• A new poll from ABC News/Ipsos adds more evidence to reports of a growing gender divide among voters heading into the November election. It shows Vice President Kamala Harris has a 13-point advantage among women voters, while former President Donald Trump is leading by 5 points with men. The poll also showed white women have made one of the biggest political shifts in the last few weeks, with Trump dropping from a 13-point advantage before the Democratic National Convention to a 2-point advantage after. Vox Senior Correspondent Zack Beauchamp looks at whether there’s evidence to support a widening political gender divide and what could be driving it.
• And in headlines: A federal judge denied Trump’s request to delay his criminal sentencing in his New York hush-money case, more than 50 people died and 200 more were injured in Ukraine after Russian missiles struck the central city of Poltava, and A former staffer for New York Govs. Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo was arrested on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government.

Show Notes:

• • Check out Zack’s stories – www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp
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  • What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
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TRANSCRIPT

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s Wednesday, September 4th. I’m Priyanka Aribindi.

Juanita Tolliver: And I’m Juanita Tolliver and this is What a Day, the show where we’re offering our sincerest congratulations and most heartfelt concern to hot dog eating champion Joey Chestnut, who set the world record on Tuesday of 83 hot dogs in just ten minutes. What? [makes disgusted sound]

Priyanka Aribindi: Feeling a little ill just thinking about it. Our prayers for your insides, Joey. 

Juanita Tolliver: I often say, gag me. I don’t mean like this. 

Priyanka Aribindi: No. 

Juanita Tolliver: I don’t mean like this. 

Priyanka Aribindi: No. [laughter] [music break] On today’s show, New Jersey’s uncommitted delegates are urging voters to not cast their ballots for the Harris Walz ticket. Plus, a federal judge denied former President Donald Trump’s request to delay sentencing in his hush money case. 

Juanita Tolliver: But first, there is a growing gender divide among voters who support Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. And a lot of the movement is happening among white voters. According to a recent ABC Washington Post Ipsos poll, Vice President Harris has a 13 point advantage among women voters, and Trump has a five point advantage among men, and that’s an 18 point gap between the two groups. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. Okay. Very stark here. You mentioned that most of the movement has been happening with white voters. So how have they been shifting? 

Juanita Tolliver: Yeah, the biggest change since the Democratic convention has been among white women, as Trump dropped from a plus 13 advantage among white women pre convention to now only plus two, which is within the margin of error for this poll. And then there are the white men who are flocking to Trump as his numbers jumped from plus 13 to plus 21 in the same time period. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. 

Juanita Tolliver: Now, when we consider these numbers, we have to keep in mind the reality that according to the US Bureau of the census, current population reports, women have registered and voted at higher rates than men since 1980. So when it comes to voter power, it’s important to watch how women move. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Listen, based on what you’ve told me, that sounds A-okay to me. [laughter] But really, such a divide here. How much weight should we give this gender gap as we get closer and closer to November? 

Juanita Tolliver: Like I always tell you, with every poll, this is merely a snapshot of the current moment. But there are reasonable questions to ask about the gender gap in the context of which issues motivate these splits, like the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs that overturned the right to abortion access. Also, how the divide is impacted when you consider race, age, and more. To dig into all of this. I spoke with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox, covering challenges to democracy and author of the book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Here’s our conversation. So you wrote a piece back in March where you questioned the idea of a growing political divide between men and women, but given the recent polling that shows the gender gap growing between Harris and Trump voters, do you still think that divide’s overstated, at least when we’re talking specifically about American voters? 

Zack Beauchamp: The honest answer to that question is I don’t know. I don’t know because pre-election polling when it comes to demographic subgroups is uh, well, it can often be very unreliable. Right now, men and women are a sort of different case because they’re pretty large sample sizes. But also when you look at the attempts to try to figure out where this gender divide is coming from, you often end up looking at really small demographic sub slices like uh, Gen Z men and women. Right? And they’re you’re going to run into significant sample size problems, and there’s going to be a lot of variation in each individual poll. And so you end up getting these polls that with uh you’ve seen them a lot in this cycle, that showed Trump getting an improbably large percentage of Black voters, for example, one that would defy anything close yeah– 

Juanita Tolliver: Cough cough. Yes. 

