Claire Cain Miller spoke with eight young women supporting Harris, and eight young men backing Trump. Here’s what she learned.
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There is a significant gender gap in the political preferences of Gen Z voters in the United States, as evidenced by New York Times and Siena College polls conducted this month in six swing states.
Young women — those ages 18 to 29 — favored Vice President Kamala Harris for president by 38 points. And men the same age favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points. That is a whopping 51-point divide along gender lines, larger than in any other generation.
Claire Cain Miller, a Times reporter who covers gender, wanted to better understand those numbers. And she was especially curious about a specific group:
“I really wanted to hear from young men who were voting for Trump,” she said in an interview on Monday.
Ms. Miller recently published a pair of companion pieces for The Upshot, a Times section that focuses on explanatory and analytical journalism. For one of the articles, Ms. Miller talked to eight young women who said they planned to vote for Ms. Harris; for the other, she spoke with eight young men who support Mr. Trump.
Over the last few years, Ms. Miller has become increasingly interested in exploring how shifts in gender roles and societal trends have affected boys and men, some of whom feel they’ve fallen behind economically. Today more women earn college degrees than men, and are increasingly the breadwinners in their households. Over the past few decades, jobs traditionally held by men — especially those without college degrees — have dwindled.
Though Gen Z men are still somewhat more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, the men Ms. Miller spoke with described feeling unvalued in a shifting landscape of gender norms — and they saw Mr. Trump as a pillar of traditional masculinity.
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