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Once again this year, Donald Trump is running for the presidency against a woman. The last time that happened, 2016, it helped create a historic divide between men and women at the ballot box. Now, that gap is back, and it is not just the candidates' genders driving that. There's abortion, there's campaign strategy, and a host of other factors expanding that divide in this year's election. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben asked voters and pollsters - what's going on?
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Here's something a Democrat and a Republican can agree on - the gender gap this year could be huge.
CELINDA LAKE: Not only is it likely to be historically big - and 2016, it was quite big - but secondly, it's historically pervasive. Every single demographic group right now has a gender gap.
KURTZLEBEN: That was Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. And here's Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
WHIT AYRES: This has the potential to be something close to a gender chasm.
KURTZLEBEN: In 2016, the gender gap was historically big, with women preferring Clinton and men preferring Trump by sizable margins. In 2020, that gap shrank by half. But this year, polls suggest it could balloon, ending up even bigger than in 2016. There are a lot of reasons for that, but Lake says the main one is obvious.
LAKE: Abortion is the absolute catalyst for it, and it's really accentuated it because it's really fueled registration.
KURTZLEBEN: Abortion is top of mind for Amanda Burns from North Carolina, who is voting for Kamala Harris.
AMANDA BURNS: I never anticipated experiencing anything like this, as far as, like, rights being walked back for people in this country. It really is terrifying. It's - I'm just terrified.
KURTZLEBEN: Burns sees the gender gap manifesting in her own life.
BURNS: I do have a lot of family where the men do support Trump. I take it personally, when you're voting for somebody who is going to put people in power who are going to take my rights away, my daughter's rights away.
KURTZLEBEN: In the last few years, the number of women who identify as pro-choice has shot up, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, some men - young men in particular - have become more Republican. John Della Volpe, a pollster at Harvard, has found that young men have shifted by 14 points toward the GOP since 2020. That's not about abortion, says Ayres.
AYRES: I think it's much more the Hulk Hogan, professional wrestling persona of some of Trump's supporters and rallies.
KURTZLEBEN: Hulk Hogan, who showed up at both Trump's recent rally at Madison Square Garden and, before that, the RNC.
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HULK HOGAN: With our leader up there - my hero, that gladiator - we're going to bring America back together.
KURTZLEBEN: It's not that young men are in love with Hogan. It's more that Trump has cultivated a macho persona that the ex-pro wrestler fits with nicely. Trump shows up at UFC fights and has also appeared on podcasts hosted by guys like Logan Paul and Theo Von - shows with heavily male audiences.
While Josh Austin stood in line for a recent Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, I asked why he thinks there might be a gender gap among younger voters.
JOSH AUSTIN: If you look at an American man, you would think of somebody more like Trump - somebody stronger, somebody tall, somebody who wants to do nothing but be successful.
KURTZLEBEN: Voters' other identities beyond gender complicate all of this. Trump has, for example, been reaching out to Black and Latino men who have historically leaned Democratic. There's also a wide educational gap that intersects with gender. College-educated women are highly supportive of Harris. Non-college men, meanwhile, are among Trump's strongest supporters. To Lake, the Democratic pollster, that makes sense.
LAKE: Blue-collar men really feel like they are being disrespected, they are losing their advantage, and the politics of resentment and economic grievance is very high with blue-collar men.
KURTZLEBEN: Women, meanwhile, have historically been divided by marriage status, with unmarried women voting heavily Democratic. Joe Serrano, an auto technician in Virginia, says he sees a lot of women with liberal politics, and they tend to be single. Meanwhile...
JOE SERRANO: Decent women that I personally know that are more - like, they want a family, they want to meet a good man, you know, and they have these aspirations of women that are married - those are the ones that I'm more typically seeing entertaining the possibility of voting for Trump.
KURTZLEBEN: One other factor this year is simply that a woman is running. Consider how much the gap shrank in 2020 when Trump ran against a man. Now, it appears to have grown. At a Michigan union event this month, Matthew Paris said he sees this.
MATTHEW PARIS: A lot of people that I know in my age group and older just - some feel like that they're not ready for a woman to run the country.
KURTZLEBEN: Even beyond all this, there are countless other unquantifiable influences on the gap. More than two-dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including two who came out in recent weeks. There's also just the way Trump and his allies sometimes talk about women. Here's investor Grant Cardone attacking Harris at that Madison Square Garden rally.
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GRANT CARDONE: She's a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.
KURTZLEBEN: Given all of that, it could be easy to make this gap all about Trump, but that would be a mistake, Lake cautions.
LAKE: Younger women have been getting more liberal over time. Younger men have not. Even if we restore abortion, and even if Trump isn't running, we're going to see this phenomenon.
KURTZLEBEN: Whatever the exit polls say, then, it won't just tell us something about this year - it could be a sign of things to come.
Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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