Zack Beauchamp: Right. 

Juanita Tolliver: Yes. I see that all the time. [laughing]

Zack Beauchamp: Right. It’s just like that’s that’s some of those things are just not happening. And they’re probably a result of there being statistical noise. Right. And sample randomness can generate random stuff. That’s how it works. That’s all like a big caveat, though, it’s entirely possible that there is a growing gender divide in American politics. And when I wrote that article that you talked about a second ago, my conclusion wasn’t, this isn’t happening. It’s we don’t have enough evidence to know for sure that it’s happening, that there’s some evidence. It’s very preliminary, it’s very new. And we don’t know how durable these patterns are. We don’t know how significant they are. And we know, based on past elections that the gender gap is typically overstated and, generally speaking, dwarfed by gaps inside of genders. White women and Black women vote much more differently than men and women do, right? Same thing with white men and Black men. And you know, we could go on down the list, right? Race, religion, sexual orientation, age, all of these tend to be more important than gender, historically. Again, that might change. Uh. And there’s some reasons to think it may in fact be changing, but I’m still on the cautious side. Right. Just because of of how often this kind of thing gets overstated. 

Juanita Tolliver: I appreciate the caution, but I do want to focus on the evidence around this election in which gender has become a major issue. Polls show Harris has increased her margin over Trump with women voters by about 13 points. But that divide was there when President Biden was the presumptive nominee. So we know reproductive rights has been a big issue driving women to Democrats in particular. But what else is pushing women voters to the left right now? 

Zack Beauchamp: A few of the plausible guesses include first, there’s a growing educational gap among women and men. Women are increasingly more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than men are. And we know that education tends to make people, uh well, I should be cautious about that. We know that people who have college degrees are more likely to be Democrats. We don’t really know why. That’s another one of those fun puzzles, right, that we’ve got in American politics. Where you look at these things and you have a bunch of different theories, you don’t really know why it’s true. But if it’s the case that women are increasingly making up the ranks of college graduates, men are less likely to graduate. That means that women are probably more likely to become Democrats disproportionately. Um. Another theory is that, uh it’s generational. Like Dobbs is part of it, maybe a really big part. But another part would be that a lot of women who are younger now were socialized in a moment where gender politics and conflict over gender became really salient. Right? A really important part of their experience. Right? I’m talking Donald Trump running for president after the grab them by the pussy comments, the MeToo movement that came after that, uh the rise of a lot of young men paying attention to misogynist influencers, people like Andrew Tate. Uh. Like if you’re a young woman in high school and the men are listening to a guy who is like, there’s a lot of very good evidence that he’s an actual sex trafficker. And that’s who they’re looking to for dating advice and advice about how to be a man in the modern world. It would make sense that a lot of women would sort of come to see politics through the lens of gender. Uh. And that’s why a lot of the arguments about this, they tend to focus on younger women. Right? Because the divide is not very evident in older generations. But there’s some preliminary polling that you pointed to. That tends to suggest a massive divide between young men and young women in political preferences. Again, we’ll see if that’s borne out in November. Right. It may or may not be. 

Juanita Tolliver: I do want to go to the flip side of that and hear your theories as it relates to men, because American men have been riding with Trump and Republicans. 

Zack Beauchamp: Right right, but the thing I want to add. This is like a little fun wrinkle is that it’s actually not that young men are more conservative than older generations. There is some evidence that, like a fringe of young men listen to these Andrew Tate type figures, right? But actually, on average, a Gen Z man is more likely to be left leaning than someone in older generations. Maybe not millennials, but certainly older than that. But what’s really happened is that young women have swung really hard to the left. Right. So so a lot of the explanation is less what happened to men then what’s going on with women and why again if the state is right, why are women so left wing. That’s one of the things that we have to puzzle through right now. 

