2026-02-22T11:00:35.806Z / CNN
长期从事民主党民调工作的塞琳达·莱克(Celinda Lake)为其政党的成功总结了一个简单公式：当民主党在女性选民中的支持率超过共和党在男性选民中的支持率时，民主党就能在选举中获胜。
出口民调显示，民主党在2018年中期选举和2020年总统选举中通过了这一考验，但在2022年中期选举和2024年总统选举中失败。今年的民调让民主党人看到了希望，他们有望在11月再次满足莱克的条件。
特朗普在男性选民中的支持率在近期多项全国民调中几乎持平。但这些调查同时也显示，他在女性选民中存在巨大劣势，通常有60%或更多的女性表示不认可他的执政表现。
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事实上，尽管人们理所当然地关注特朗普在2024年转向他的非传统选民群体（年轻男性、拉丁裔、工人阶级非白人选民）中的支持率下滑，但共和党在2026年面临的最大威胁可能就在眼前：女性选民对特朗普在其第二任期内做了什么、没做什么的巨大不满。
距离选举日还有近8个月，特朗普在女性选民中的支持率更接近他2018年和2020年（在任期间）时的虚弱状态，而不是2024年（卸任期间）相对较小的劣势。
莱克表示，尽管民主党仍需努力解决女性选民对他们的疑虑，但特朗普和共和党要重新夺回2024年以来在女性选民中失去的支持率，比扭转特朗普在男性选民中的下滑要困难得多。
“我认为他更容易挽回男性选民，而且可能确实会做到，部分原因是男性对民主党有更多疑虑，”莱克说，“（但）他很难减少在女性选民中的损失，因为她们已经迅速、坚定地转向了民主党。”
民主党在任何主要职位的竞争中很少能赢得大多数男性选民，同样，共和党也很少能赢得大多数女性选民。因此，自20世纪80年代以来，性别差距一直是选举中的一个恒定因素——但哪一方从中受益的问题却在不断变化。大多数选举的结果取决于哪个政党能更好地扩大其在优势性别群体中的优势，同时最小化在劣势性别群体中的劣势。
在2020年总统竞选中，民主党在选民中占据性别优势。根据包括CNN在内的新闻机构联盟进行的出口民调，乔·拜登在女性选民中以15个百分点的优势领先，几乎是他在男性选民中劣势（8个百分点）的两倍。这使得拜登轻松赢得普选。前总统特朗普在七个摇摆州中的五个州（密歇根州、宾夕法尼亚州、威斯康星州、亚利桑那州和内华达州）中，赢得女性选民的优势至少与他在男性选民中失利的程度相当，并赢得了所有这些州。（拜登在北卡罗来纳州和佐治亚州男性选民中失利的幅度超过女性选民支持率，但他最终还是以微弱优势赢得了后者，因为女性选民占比很大。）
2024年，情况发生了逆转。出口民调显示，特朗普击败副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）12个百分点赢得男性选民，而在女性选民中仅以8个百分点的劣势输给哈里斯。哈里斯在七个关键摇摆州中的六个州仍赢得多数女性选民（尽管通常比拜登的优势小），但她在男性选民中失利更多，导致这些州全部落入特朗普手中。（在特朗普也赢得的亚利桑那州，哈里斯同时输掉了男性和女性选民。）2024年性别差距依然存在，但这次差距反而帮助了特朗普。
2024年投票给特朗普的许多女性，尽管对他心存疑虑。出口民调显示，绝大多数女性认为他的观点过于极端——但其中约九分之一持这种看法的女性还是投了他的票。超过四分之一认为堕胎应在所有或大多数情况下合法的女性也投了他的票；令人惊讶的是，这一比例甚至高于2020年（在其最高法院任命者推翻宪法赋予的堕胎权之前）支持堕胎权的女性中支持他的比例（约五分之一）。
研究温和派、工人阶级和中产阶级白人女性的自由派组织Galvanize Action的执行董事杰基·佩恩（Jackie Payne）在2024年选举期间告诉我，在她的民调及焦点小组研究中，那些认为特朗普会改善她们经济状况的女性，会主动抵制任何可能让她们支持他的决定复杂化的信息。“她们选择相信一个与自己期望的特朗普形象一致的愿景——一个强大的经济——并且会绝对将任何感觉极端的信息视为虚假信息或夸张说法，即使他说他会做到。”她当时表示。
现在，佩恩表示，许多这样的女性对特朗普在这两方面都感到失望。“她们觉得他没有在经济上为她们带来好处，反而让她们生活的其他方面感到更不安全。”
这两方面的不满在民调中都有明显体现。女性对经济和通胀的负面看法始终远高于男性：在最新的CNN/SSRS民调中，76%的女性将经济描述为糟糕，而男性这一比例为62%。在凯泽家庭基金会（KFF，一个无党派医疗保健智库）1月份的民调中，女性比男性更有可能担心支付抵押贷款和医疗保健费用，而且更有可能担心支付食品、杂货和公用事业费用。在同期的《纽约时报》/锡耶纳大学民调中，54%-45%的男性选民表示他们能负担得起想要的生活；而女性选民中这一比例为56%-42%，显示更多女性无法负担。在同一调查中，53%的女性选民（男性为36%）表示现在养育家庭变得难以负担。
