Accepting the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris made no explicit mention of the history that would follow her election. Her mentions of women were restricted to descriptions of her work as a prosecutor or to reproductive rights. She mentioned her South Asian heritage only in the context of her mother, who emigrated from India to the United States.<\/p>\n
We can assume that Harris\u2019s speech was attuned to public opinion polling of what targeted voters want to hear and, by extension, that the polls or Harris sought not to draw explicit attention to her gender and racial background. Perhaps it was in part because Democrats are still stinging from Hillary Clinton\u2019s failed 2016 effort, in which the unofficial campaign slogan \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m with her!\u201d \u2014 was not subtle about the historic stakes.<\/p>\n
Polling from Fairleigh Dickinson University released on Friday, though, suggests that an explicit embrace of Harris\u2019s identity might prove beneficial as Election Day approaches.<\/p>\n
The poll took an unusual approach to the question of electoral support, beginning by asking respondents to evaluate the importance of various issues to their vote. A third of respondents got only policy-centered issues, like immigration or taxes. A third had \u201cthe race or ethnicity of the candidate\u201d added to the mix. The last third were presented with \u201cwhether the candidate is a man or woman\u201d (but not the item about race).<\/p>\n
Overall, Harris had a healthy lead over former president Donald Trump, though that came only after the question about issue importance and therefore could have been influenced by the issues offered. Which was the point: The pollsters wanted to determine whether having race or gender at top of mind when choosing a candidate influenced the results.<\/p>\n
It did. Overall, Harris had a seven-point lead. Among those who weren\u2019t presented with the race or gender questions \u2014 who weren\u2019t \u201cprimed,\u201d in Fairleigh Dickinson\u2019s verbiage \u2014 Trump and Harris were essentially tied. Among those who had been presented with gender as an issue, Harris had a 10-point advantage. Among those presented with race as an issue, she had a 14-point lead. (The overall seven-point lead combines those three groups.)<\/p>\n
Among men, being primed with the gender issue didn\u2019t have much effect. Among women, though, it was the difference between a 16-point Harris advantage (the unprimed group) and a 26-point one. White respondents preferred Trump by 11 points when they weren\u2019t primed on race or gender. When primed on race, they narrowly preferred Harris. Among non-White respondents, Harris\u2019s 16-point advantage among the unprimed jumped to a 36-point one after hearing about race as an issue.<\/p>\n
The poll also segmented responses by gender in an interesting way. Respondents were asked whether they saw themselves as \u201ccompletely\u201d masculine or feminine or some less-strong descriptor, like \u201cmostly\u201d or \u201cslightly.\u201d<\/p>\n
About half of men chose the \u201ccompletely\u201d modifier, a group the pollsters refer to as \u201ctraditional\u201d men. Those were by far the strongest supporters of Donald Trump. Men who didn\u2019t select that descriptor preferred Harris by 20 points. The \u201ccompletely masculine\u201d men preferred Trump by more than 30 points, leading to a Trump lead among men overall.<\/p>\n
That includes \u201ccompletely masculine\u201d men who were primed with the gender issue. Among those who weren\u2019t primed on race or gender, Trump had a 52-point lead.<\/p>\n
The intertwining of Trumpism and perceived masculinity appears in other polling, too. On Saturday, the New York Times assessed the overlap of age and gender in its polling conducted with Siena College. The article focused on how younger men (members of Gen Z) felt as though they were disadvantaged by changes in society. What\u2019s striking, though, is that young men didn\u2019t differ much in their views of the election relative to older men. The big gap among younger voters was driven by the extent to which younger women preferred Harris.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s useful about the Fairleigh Dickinson poll in particular is that it incompletely incorporates an element of the election that hasn\u2019t yet emerged to a significant extent. Campaigns often test messages and attacks to carefully tailor their messages for television ads and mail. (And, as noted above, speeches.) This poll offers that in a microcosm: What happens to voters if they make their decision while considering what makes Harris unique?<\/p>\n
The answer is that she benefits.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Accepting the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris made no explicit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}