Many white working-class women simply followed the same political trajectory as white working-class men. Some split with the Democrats initially over civil rights, but later over programs that seemed to ask them to subsidize the poor with higher taxes or premiums, while receiving no benefits themselves. Many also objected to Democratic support for gun control and indifference to illegal immigration. Significant numbers shared the cultural agenda of the religious Right.
The loss of Democratic support was particularly dramatic in rural areas and small towns that used to favor the Democrats. These areas, where on average only 25 percent had college degrees, became hotbeds of Republican support. Feeling left-behind and ignored by Democrats, they backed Trump in his three campaigns. While Harris carried the big cities and adjacent suburbs, Trump won the men and women of rural areas and small towns by huge margins. According to a voting analysis by Dante Chinni of the American Communities Project, Trump carried women voters in aging farmlands by 82 to 17 percent and in working-class country towns by 68 to 30 percent.
In 2024, Harris was more circumspect about the possibility of becoming the first woman president, although her supporters were not. During her campaign, she spoke eloquently and passionately about abortion rights, but with far less conviction and clarity about economic issues. Both presidential candidates received over 60 percent of the vote of college-educated women. Harris received 61 percent of the vote from young women aged 18-29. She won women in big cities by 67 to 32 percent and in adjacent suburbs by 61 to 37 percent. These were women whose outlooks were mostly likely to have been shaped by feminist concerns.
By contrast, Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 barely won the vote of women without college degrees, and Harris lost that vote to Trump. If the vote of minority women, whose electoral loyalty to the Democrats has dated from the civil rights era, is set aside, Clinton, Biden, and Harris lost the vote of white women without college degrees by 34, 36, and 35 percent, respectively. Many of these voters do support abortion rights, but they accord less importance to basing their vote on the issue than do college-educated women and women who live in large metro centers. They are also much less likely to describe themselves as feminists.
To sum up: the pro-Democratic female gender gap was initially driven more by working-class women then by women with college degrees. That began to change in the 1980s and culminated in the dramatic shift in party allegiance in the last three elections. Many working-class women abandoned the Democratic party for the same reasons as their male counterparts. Those who lived outside the great metro centers felted snubbed by Democratic elites; they blamed Democrats for lost jobs through bad trade deals and regulations and for rising illegal immigration. But many also rejected what they saw as Democrats’ identification with cultural views of the family and home that had been shaped by feminism. They identified the proponents of those views as metropolitan elites. In this way, the shift of the party’s base toward college-educated women and feminist priorities helped speed the exit of some working class women from Democratic ranks.