女性比男性更有可能认为特朗普的政策加剧而非缓解了她们的经济压力。在最近的福克斯新闻民调中，约三倍的女性选民表示她们受到特朗普经济政策的伤害而非帮助；男性选民的看法更为分化。同样，在1月份的马奎特大学法学院调查中，近三分之二的女性（男性略超一半）表示特朗普的政策增加了而非降低了通胀。女性在民调中对特朗普的关税政策也比男性更持敌意。
这种性别差异也延伸到了特朗普的其他核心政策。女性比男性更可能认为特朗普对总统权力的强硬主张对我们的政府体系构成了独特威胁；更可能反对去年“一项大而美丽的法案”中大幅削减医疗补助（Medicaid）以及共和党国会决定让《平价医疗法案》（Affordable Care Act）下的增强补贴到期；更可能认为特朗普的大规模驱逐计划过于严厉，使美国不安全而非更安全；更可能认为特朗普在使用联邦部队对付抗议者方面“走得太远”。佩恩表示，在所有这些方面，女性都觉得特朗普在国内外制造了令人不安的“混乱”。她指出，特朗普和共和党人在2024年“将自己标榜为秩序的保护者”，“但实际上他们正在成为威胁”。
莱克指出，即使是那些对这些政策有些不安的男性，也往往会提到他们认为的抵消性好处，比如削减政府开支、驱逐非法移民或通过关税可能创造国内制造业就业机会。她表示，女性的态度则更不矛盾：“她们压倒性地反对这些政策，而且看不到这些政策有任何好处。”
选民中的主要人口和地理群体几乎不会孤立移动。当总统支持率上升时，几乎所有群体都会支持他；当支持率下降时，几乎所有群体都会反对他。
与他第二任期初期的民调相比，特朗普的工作支持率在男女选民中都有所下降。所有近期调查都显示特朗普在男性选民中的支持率下滑，尽管幅度不一。一些民调（包括CNN/SSRS、美联社/诺尔研究中心和皮尤研究中心的调查）发现他在男性选民中的支持率降至约40%；大多数调查显示男性选民对他的评价分歧更大，反对者略多于支持者。
近期关于女性对特朗普第二任期表现看法的民调更为一致。几乎所有2026年的主要无党派民调都显示，至少60%的女性不认可他的工作表现，至少有六项调查显示这一不认可率高达63%-65%。
这对共和党构成了风险：女性选民对特朗普的不认可率可能超过2018年出口民调记录的59%。这对共和党来说是个不祥之兆，因为尽管对特朗普的不满帮助民主党在女性选民中取得了近年来最好的表现——当年出口民调显示，女性选民对民主党众议院候选人的支持率比共和党高出19个百分点，这是21世纪中期选举中双方在任一性别群体中记录的最大差距。
民主党在2018年的大胜进一步证明了莱克的公式：尽管共和党当年在全国众议院普选中仍以微弱优势赢得男性选民，但因民主党赢得女性选民的优势更大而惨败，出口民调显示。这一公式也解释了2022年和2014年的众议院选举：共和党在这两年中赢得男性选民的优势远大于民主党赢得女性选民的优势，从而获得席位。
自2018年以来，几乎所有有出口民调的参议院选举都遵循这一模式：民主党只有在赢得女性选民的优势超过失去男性选民的劣势时才能获胜；如果民主党失去男性选民的优势超过赢得女性选民的优势，就很少能成功。（2024年密歇根州的埃莉萨·斯洛特金和2022年佐治亚州的拉斐尔·沃诺克是少数例外，他们在男性选民中的劣势超过了女性选民中的优势，但仍因女性选民占比超过一半而获胜。）
今年秋季衡量众议院选民偏好的早期民调一致显示民主党符合莱克的测试条件。最新的“通用选票”测试显示，共和党在男性选民中几乎与民主党持平或略占优势。但在同一批民调中，民主党在女性选民中以约10个百分点领先，有些民调显示民主党在女性选民中的优势扩大到约15个百分点。
民主党在女性选民中的绝对优势对11月至关重要，但其构成也同样重要。受过大学教育的白人女性和黑人女性似乎都准备大规模反对特朗普。民主党也有望重新赢得拉丁裔女性的支持，她们在2024年曾转向特朗普。
但没有大学学历的白人女性一直是最不支持民主党的女性选民群体，重新争取她们的支持——正如我之前所写——是民主党在众议院中最大化收益并真正有机会重新夺回参议院控制权的关键。长期从事共和党民调工作的妮可·麦克莱斯基（Nicole McCleskey）认为，共和党在选举日前有机会改善与这些女性的关系，而其他大型女性选民群体可能没有那么大的机会。
她说，尽管这些工人阶级白人女性感到沮丧，但她们的经济压力并未迅速缓解，她们仍然与民主党提供的替代方案深深疏远。“对她们来说，没有什么比她们认为卡玛拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）总统可能对国家造成的影响更可怕的了。”麦克莱斯基表示，“现在（她们的选择）是围绕特朗普的，所以是共和党对阵理想化的民主党（而后者从未真正存在过）。一旦民主党候选人的真实面貌被知晓，我们就有更多机会，因为通常他们的政策和立场与这些女性的期望不符。”
