NEW YORK – Donald Trump ran a campaign focused on hypermasculinity, actively courting young men, particularly with interviews on popular male-centric podcasts.

In the final weeks of the campaign, the former president and many of his surrogates looked into sexist remarks and jokes about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some of his supporters, including former presidential rival Nikki Haley, have warned that the former president risks exacerbating his lingering gender gap with Harris. Prominent representatives, from billionaire Elon Musk to Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point, have called on men to vote in large numbers to counter Harris’ expected strength among women.

In the end, the gender voting gap was not remarkable by recent historical standards.

Here are some takeaways from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide:

The gender gap was large but not unusual

Men are more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey found. This gap in voting preferences has remained largely the same, although voting choice between men and women has shifted slightly.

Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, the survey found. In 2020, VoteCast showed that Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump.

And this is nothing new: the majority of women have favored the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1996, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.

Trump also made inroads with men

Trump enjoyed small gains among both men and women, with Harris slightly underperforming Biden in 2020. Fifty-four percent of men supported Trump in 2024, up from 51% in 2020.

Shifts by gender were concentrated among younger voters, as well as black and Latino voters. White voters of all genders and older voters of all genders voted the same in 2024 as they did in 2020.

Women under 30 voted for Harris over Trump, but their majority was a bit smaller, at 58%, than for Biden in 2020, at 65%.

There is some evidence that the Trump campaign’s overtures toward young men worked: More than half of men under 30 supported Trump over Harris, but in 2020 the divide reversed.

Trump also nearly doubled his share of young black men, cutting off a key Democratic voting group. About 3 in 10 black men under 45 voted for Trump, about double the number he received in 2020. For their part, Latino men were less open to the Democratic candidate than they had been in 2020. About half of Latino men voted for Harris, compared to about 6 in 10 who went for Biden.

Economic concerns affect all genders

This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. against Wade, and it was the second chance in history for Americans to elect their first female president.

These questions, along with concerns over sexist rhetoric from the Trump camp, were important to many women. But concerns about immigration and inflation weighed more heavily on many voters. and transcend gender barriers.

Kelly Dittmar, research director at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said that while it may not have been the main reason for his victory, Trump was able to exploit fear that norms gender and power dynamics are disrupted.

Dittmar said the results showed that “a majority of voters were willing to ignore misogyny and racism, and some were even motivated by it.”

“We don’t always recognize how invested our citizens actually are in sexism or racism when it comes to political power,” Dittmar said.

Only about 1 in 10 women said electing a woman president was the main factor in their vote, and 4 in 10 women said it was not a motivating factor at all. Black women were most motivated by the possibility of a first female president, with about a third saying it was the main factor in their vote choice.

About 9 in 10 Black women and 6 in 10 Latina women supported Harris. Just under half of white women support the vice president.

___

Associated Press writer Cora Lewis in New York contributed to this story.

___

AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The survey of more than 120,000 voters was conducted over eight days and ended when polls closed. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from non-probability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at https://ap.org/votecast.