2024 Election Post-Mortem: Religion And The Gender Gap
(ANALYSIS) When you teach certain classes at the college level, you just know you are going to have to cover certain subjects. Any introductory biology course should touch on photosynthesis, a class on philosophy should cover logical fallacies, and any course on American history has to spend way too much time talking about the constitutional convention.
We also have concepts like that in political science, too.
If one were to teach any course on political behavior, it’s almost universally the case that one class period should touch on the gender gap. It’s pretty simple to explain - men tend to vote for Republicans and women favor the Democrats.
I love teaching it because it’s easy to throw together six or eight graphs that make that point incredibly straightforward. (I recommend this resource from the Center for American Women and Politics which has collected a bunch of data, for what it’s worth).
This isn’t a finding that has a whole lot of caveats. Take an average man and find an average woman who matches him on demographic characteristics. The woman is going to be more inclined to vote for the Democrat, on average. Once that fact has been established, then you can get into the fun part of the discussion with the students: why is this a near universal truth in the United States?
The media has been toying around with the gender gap a whole lot in the wake of the 2024 election. The Washington Post published, “The story behind the rightward shift of young men.” New York Magazine asked, “How Did This Become the Gender-Gap Election?” and Vox ran one with the evocative title, “This is why Kamala Harris really lost.”
They all are trying to understand how much gender drove Donald Trump to a second term. You can probably guess how I am going to try and add to this discourse - what about the gender gap when it comes to religion? If we compare just white evangelical men and women, is it still there? What about atheists? Or Jews? Let me show you.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on his Substack channel.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.