莱克和佩恩都认为，2024年支持特朗普的可说服女性选民对民主党仍有许多疑问。但佩恩坚持认为，她们对特朗普的失望，尤其是在经济方面，已经高到足以让相当多的人“愿意再次冒险支持民主党”。
这些摇摆女性选民中有多少会被民主党争取过来，这很重要——但同样重要的是，有多少对特朗普失望的男性选民会被共和党重新拉拢回来，共和党可以通过提醒他们与民主党的意识形态分歧来做到这一点。
人们在讨论性别差距时，往往只关注民主党在女性选民中的优势。但正如莱克的简单格言所强调的，重要的是每个政党在每个性别群体中积累的相对优势。2024年，这种平衡让特朗普重返白宫。2026年，这种平衡可能让民主党重新控制国会参众两院中的一个甚至两个。
The GOP’s biggest 2026 risk may be hiding in plain sight
2026-02-22T11:00:35.806Z / CNN
Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, has a simple formula for her party’s success: Democrats triumph in elections when they win among women by more than Republicans win among men.
Democrats passed that test in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections, and flunked it during the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential elections, exit polls show. This year, polls offer Democrats encouragement that they could again come out on the right side of Lake’s equation in November.
Trump’s approval rating among men has run close to even in many recent national polls. But those same surveys now routinely show him confronting cavernous deficits among women, with 60% or more of them typically saying they disapprove of his performance in office.
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Indeed, for all the understandable focus on Trump’s erosion among the untraditional groups of voters that moved toward him in 2024 — young men, Latinos, working-class non-White voters — the GOP’s greatest threat in 2026 may be hiding in plain sight: towering discontent among female voters about what Trump has, and has not, done in his second term.
Nearing eight months before Election Day, Trump’s standing with women more closely resembles his enfeebled position in 2018 and 2020 — when he was in the White House — than his more modest deficit in 2024, when he was out of office, and to some extent out of mind.
Lake said that while Democrats still face substantial work to address women’s unresolved doubts about them, it will be tougher for Trump and the GOP to regain the ground lost since 2024 among female voters than to reverse Trump’s decline among men.
