Digging into the gender divide in the presidential race | PA 2024 Newsletter

📅 There are 38 days until Election Day.

In this edition:

—Julia Terruso, Gillian McGoldrick, Aliya Schneider, Fallon Roth, Katie Bernard, pa2024@inquirer.com

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Polls — including the one The Inquirer released last week — show a stark difference between how women and men will be voting this election. Vice President Kamala Harris is surging with women and former President Donald Trump has a stronghold on men. National politics reporter Julia Terruso takes a closer look at how each candidate is trying to close the gender gap to expand their coalition:

A week after Vice President Harris made an appeal in Philadelphia to Black men saying she’d work to “earn their vote,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd in Western Pennsylvania he’d be a protector for women.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger,” Trump said. “You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

Trump went on to say women would no longer have to think about abortion, an issue on which the overwhelming majority of female voters prefer Harris.

Trump and Harris are deadlocked in Pennsylvania but a closer look at their support here shows a striking gender gap. In a Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris had a 17-point advantage among women and Trump had a 11-point advantage among men.

Nationally some polls have shown an even larger divide.

But aside from the protector comment, there’s been little evidence that Trump is focusing too much on winning over women as he tries to mobilize voters with six weeks until Election Day.

“Trump is so heavily targeting very specific male audiences in very specific ways,” said Alison Dagnes, a Shippensburg University professor, who has spoken on how gender is factoring into the presidential election. “It’s this agro-masculine, I’m a real man’s man.”

From the celebrities at the Republican National Convention (Hulk Hogan among others) to some of the podcasts he’s appeared on, Trump has seemed to disproportionately target white male audiences.

On the other side, Harris, who has not made gender central to her campaign, has elevated her running mate, Tim Walz, to try and appeal to a different brand of masculinity.

“They’re showing him fixing transmissions. It’s so purposeful because she’s trying to target the ‘latte dads,’ and the educated Black men and educated white suburban men,” Dagnes said.

Ultimately direct gender appeals are often ineffective. Pennsylvania Democratic strategist Hannah Jeffrey said Harris’ best chance in the state is building a wide coalition.

“I think the candidate who wins Pennsylvania is the candidate with the most resources and the better coalition, who is building a case to a broader group of people. Focus on that rather than trying to appeal to one group over another.”

💼Dave McCormick managed the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater. It’s a major line in his resume for U.S. Senate, but it’s also been one of his campaign’s biggest vulnerabilities because of the firm’s business in China and reportedly ‘cult-like’ environment.

👬A married, gay, moderate who supports abortion rights but is voting for Trump, New Jersey Republican Curtis Bashaw describes his Senate campaign as “walking a balance beam.”

🤷‍♂️Josh Shapiro’s visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a Scranton ammunition plant has drawn the attention of U.S. House Republicans, who contend the Ukrainian leader was campaigning for Harris in the key swing state.

🏛️Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to blame noncitizen voting, an extremely rare occurrence, for a potential loss in November — much like Trump’s inflated concerns about mail voting signaled strategy to contest Pennsylvania’s results in 2020.

💵Harris still trails Trump on the key issue of the economy. Her speech in Pittsburgh this week was an attempt to close that gap. Here’s why that matters for the Pa. race.

The claim: ”When Kamala Harris uses illegal action to give amnesty to aliens, that does not make them legal immigrants. That makes them illegal immigrants unless you’ve lost all common sense,” said Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, as the campaign ratchets up its rhetoric on the issue.

The check: ✖️False

Vance was referring to Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, many of whom are in the U.S. with temporary protected status.

The temporary protected status program was created by Congress in the 1990s and it is granted to people whose home country is in crisis. The Obama administration first offered it to Haitians living in the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake. Trump had sought to end the status for Haitians during his presidency.

The Biden administration’s use of the program is legal — though not without controversy. The Department of Homeland Security announced in June that it was offering TPS to roughly 300,000 Haitians who arrived in the country before June 3. The status would last until February of 2026. This comes on top of 200,000 Haitians who already had that status.

📈Influencers: Twenty content creators were hosted by a Democratic donor effort in an extravagant house in the posh Philly suburb of Gladwyne, which was complete with Harris-themed corn hole and beer bong. The manor had been transformed into a “content house” where the creators – 10 from Pennsylvania and 10 from across the country – strategized about pro-Harris messaging and crisscrossed their networks to grow their reach. They collaborated on content, like satirical videos about a “White Ladies for Kamala” class and a bearded man embodying Project 2025. They also went to a Phillies game, sang “Karaoke for Kamala,” and learned about “greedflation.”

📉Spell-check: Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is coming to Newtown in purple Bucks County for a rally Saturday. Yes, Newtown, not Newton as the spelling mistake in the press release announcing his Pennsylvania visit suggested. The Ohio senator probably didn’t mean the beloved bar, Isaac Newton’s, in Newtown Borough. The slip-up has garnered some quips online, including from Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) who joked on X that “Vance claimed the Haitians ate one of the W’s in “Newtown”,” a reference to the xenophobic false claims about Haitian immigrants that Vance and former President Donald Trump have spread on the campaign trail. Vance’s visit comes after Trump canceled a Bucks County stop earlier this month.

What he said: Former Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who has taken up protecting democracy as his side gig to teaching law at Duquesne University, reflected at a Keep Our Republic event in Harrisburg on his own reelection loss in 2015 to former Gov. Tom Wolf.

“People are going to lose races. I lost my reelection. Get over it. Move on and move forward,” Corbett said.

What he meant: “Former President Donald Trump, get over your 2020 loss. And if you lose again this year, move on.”

State campaign finance reports filed this week show Democrat Eugene DePasquale will go into the final weeks of the race for Pennsylvania attorney general with more than $2.1 million in the bank after spending more than $1.1 million over the last four months. Republican Dave Sunday is sitting on more than $1.2 million going into the race’s final months, after spending less than $160,000 of the campaign’s own money.

But those figures don’t mean DePasquale has the money advantage.

Democrats cried foul about Sunday’s report, claiming that one of the top Republican contributors – the Commonwealth Leaders Fund, which is largely funded by Pennsylvania’s richest man Jeff Yass – did not get reported properly and purposely hidden from voters. The Commonwealth Leaders Fund PAC has reserved more than $6 million in TV ads and streaming through November, and has been on TV for weeks.

Sunday’s campaign said there is nothing amiss about their report, and the Commonwealth Leaders Fund didn’t tell them how much it has spent on in-kind contributions until after the campaign finance filing period was over on Sept. 16.

“They are making a mountain out of a molehill,” Sunday’s spokesperson Ben Wren said in a text.

About 200 people showed up for the event hosted by the Harris campaign — a mix of Republicans, Democrats and independents.

➡️ Josh Shapiro will campaign for Kamala Harris in the Philly burbs with television producer Shonda Rhimes, who created Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy.

➡️ JD Vance will visit Bucks County on Saturday as the Trump campaign seeks to make gains in the key collar county.

➡️Donald Trump will hold a rally in Erie on Sunday. He’ll be back in the state again the following weekend for his Oct. 5 return to Butler after surviving an assassination attempt there this summer.

As always, thank you for reading. Enjoy the last weekend of September!