Americana mailbag: Answering your questions about the election

ANN LEHMAN: What is the difference between women and men in voting numbers thus far? What is the difference between younger women and younger men thus far?

AMERICANA: We have some idea of the answer here, though the data is incomplete. The University of Florida’s Election Lab, which aggregates early vote data, has compiled the numbers in the only states with gender-based ballot reporting: Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia. As of this morning, there’s a 10.3-point gender gap, with more women casting ballots than men.

Every bit of polling tells us that women are breaking for Harris, and men are breaking for Trump. That’s not new; Democrats hope that the usual gender gap cuts their way this year, because the Dobbs decision has pushed women further from the GOP, and they got evidence of this in 2022 and post-Dobbs special elections.

If Democrats end up with the short end here, young voters will be the biggest part of the story. A few weeks back, I talked with John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, who saw Republicans doing better with young men, and expanded on his findings in a New York Times op-ed. Probably best to just quote it:

Compared with when Mr. Trump ran in 2020, young male voters are now less likely to support government-backed climate change solutions (down 15 points, according to our poll) and affirmative action for qualified candidates (down eight points). They are more likely to question immigration policy (up 12 points), free trade (up 10 points) and whether government stimulus leads to economic growth (up seven points). They are also more likely to believe that religious values should play a more important role in government (up six points).

Della Volpe credits a four-year campaign to win over these men, and I agree — it’s been a mix of Republican paid messaging and organic talk that appeals to young men who bristle when they see “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” shirts or nod when they watch Critical Drinker videos. Not to over-simplify things, but there are cultural currents here that Democrats just don’t think much about.

PAOLA PEDUZZI: I’m interested in the billionaires’ role in this expensive campaign and I’d like to ask you how the narrative changed so much that, as you say, now the right to lead is determined by the ability to make money. Is that a strange twist in an anti-elite rhetoric of Trumpism?

It’s ironic, right? Lots of people admire billionaire businessmen (as opposed to people who inherited their wealth) because of what they built. But neither party wants to be seen as the home of billionaires. I keep thinking of a post from Laura Ingraham last week, reacting to news that Harris outraised Trump 3-1 in September: “Who’s the candidate of billionaires again?” she asked. That’s not really a question you answer with direct donations to candidates, which are capped at $3,300.

Rhetorically, as I wrote this week, Republicans are very comfortable defending the role of “job creators” and “people who’ve signed both sides of a paycheck.” Below the surface — I’m talking about what you read in conservative media and hear in podcasts, not see on TV — conservatives are more confident than they were even four years ago about contrasting risk-takers and business owners with the sort of people who work for the federal government, for universities, or other non-dynamic jobs. Elon Musk willed two industries (electric cars, private space exploration) into existence — what has a DMV clerk ever done?

Still: Republicans like to draw attention to the wealthy Democrats and dark money funds that have kept them competitive with conservative mega-donors. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and JD Vance have both said, in recent weeks, that Donald Trump has broken free of “the billionaires” — they’ve just got a heuristic in which Elon Musk is a free speech warrior fighting his class, and in which everyone agrees not to mention Timothy Mellon.

DAVID BATES: Is there any way to quantify the polling effect of the alleged Trump supporters that refuse to talk to pollsters?

This may not be surprising, but pollsters think they have adjusted to this, at great effort and expense. Polling responses have collapsed across the board, and it’s common now for a top-shelf pollster to complete calls with less than 10% of the people it contacted.

Burned by 2020, when pollsters consistently underrated Trump’s support, they’ve adjusted to capture enough non-college voters to fix that. One way their job got a little easier over the past four years is that the education gap, a new phenomenon in 2016, stayed consistent in elections with very different candidates and conditions. So pollsters now know that a poll weighted too heavily with college-educated voters is going to show too much support for Democrats.

Does that fix the implicit problem here, that Trump voters don’t trust the media and might hang up on them? It might, because it’s not just the media making these calls. Pollsters who work directly for campaigns are making the same adjustments. Conservative polling outfits and conservatives with influence on the betting markets (Musk again) have also been insisting that Trump is headed for a landslide. That surely has an effect on whether MAGA voters feel like talking to pollsters.

JAY NEWBERN: How do voters view personal integrity when they support a criminal and his criminal supporters for office?

AMERICANA: They make compromises. It was 28 years ago, this week, when Bob Dole campaigned in Dallas and boiled down his attacks on Bill Clinton’s ethics with one memorable phrase: “Where’s the outrage?” He knew that voters considered Clinton less ethical and moral than him, but were voting for him because the economy kept growing.

I’m not conflating Clinton’s ethics with Trump’s, just noting that voters have been balancing their questions about a candidate’s behavior with his record for a long time. Right now, according to Suffolk University’s polling, a clear majority of voters say that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s said he’ll do: Direct his DOJ to drop all charges against him and his allies. These same voters are split on whether they’ll vote for Trump or Harris.