EAST LANSING, Michigan — Vice President Kamala Harris has long sought to ignore the historic nature of her campaign, a biracial black woman running to break the highest glass ceiling — the White House.
Over the weekend, when asked about female voters, Harris told CNN, “I believe all Americans are going to make the difference. And I intend to be a president for all Americans.”
But women who attended her rally in East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, are decidedly banking on gender issues to catapult Harris to victory.
Gender will likely be a defining factor of this election cycle as more women are breaking for Harris, bolstered by her support for abortion rights and anger over the fall of Roe v. Wade, while Trump is winning over male voters who support the former president’s masculine persona.
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Harris caught a break Saturday evening when the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll showed Harris leading Trump 47% to 44%, with a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.
Notably, the poll also showed older and independent women were leaning toward Harris bolstering her support in the state.
“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. said.
The Trump campaign quickly dismissed the results in a memo sent out Saturday touting a recent Emerson poll showing the former president leading by 10 percentage points.
“Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said. “Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology.”
Women began voting heavily for Democrats following former President Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House in the 1980s. Now, Harris is especially winning over Gen Z women, who tend to be the most progressive group among all ages of women voters.
Among the states that collect voter gender data, of which Michigan is one of the states, at least 8,827,715 women have voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Those figures outpace the 7,127,921 men who have voted.
Harris’s pivot from her gender while campaigning is remarkably different from Hillary Clinton, the first woman presidential candidate of a major party, who lost the 2016 election to Trump.
“The experience that I am having is one in which it is clear that regardless of someone’s gender, they want to know that their president has a plan to lower costs,” Harris said almost two weeks ago.
However, for female voters, breaking the glass ceiling and protecting access to abortion, which Harris has made a key campaign issue, are important factors in this election.
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“Having a female president is going to inspire so many people. I’m seeing so many young kids who are so excited to see a change,” said Melody Marcum, a 23-year-old graduate student at Michigan State University.
“I think it’s going to be close, just because of all the things that are being spread around. But I do think having a woman as president is going to change Michigan for the better,” Marcum said. “And I think with ‘Big Gretch’ [Gretchen Whitmer] right behind her, I love it.”
Michigan’s top three leaders are all women, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel, which voters claimed would help Harris as she battles with Trump to win the state.
“I don’t personally know of any women who aren’t voting for [Harris],” said Carolyn Stults, a 24-year-old Kalamazoo resident who graduated from MSU in 2022. Stults cited anecdotal evidence that married or partnered women are considering voting for Harris but not telling their male spouses.
Democratic groups have also launched recent ads, including one narrated by Julia Roberts, emphasizing that casting a ballot is a private affair.
“It’s a tricky situation … people don’t know what anybody else is going through, and like, they shouldn’t be shamed for doing that,” Stults explained. “It shouldn’t matter, as long as they are getting their voice out and they’re doing what’s best for them, that’s the most important.”
None of the voters who spoke with the Washington Examiner expressed fear stemming from Clinton’s defeat eight years ago.
But Clinton sarcastically commented on X about Trump’s gender gap problem. “No kidding,” Clinton wrote as a response to a CNN headline that claimed, “As women outpace men in early turnout, Trump’s challenge to win over female voters comes into focus.”
Other voters stressed their disdain for Trump’s legal problems, which include being convicted of sexual assault and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll in civil court, a 34-count felony conviction, as well as Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) comments about “childless cat ladies.”
“I voted early, and Michigan has really cool ‘I Voted’ stickers and the ones with cats on them were almost gone when I voted,” said Liz Billings, a 60-year-old acupuncturist from Williamston. “And when my sister voted, there were only two of the cat stickers left. So I’m assuming those were the cat ladies for Harris who are taking those.”
“He’s a joke, seriously and honestly,” said Chaunel Phillips, a 51-year-old administrative assistant for Muskegon Heights High School. “Normal Americans, they commit a crime, there’s a lot taken away from him. Why should he represent the whole United States being a felon?”
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Harris’s rally comes one day before Trump holds his final pre-election rally of the 2024 cycle in Grand Rapids. Yet voters claimed that lingering anger surrounding abortion rights will tank the former president’s bid for the White House.
“Our bodies belong to us, and we should have the final say in whatever we want to do with our own body. That’s not Trump,” Phillips added.