“I think it’s much easier for him to recover men and he probably will recover men, in part because men have more doubts about Democrats” than women do, Lake said. “(But) it is going to be hard for him to cut his losses with women, because they have moved so far, so fast, and so solidly.”
Democrats rarely win most men in competitive races for any major office, just as Republicans rarely win most women. As a result, the gender gap has been a constant in elections since the 1980s — but the question of which side benefits from it varies. Most elections are decided by which party does a better job of maximizing its advantage with its stronger gender, while minimizing its deficit with its weaker.
In the 2020 presidential race, Democrats held the gender advantage among voters. Joe Biden amassed a national lead among women (15 points) almost twice as large as his deficit among men (8 points), according to the exit polls conducted for a consortium of news organizations including CNN. That allowed Biden to comfortably win the popular vote. The former president likewise won women by at least as much as he lost men in five of the seven swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada), capturing them all. (Biden lost men by more than he won women in North Carolina and Georgia, but narrowly captured the latter anyway because women constituted such a large majority of the voters.)
In 2024, the equation flipped. Trump won the national popular vote after beating Vice President Kamala Harris among men by 12 percentage points and losing women to her by just 8, according to the exit polls. Harris still won most women in six of the seven key swing states (albeit generally by smaller margins than Biden did), but she lost men by more and saw each of those states go to Trump. (In Arizona, which Trump also carried, Harris lost both men and women.) The gender gap still existed in 2024, but it functioned in a way that boosted Trump.
Many of the women who voted for Trump in 2024 did so despite harboring clear doubts about him. In the exit poll, a strong majority of women said they considered his views too extreme — but about 1 in 9 of them who felt that way voted for him anyway. More than 1 in 4 women who said they believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases also voted for him; strikingly that was even higher than the percentage of women supporting abortion rights (about 1 in 5) who supported him in 2020, before his Supreme Court appointees helped to overturn the constitutional right to the procedure.
Jackie Payne, the executive director of Galvanize Action, a liberal group that studies moderate, working- and middle-class White women, told me during the 2024 election that in her polling and focus group research, women who thought Trump would improve their economic situation actively resisted any information that might complicate their decision to support him. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him — a strong economy — and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said then.
Now, Payne said, many of those women feel disappointed by Trump on both counts. “They feel he is not delivering for them on the economy and actually making things feel more insecure and unsafe in the rest of their lives,” she said.
Both ends of that equation are evident in polls. Women consistently express much more negative views than men about the economy and inflation: In the latest CNN/SSRS poll, 76% of women, compared with 62% of men, described the economy as poor. In a January poll by KFF, a nonpartisan health care think tank, women were slightly more likely than men to say they worried about affording their mortgage and health care, and much more likely to say they worried about affording food, groceries and utilities. In a New York Times/Siena University poll around the same time a 54%-45% majority of male voters said they could afford the life they want; an even larger 56%-42% majority of female voters said they could not. In that same survey, far more female voters (53%) than male voters (36%) said it was now unaffordable to raise a family.
Women are also more likely than men to say Trump’s policies are compounding, rather than alleviating, their financial squeeze. In a recent Fox News poll, about three times as many female voters said they have been hurt than helped by Trump’s economic policies; male voters divided more closely. Likewise, in a January Marquette University Law School survey, almost two-thirds of women (compared with just over half of men) said Trump’s policies had increased rather than reduced inflation. Women are consistently much more hostile in polls to Trump’s tariffs than men.
This gender divide extends to other core Trump policies. Women are more likely than men to say Trump’s aggressive assertion of presidential powers constitute a unique threat to our system of government; more likely to disapprove of the big Medicaid cuts in last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and the GOP Congress’ decision to let the enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expire; much more likely to say Trump’s mass deportation program has been too harsh and made America less safe, not more; and more likely to say Trump has “gone too far” in using federal forces against protesters. In all these ways, Payne says, women feel Trump is unleashing an unsettling level of “chaos,” both at home and abroad. Trump and Republicans “offered themselves as protection” from disorder in 2024, she says, “but instead they are becoming the threat.”
Lake notes that even men somewhat uneasy with those policies will often cite what they see as offsetting benefits, such as reducing government spending, removing undocumented immigrants or potentially creating domestic manufacturing jobs with tariffs. Women, she says, are less conflicted: “They disagree overwhelmingly with the policies, and they don’t see any upside to the policies.”
Big demographic and geographic groups in the electorate almost never move in isolation. Presidents tend to rise with almost all groups when their support swells and to fall with almost all when it recedes.
Compared with polls in the early weeks of his second term, Trump’s job approval has ebbed with both women and men. All recent surveys show Trump’s support declining among men, though they differ on how much. A few (including polls from CNN/SSRS, AP/NORC and the Pew Research Center) have found his approval among men collapsing down to about 40%; most show men divided almost evenly about his performance with slightly more disapproving than approving.
There’s more consistency in recent polling about women’s views on Trump’s second-term performance. Virtually every major nonpartisan poll in 2026 has found that at least 60% of women disapprove of his job performance, with at least half a dozen surveys putting that disapproval number as high as 63-65%.
That opens Republicans to the risk that even more female voters will disapprove of Trump’s performance on Election Day than the 59% recorded in the 2018 exit poll. That’s an ominous prospect for the party, because even though that level of discontent with Trump helped Democrats record their best performance among women voters in any recent House election: The exit polls showed women that year preferred Democratic House candidates over Republicans by 19 percentage points, the biggest margin either side has recorded with either gender in any 21st century midterm.
The Democrats’ 2018 sweep offered more proof of Lake’s equation: Republicans still narrowly won men in the national House popular vote that year, but were routed because Democrats won women by much more, the exit polls found. The formula explained the 2022 and 2014 House elections, too: Republicans those years won men by much more than Democrats won women and gained seats each time.
Almost all Senate races since 2018 for which exit polls have been conducted also follow this pattern: Democrats have always prevailed when they win women by more than they lose men and only rarely succeeded when they lose men by more than they win women. (Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin in 2024 and Georgia’s Raphael Warnock in 2022 are among the very few exceptions whose deficit with men exceeded their lead with women, but who won anyway because women made up well over half of voters.)
Early polls measuring voter preferences for the House this fall consistently show Democrats on the right side of Lake’s test. The latest measures of the “generic ballot” test have usually shown Republicans running about even, or just slightly ahead of Democrats among male voters. Several of those same polls find Democrats leading among female voters by about 10 points, though some have shown the party’s advantage among them widening to about 15 points.
The absolute Democratic advantage among women will be critical in November, but the composition of it will be too. Both college-educated White women and Black women appear poised to repudiate Trump in big numbers. Democrats also look on track to recover with Latina women, who moved toward Trump in 2024.
But White women without a college degree have been the female voting bloc most resistant to the party, and recovering ground with them, as I’ve written, will be key to Democrats maximizing their gains in the House and developing a real chance to recapture the Senate. Nicole McCleskey, a longtime Republican pollster, sees more opportunity for the GOP to improve with those women before Election Day than with the other big blocs of female voters.
Though those working-class White women are frustrated, their economic squeeze has not eased more quickly, she said, they remain deeply alienated from the Democratic alternative. “Nothing is scarier to them than what they think a President (Kamala) Harris would have meant to the country,” McCleskey said. “Right now (their choice) is Trump-focused, so it’s Republicans versus an idealized Democrat, which never exists. Once a Democrat becomes known, there are greater opportunities for us, because generally their policies and their positions on issues are not what these women are looking for.”
Both Lake and Payne agree that persuadable female voters who sided with Trump in 2024 still harbor many questions about Democrats. But Payne maintained that their disappointment in Trump, particularly on the economy, is high enough that a meaningful number appear “willing to take a risk on the Democrats again.”
How many of those ambivalent women Democrats can pull into their camp matters — but so does the number of men disenchanted with Trump that Republicans can reel back by reminding them of their ideological disagreements with Democrats.
Too often, discussion of the gender gap focuses only on the Democratic edge with women. But as Lake’s simple maxim underscores, what matters is the relative advantage each party amasses with each gender. In 2024, that balance returned Trump to the White House. In 2026, it could return Democrats to control of one or even both congressional chambers.
