Funding for “To the Contrary,” provided by: Coming up on “To the Contrary”: Gender is one of the defining fault lines of our politics today.

You know, one of the starkest contrasts right now is when you talk about “cat lady” and some of the comments that Trump and Vance make.

Women find it very disrespectful.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to “To the Contrary,” a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

We are in the final month of the campaign.

And women voters and issues affecting women of all races and of all diverse types are dominating the campaign.

With us to sort through the noise and help everyone understand what lies ahead, are Democratic pollster, Linda Lake of Lake Research, and Amanda Iovino, Republican pollster of WPA Intel.

Welcome to you, both.

Thank you so much for having us.

And it's great to be on here with Amanda.

Yeah, it's great to be on here.

Thank you.

All right.

Terrific.

And let's just jump right in by asking you how big an issue is gender in this campaign.

The coalition that Harris has put together is different than the Biden coalition.

There is a bigger gender gap.

She has created an incredible enthusiasm among pro-abortion voters, even more than Joe Biden had done, registering a lot of young people, registering a lot of women of color, so the gender of the voters and the gender of the issues, i.e.

abortion, although I would argue abortion is a man and a woman's issue, and the gender of the candidate are all making a big difference.

Yeah, I think from a voter perspective, it's a major issue, you know, along with education.

And of course, partisanship.

Gender is one of the defining fault lines of our politics today.

Gender determines how campaigns, news and even issues are perceived.

But what's been interesting is that gender is less of an issue within the campaigns itself, particularly relative to 2016 and even 2020.

On the Democratic side, certainly, I think the media has learned some of its lessons and Harris has as well.

Frankly, what Republican women candidates have frankly learned or knew intuitively that playing the gender identity game doesn't help with voters as much as they might want it to.

That really focusing on the issues is what voters want to hear.

Kamala Harris has not been raising gender, really, or race for that matter very much, if at all.

Is that the best way for her to campaign?

Trump keeps bringing it up.

I think that it is the smartest way.

I think it's a new generation of leadership.

It's a new generation of feminism, which, believe it or not, is still a very popular word with people.

And two-thirds of women describe themselves as feminism.

But we don't have to be told she's a woman candidate.

We can see she's a woman candidate.

We don't have to be told she's a woman of color.

We can see that.

And her personal story and her agenda reflect some of these issues.

She's made much more prominent, for example, the caregiving agenda.

She's very, very comfortable and very identified with freedom to have an abortion, to make your own decisions, personal, medical decisions.

So she's telling it in an integrated way.

It is part and parcel of who she is.

She doesn't need to wave a banner around.

It's something that is evident between the two candidates.

It's not something that necessarily needs to be said.

And like I mentioned, it's something that Republican women candidates have been dealing with for a long time.

And it's nice to kind of see both sides kind of coming to the same conclusion.

When you interview men versus women, do you talk to them differently?

Do they respond to different issues or even emotional themes differently?

We ask them mostly the same questions.

It's very rare that we'll ask them different questions, but how they respond to the questions is definitely different.

The messages that they react to is different.

The issues that they highlight are often different.

The language that they use to respond when we ask them an open ended question is different.

And all of that is kind of factored into our analysis and the strategic kind of insight that we provide to the campaigns then is different.

But are there, before we get to Celinda, are there words, Amanda, that you would use with polling women that elicit a better response from your perspective that you should use and those that you shouldn't use because they don't?

When I poll, I typically look for what a candidate is going to say and use the words that the candidate is going to want to use to talk to voters and see how voters respond to that, as opposed to looking to see what a voter of either gender is going to want to hear.

Sometimes people will respond differently, whether they're being interviewed by a man or a woman.

So, for example, on the abortion issue, women who are talking to women before the Dobbs decision were more pro-choice than women who were talking to men.

Which is exactly the opposite of what a lot of us thought it would be.

And when we went back and asked people why they had those attitudes, they said, “Well, when I'm talking to women I feel like I can express my ambivalence.

I can say maybe I wouldn't get an abortion or I worry about this or I'm conflicted by this.

When I'm talking to a man, I don't want him to think it's his decision, so I just tell him I'm pro-choice.” So there are some differences like that.

You know, one of the starkest contrasts right now is when you talk about “cat lady” and some of the comments that Trump and Vance make, women find it very disrespectful and divisive.

They don't like it.

They don't want their daughters to hear it.

Men are like, “Well, I don't like it.

But that's Trump being Trump.

Sometimes Trump doesn't know when to shut up.

He should just not talk because his policies are good, but his rhetoric isnt.” So you do get gender differences in terms of responses to different things that candidates will be saying.

