LISTEN: Gender and early voting trends
Oct 28, 2024, 5:00 PM
SALT LAKE CITY — Many voters have already cast their ballot for the 2024 election and some trends are becoming very apparent.
According to a poll by NBC News, there is a significant gender gap in young, Gen-Z, voters.
Young women were shown to more widely favor Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, young men had a much closer margin between the two candidates.
KSL At Night host Rusty Cannon joined Dave & Dujanovic to talk about early voting trends and what role gender is playing in the election so far.
KSL NewsRadio has modified this transcript for brevity and clarity.
Debbie Dujanovic: I was looking forward to having you here today Rusty. Because I really want to keep talking about early voter turnout across the country. I think it’s been impressive.
And specifically gender. And there’s a little bit of a spoiler alert I want to start with. So far, women are outpacing men in early voting by quite a hefty margin. And I want to talk to you about what you think that means for each presidential candidate if the trend continues.
Rusty Cannon: Yeah, if the trend continues according to NBC News and the website they’ve set up, it’s a great tracking device, women lead men 53% to 45% for mail-in and early person votes cast nationally for the states that are reporting it.
Generally speaking, Harris will do much better with women than Trump will, and that would point to an advantage for what it’s worth, in that category of 53% to 45%.
We know how razor-thin this election is going to be and has been. In fact, I had to make a presentation on Friday to some folks talking about the presidential election and Senate and Congress. And I actually started with a quote that I read in a column last week.
It was kind of funny where ‘If somebody tells you that they’re going to predict who’s going to win the presidential election. Also ask them what else they’re going to lie to you about,’ because nobody knows.
All the polls are within the margin of error and very close. But these are some interesting data points that might give a little bit of a clue as to how things will go on Election Day.
And, unfortunately, for the days after. Because we are not going to know. Well, I guess we could. But it is unlikely we know who is elected president the next day.
Dujanovic: I want to click through some of the states – let’s start with Utah. And in Utah, it’s actually pretty close. It’s closer than a lot of the states.
Of all those early mail-in and in-person votes that have been cast in Utah, it’s 46% of those have been cast by women, 43% by men, which does not mirror the national trend. I mean nationally, we’ve got 44 million mail-in and early in-person votes cast across the country.
This again, I want to make it clear, this is a snapshot in time. We talked about this last week, it will grow. This is just a snapshot as of today.
Listen to the full episode:
