge of male support, with 58 percent of respondents in a New York Times/Siena College poll saying they would vote for him, and just 31 percent backing Biden. Women are not so enthusiastic: Biden retains a lead with female voters, although the margins are not nearly as dramatic. Most polls don’t break out support by race and gender combined, but Trump also leads among white voters, 56 percent of whom are supporting him—a trend that suggests he has particularly strong backing from white men.

And he seems too to be making inroads with men of color. Again, the most recent and reliable polls are not granular enough to break down the preferences of Black and Hispanic men vs. women (or older voters of color vs. younger ones), but voters of color without college degrees are surprisingly split: Biden leads this cohort by just 7 points, with 40 percent supporting Trump. But voters of color without college degrees are more likely to be male than female. In other words: While Black voters are still strongly pro-Biden and Hispanic voters remain more pro-Biden than pro-Trump—and while white voters are much more pro-Trump than any other racial group—the data suggest that when it comes to Trump’s making inroads among voters of color, he’ll have the best luck with men.

Vance has similar strengths. In his 2022 senate race, Vance won 58 percent of male Ohio voters, including 62 percent of married men, 64 percent of white men, and nearly 15 percent of Black men.

This, in a traditional campaign sense, makes Vance a poor choice for the vice presidency. If Trump is trying to win over more voters, he has much more room to grow with women. From 2016 to 2020, he increased his support from white women, while Biden gained among white men. This year, though, women have been flocking to Democrats in the wake of abortion bans and other instances of GOP hypermisogyny. Trump himself knows that abortion politics are the GOP’s weak spot, which is why he has forced the party to be more deceptive about its opposition to abortion rights in its 2024 platform. But winning back women is apparently a lower priority than emphasizing MAGA masculinity. And elections, after all, are about both turnout and persuasion. In choosing Vance, Trump seems to be betting that he can increase male turnout by fanning the flames of masculine discontent and perhaps persuade some Democrats and independents that they too are better represented by the party of men.

Finally, leaning so heavily on masculine power is also a strategy particularly calibrated in opposition to Biden. Trump is by no measure a healthy young man and has rarely received praise (other than from himself) for his mental acuity. But voters really are worried not just about Biden’s age but about his stamina and his physical and cognitive abilities.

And some may be swayed further still by Vance, whose appeal rests partly in his youth, especially when compared to Biden. (Vance is 39.) Male voters are much more likely than female ones to strongly believe that Biden is simply too old to be president—60 percent of them say so, according to Times polling. And just 21 percent say the same of Trump.

Putting a much younger man on the ticket reinforces Trump’s core message: He and Vance are red-blooded American males, and this is no country for old men. (Vance, for his part, has leaned into the role as well: When the Chinese spy balloon was floating over the U.S., Vance posted a photo of himself on social media pointing a gun at the sky.)

Nor, the Trump ticket suggests, is it one for middle-aged women. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is much younger than Biden. But she’ll be 60 by Election Day. Vance will be 40—making him, if he and Trump win, one of the youngest vice presidents in American history. In Vance, disgruntled men may see someone who stands up for, and stands in for, their return to greatness. Trump’s conservative base may see a man who can carry the MAGA movement for years to come. Whether that’s enough to counteract the damage the GOP has done with female voters is a gigantic question. But in choosing Vance, Trump has laid his cards on the table, and he’s going all in on the guys.