How does that play with Republican voters who are supporting Trump?

The fact that the women, particularly female Republicans, that they don't want their daughters hearing about what he's saying and what he's doing, what do evangelical women think about this?

I think a.

Lot of that is kind of prebaked into who Trump is.

Voters, especially Republican voters, are very much focused on Trump's policies.

And they believe strongly that the four years under Trump were significantly better, especially economically, than they have been under the last four years with the Biden-Harris administration.

And that's really what they're looking forward to under a second Trump administration.

So the rhetoric, it kind of goes back to, you know, the 2016 campaign, they didn't.

There are a lot of Republican voters that don't necessarily like the way Trump talks about things, but there are a lot of voters that for whom the way Trump talks about issues is a majority of his appeal, especially for voters without college degrees, men without college degrees.

They like that he just tells it like it is.

And that is a strong, his authenticity is a big part of his appeal.

The media have given a lot of place, Celinda, to the Project 2025 agenda put forward by the Heritage Foundation.

But using all staff, former staffers and people close to former President Trump.

Are women scared at all by that agenda?

So originally, people had no idea what the 2025 agenda was, and I really credit the Democrats and their allies for defining it.

And now you have 50 some odd percent of the voters who feel negatively toward it, and only about 11% of the voters who feel positive about it.

Women were flabbergasted that it included more action on abortion.

They thought, haven't you done enough damage already?

But you're going after birth control, medication, abortion, criminalizing providers?

Women also disliked intensely the cutting of children's programs and Social Security.

They disliked doing away with the Department of Education and women, one of the biggest Are you talking talking Democratic and Republican women or undecided voters?

Republican women but Democratic women and independent and swing women.

So we've done a good job of defining 2025 agenda in a way that alienates women.

The hardest thing has been to convince people that Trump was really for it and that Trump was behind it, and that has been a bit of a struggle.

But I think that echoing as you did, that his aides and his advisers wrote a lot of it.

People think this is the MAGA agenda, and he's following the MAGA agenda now, which they don't necessarily like.

So it's been a big negative.

The biggest challenge that the Democrats face, that the vice president face is getting more credibility and increasing credibility on the economy.

And just like she gave speeches in the past, she's been emphasizing her proposals.

She knows that, too.

But that's the biggest challenge for us, for male and female voters.

Now, what do you think the biggest challenges for Trump with male and female voters, Amanda.

Getting that enthusiasm up among men 18 to 54.

That's been lagging a little bit.

And that's, I think, why you're seeing him kind of go out and talking to different social media influencers.

That's one of the big keys.

And then reaching out to women, which I think he is doing, perhaps, in his own way and artfully, but really emphasizing that safety elements and, of course, the economic messages and really emphasizing, how much better the economy was under him and how much how poorly it's been under the Biden-Harris administration.

How do you think Republican women have responded to him recently, telling them that he would be their protector, and that he that once he got back into the White House, if he does, that women wouldn't even be thinking about abortion?

I kind of, I was a little confused by that, to be honest.

You know what he was trying to say in his own way, was that his economic and immigration and safety policies are clearly better for women than Harris'.

And that these issues are just as much women's issues as abortion.

You know, could he have said it more like a typical politician?

More rehearsed, of course.

But this is Donald Trump that we're talking about.

And, frankly, his inability to be anything except who he is is part of his appeal.

I think the segment of voters that are still reachable by his campaign, who haven't made up his mind, knew exactly what he was talking about and understood everything.

What do you both think the down ballot effect of each of the candidates is going to be starting with you, Amanda, though on Republican Senate candidates, on House candidates and gubernatorial candidates, how's that going to work?

It's very much a campaign by campaign issue.

I think there are some Senate candidates, especially, who have been able to define themselves, separately from the presidential, and those will likely have Republican candidates might be able to overperform Democrats might be able to overperform by a point or two.

Incumbency will definitely matter there as well.

And House candidates will be the same way, just to probably a slightly lesser effect.

There's a lot of talk or there was about the gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, Robinson dragging Trump down.

Did you think that's what was going to happen if he stayed on?

It did look to be the case among independents, but in some initial polling back in August.

But there's plenty of time for things to change.

And I think it's been pretty clear that Trump has kind of denounced him and tried to put as much separation between himself and that candidate as possible.

Well, I think that there and the Robinson case is a good example.

There's the Trump effect on down ballot races.

And then there's the down ballot effect on Trump.

There are some doozy candidates that have been nominated in these Republican primaries.

It's really hard right now for some of the more mainstream Republicans.

It's hard for women, and Amanda is an expert on this, to get nominated in the primaries.

And so you have some of these very flawed candidates emerging.