Juanita Tolliver: Well let’s start to dig into it, because you mentioned a couple of things already. You mentioned the recording where Trump talked about grabbing women by their genitals. We talking MeToo movement. There’s Dobbs that we’ve already discussed that as well, and a lot of that came up after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. So how do you see these kinds of events exacerbating, gender divide in American politics? 

Zack Beauchamp: I mean, there is a sense that the feminist movement and its gains are under attack in a way that they haven’t been in a really long time. And it’s not just like a sense, right? Dobbs wasn’t just one political development among many. A lot of people–

Juanita Tolliver: Right. 

Zack Beauchamp: –treated it like that at the time. Right? That it was just this is, you know, one of those things that’ll happen and then people forget about it by November. And that’s we know that’s not what happened. Right? We know it was one of probably the two most decisive issues, maybe the single most decisive issue in Democrats well overperforming in the midterm elections. Like this was an epical event for the way that a lot of Americans see their politics. And before that, abortion politics weren’t actually that polarized on gender lines. Men and women were kind of similar when it came to abortion. But I have this theory. I feel like it’s been borne out by a lot of recent events that people don’t really appreciate something when it’s going to happen. It’s only when it actually happens that it changes the way they think about politics. 

Juanita Tolliver: Oh come on. I feel like Trump’s full administration was a case study in that reality check. Yeah.

Zack Beauchamp: Yeah. It’s like people just like didn’t they don’t they’re like, okay, maybe this bad thing could happen. But you know, that’s could. That’s that’s that’s a future problem, right? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But once the constitutional right to abortion was gone and you started getting states banning abortion altogether pretty much, or doing six week bans that were functionally the same thing. People really changed the way they thought about this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a gender gap emerged as a [?], a durable and consistent gender gap, because it’s women whose rights are being taken away, right? Of course, like historically, people would puzzle why don’t women care more about this? And I think the answer we may have is they didn’t think that it was going to be under threat in the way that it is today. Again, one theory, but it strikes me as a plausible one. 

Juanita Tolliver: That was my conversation with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox and author of the book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, which is out now. 

Priyanka Aribindi: That is the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in just a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We’ll be right back after some ads. [music break] Let’s wrap up with some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Priyanka Aribindi: A federal judge refused to come to former President Donald Trump’s rescue on Tuesday, denying his request to delay his criminal sentencing in his New York hush money case. This comes months after Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump and his lawyers have tried everything to get his conviction overturned by requesting that the case be moved from state to federal court. They argued that the judge who presided over the case, Justice Juan Merchan, was biased against the former president, and that the Supreme Court’s ruling granting former presidents like Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official acts warrants a federal appeal. But Tuesday’s rejection from a federal judge means that Trump’s sentencing date is still on the books for September 18th. Mark your calendars. 

Juanita Tolliver: On Tuesday morning, two Russian missiles struck the city of Poltava in central Ukraine, in one of the deadliest attack since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine. We reached back out to Kateryna Hodunova, a journalist at the Kyiv Independent, for an update on the situation. 

[clip of Kateryna Hodunova] Russia hit the Poltava Military Communications Institute and a nearby hospital. The attack was carried out with two ballistic missiles, and it took place as people were going down to the shelter. As of the evening of September the third, 18 people likely remain under the rubble. 51 people were killed and more than 200 are injured. 

Juanita Tolliver: Following the attack, Ukrainian officials announced that they’ll be carrying out an investigation into, quote, “whether enough was done to protect the lives and health of the soldiers at the military facility.” And in an interview with NBC news released Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that even though they don’t need it, his country will continue holding the Russian territory it has captured since the start of last month’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Zelensky also declined to say publicly whether he plans to go after more Russian land. 

[clip of Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky] Sorry, I can’t I can’t speak about it. It’s like the beginning of our this Kursk cooperation. With all respect, I can’t speak about it. I think that the success is very close to surprise. 

Priyanka Aribindi: It is that time of year again, people. Time to get your Covid booster shot. The FDA approved a new Covid 19 vaccine from Novavax last week for people ages 12 and up. The agency also approved updated shots from Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna for the fall and winter season, notably absent JNJ. We just aren’t gonna talk about it. 

Juanita Tolliver: Nope. 

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s fine. 

Juanita Tolliver: Nope. 

Priyanka Aribindi: All three are designed to target newer Covid variants amid a surge in infections over the summer, and they are available right now at your local pharmacies. So be like us, make a beeline over there and get that shot. But unlike years past, the federal government will not cover this new round of shots for folks who don’t have insurance. Uninsured or underinsured people may have to pay up to $200 to get their booster. But the CDC said that it will dedicate $62 million to vaccinating low income folks nationwide for free. Guys, you’ve seen the numbers. You know the deal. Get the shot. 

Juanita Tolliver: A former staffer for New York Governors Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo was arrested Tuesday on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government. According to the indictment, Linda Sun worked on China’s behalf to build relationships between New York politicians and Chinese officials, and sabotage the attempts of the Taiwanese government to work with Hochul and Cuomo. Sun received lavish gifts and cash in exchange for that work, which she used to purchase a $3.6 million home and multiple cars, including a 2024 Ferrari. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Subtle. 

Juanita Tolliver: Yes. A current year Ferrari. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Perfect. Just really flying under the radar there. 

Juanita Tolliver: Her charges include violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as well as visa fraud and money laundering. Sun worked in the New York government for over a decade across multiple agencies. Her husband, Chris Hu, a liquor store owner, has also been indicted. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Uncommitted Democratic delegates from New Jersey announced that they’ll withhold their votes from Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic congressional candidates in November, barring a U.S. arms embargo on Israel and the negotiation of a permanent cease fire. The announcement comes two weeks after uncommitted delegates staged a sit in at the DNC in response to being denied a platform to have a Palestinian-American speak at the event. Tensions within the party over the Israel-Hamas war continue to be a sticking point for many voters, especially young people. In a recent CBS poll, 77% of Americans under the age of 30 said that they want an end to U.S. weapons aid to Israel. And as college students return to campus, protests are already underway. In a statement released online, the new Jersey uncommitted delegates said, quote, “we refuse to be complicit in genocide. We refuse to vote for a party that callously ignores our demands and the will of the American people.” 

Juanita Tolliver: Hearing the story, one of the things I’m going to be watching for is how many other states where there were uncommitted delegates will be making the same statement, because–

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Juanita Tolliver: One thing the uncommitted movement has been clear about is one, they’re not here to support Donald Trump, don’t want a Trump win, but they do want an end and they’re willing to leverage their votes in a push for that and protest for that. And so I’m curious to see if Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Juanita Tolliver: Other states with uncommitted movement delegates and members come forward. So something to keep an eye on, y’all. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Definitely. And those are the headlines. 

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Priyanka Aribindi: That is all for today. If you like the show. Make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Register a woman to vote and tell your friends to listen. 

Juanita Tolliver: And if you’re into reading and not just about the medical impact of ingesting 83 hot dogs like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe! I’m Juanita Tolliver.

Priyanka Aribindi: I’m Priyanka Aribindi. 

[spoken together] And don’t be a cliche with your corruption money. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Come on, a Ferrari? So uninspired. 

Juanita Tolliver: Tacky. [laughter]

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s almost like those TikToks where it’s like if I won the lottery, like there would be signs and they would all be in my closet. That’s kind of how you–

Juanita Tolliver: Oh. 

Priyanka Aribindi: –would know. 

Juanita Tolliver: Yeah. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Bye. 

Juanita Tolliver:  I’m into that.

Priyanka Aribindi: Got my corruption money.

Juanita Tolliver: I’m into that. Your quiet corruption wealth. [laughing]

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah, it would be hanging in my closet. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Tyler Hill, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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