And Trump will initially endorse him and then have to, you know, separate himself from these candidates.

I think the other impact that Trump and Harris have are who they're mobilizing, because if they're bringing in candidates, if they're bringing in new voters, those voters, may just vote down the ticket and send Trump or Harris, his or her team.

So I think that's a big impact.

And then the agenda that they said, certainly, Trump being so forceful on the economy has meant a lot of Democrats have had to address weaknesses on the economy.

The fact that Harris is so strong on abortion have meant that a lot of candidates who weren't planning to have a whole campaign talking about abortion have had to answer that issue.

And, for example, in the Tester-Sheehy race in Montana, there's an initiative on the ballot.

And it's a very clear distinction because Tester said, “I vote yes.” Sheehy said he'll vote no.

And it's been a struggle.

It's been one of the things that's gained some points back for Tester because people are like, “This is in our Constitution, we like this.” And so that has the issue, agenda has seeped down to some of the other candidates.

I do think one of the other factors here is, because some of these swing voters this year are college educated voters, thinking specifically about do places like Minnesota, where the vice presidential nominee on the Democratic side is from, there are a lot of swing voters who might lean towards voting for the Democrats on the top of the ticket.

But frankly, the last, you know, couple of years under Walz, he's really raised their taxes by a lot.

And they might when they're looking at kind of the state races down the ballot, might be leaning towards splitting their ticket.

And there's I think when you're having more of these swing voters be college educated voters, they're potentially more likely to be looking to split their tickets, especially when you're looking at a federal versus a state race.

When we've tested, by the way, Bonnie, to the 2025 agenda, that's something that has coattails to.

And so we found, Amanda is raising a really good point, that when we found that, we can say, you know, that Trump is for this and the Senate candidate, the MAGA Republican Senate candidates for this.

And people think, “Well, I might vote for Trump for other reasons, but then I'm going to have to balance that vote by sending a Democratic senator who's opposed to 2025.” So there is some balancing going on in the voters minds, particularly these last, undecided voters who aren't that rooted in partisanship.

Tell me how polling has changed.

I'll get back to particular topics in the campaign, but as I understood it, because so few people have home phones anymore and most everybody's on cell and you can't get cell phone numbers.

How are pollsters making sure that they're getting a representative sample the way they used to be able to do by looking up a person's phone number and seeing where they lived and maybe even looking up voting record.

Well, one thing I would correct is we can get a hold of cell phone numbers and we can buy.

There are huge databases of cell phone numbers.

There are vendors who match cell phones to the voting files so we can get your cell phone.

Although I hope in saying that we don't shut that down because the minute I avoid thinking because it's no way, that polling will survive, but we try to reach them.

We still reach 20% on landlines.

Mostly seniors and rural voters.

We reach you, we try to reach you on your cell phone, we text you, and we also do online polling.

So we're trying to reach you in multiple ways, multiple times, multiple days.

But it is hard to reach people.

And the response rates have gone way down.

And it always makes the pollsters on either side of the aisle very nervous.

Yeah, I will say it's gotten, I think, more interesting that we can reach people, especially through text in various times of day.

We used to, you know, only call during dinner time and get hung up on because for those reasons.

But now we can reach out.

And in different times of day, people are on different schedules and I think Celinda and I probably both miss, you know, some of the days of Covid when it was very easy to get people on the phone because everyone was a lot of people were home during the day and begging to talk to anybody, even pollsters.

Right, exactly.

It was lonely spending all those months at home, wasn't it?

Well, but what about, making sure, you know, you said you can buy, you can buy cell phone numbers, you can buy down to the zip code and get all kinds of voting information on the people you're calling.

But how do you make sure, for example, that you're not oversampling one kind of voter versus another?

I ask this because I saw a poll most recently, and it was actually an online poll, and I wonder how much these polls are being used and how they're being used.

But an online poll that was very that showed, Trump up way higher than he had been in any recent survey by Quinnipiac or or Ipsos or, you know, Gallup or any of the established pollsters.

So is there something going wrong with online polls or are they just getting people to respond and not seeing, what their proclivity is, politically speaking?

It very much depends on how the online poll was conducted, which panel they used and how they collected the data.

Often when we're using online panels, it's a blend of opt-ins.

And we're also sometimes blending it with texting and calling and kind of whenever you're mixing your methods, you're probably getting a group of people from a bunch of different, different ways and kind of sampling from a bunch of different methods and evening out any problems with one particular method.

And we have, we established strata and quotas like we estimate how many people will be African American, how many people will be women?

And I would imagine that poll that you saw might have had majority men, for example.

One of the things that really irritates us as pollsters is 85% of our polls are never public.

And there are some very fine public polls, as you said.

And there are some really sloppy ones.

And that's why the averaging is a little bit of your safety against that.

We also have to figure out what the turnout model is.

And in our firm we often estimate two different turnout models.

What if we get a Harris surge?

This is what the vote will be.

What if we get a Trump surge?

This is what the vote will be.

What if it's a traditional electorate?

So we're trying to understand and protect ourselves against deviation like that.

And we stratified by region.

We don't go in and get all of the interviews.

In New York State for Manhattan, for example, we get it proportionate to the electorate that's in Manhattan.

So we're trying very hard, but it is more difficult.

And I think people bring a healthy skepticism to the polls.

And that's a good thing.

Now, Harris, for example, is talking a lot about her childcare, expanded childcare credits or tax credits for small businesses just starting out and day care.

And are those issues, are those the kind of issues that do well with women or does?

Is that translated by her followers and her supporters and would be followers and supporters into her improving the economy, the way Trump always talks about improving the economy overall?

Well, it's a big part of the economy, particularly for women, and it's increasingly a big part of the economy for men.

And we had the funniest, married men focus group in Michigan, a while ago, where men said, “I'm a caregiver spouse.

So I get my to-do list every Saturday.” They do.

And there's now men see that as, “Okay, I got a role I got to go pick up after prescriptions for my mother-in-law.

I got to go do this.

I got to go.

I got to cover half the day care of the kids sake.

It's my turn to take, stay at home.” So, and I can tell you, as an employer, young men are negotiating this just as actively as young women are.

So it's a caregiving.

In cities they are.

Yeah.

Actually, suburban men are pretty big on it.

And, you know, even rural men are intergenerationally focused.

So it's, you know, they don't do the same amount of work.

I mean, one of the funniest questions out there is we asked men, “Do you do the same amount of caregiving in home, housework as your spouse?” And they said, “Absolutely, I do.” 50% of women are like, “Are you kidding?

25% max.” Yeah.

But, the other thing, though, that is really revealing here, if you ask who would be better on the economy, Donald Trump is ahead.

Who would be better on bringing jobs to the United States?

Donald Trump is ahead.

If you ask who would be better on the economic well-being for you and your family, Harris is slightly ahead.

If you would ask, who would be better on dealing with economics like health care costs?

Harris is much better, so they each have their advantages in the economic dialogue.

And one of the things that Harris is trying to fix, and I think she's doing it very ably, is that people just didn't know her very well.

So they have no idea.

They still dont.

Right.

So she's trying to fill in here is my agenda.

It is a new agenda.

It has the focus of my experience in life with small business and housing and caregiving.

And she just, you know, working very hard in advertising and in every public appearance to get that information out.

She was able to flip her, I mean, her approval ratings or favorability ratings are underwater for a very long time.

She was able to flip them.

But that's partly why her image is still soft and why some of this electorate is still soft.

But your point on, you know, the different.

I find that interesting because, for example, she's been much more explicit about what she's going to do with the tax code, whereas, you know, Trump was questioned at the New York Economic Club some weeks ago, asked about how he'd, you know, what he'd do with child care, how he'd pay for it.

And he rambled off and started talking about tariffs, which, you know, a lot of economists believe would kill the economy if he raised, it would be very inflationary if he raised tariffs the way he's planning to.

So your thoughts on that, Amanda?

I think for Trump, there's more of a track record that he can point to.

And people remember how they felt and how the economy was for them under Trump.

You know, there's a little bit more of an actual gut feel for how they and their family were doing.

But as Celinda was talking about in terms of, you know, which economic measures Trump is kind of best on, you know, I think one of the things to remember is that the way men and women view the economy is also different.

How so?

Men often look at the economy and how well the economy is doing by the incoming, the income for families, so the wages and jobs.

And women are looking at it in terms of the outgoing expenditures.

So inflation, and prices are really hitting for women.

And so one of the things that you're really seeing is, an education or socioeconomic gap for women.

So I don't think Trump is really going to be targeting winning over college educated women.

Now, there are some spots where he'll be able to on a safety issue.

And that's how Republicans were able to do so well in places like New York in 2022, but in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Arizona, what he's going to be focusing on are kind of women without college degrees.

And those are the women that, you know, over the last four years have had to decide whether to put gas in the car or food on the table at times.

So that kind of economic stress has been really front and center for them.

And they remember that under the Trump administration, they didn't have that kind of same economic stress.

And that's really what he's focusing on.

Thank you both for joining us, pollsters Celinda Lake and Amanda Iovino.

That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on all our social media platforms and visit our website: And whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you next week.

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