It’s kind of interesting considering that Trump wears more makeup and hairspray than Dolly Parton. But the heart wants what the heart wants:
Given how unreliable the exit polls were this year, it will likely be a while before we know exactly how differently men and women voted in 2020. But a new survey from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life offers some clues, indicating that once again, gender and sexism may have been a big dividing line, as was the case in 2016.
That may seem surprising since this year’s contest pitted President Trump against another white man instead of a woman, much less the first woman to run for president on a major-party ticket. It certainly seemed possible heading into this election that the gender gap might be smaller, especially as Joe Biden seemed poised to pick up more support among male voters than Hillary Clinton did.
Only that doesn’t appear to have happened, at least not in a widespread way. Men’s and women’s voting patterns have been diverging for the past few decades. But according to research conducted before and after the election, the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.
Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.” [A] majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19 — setting them apart from all other men and women. (Compared with other respondents, completely masculine men were also much more evenly split on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, more likely to believe that wearing a mask was more about being politically correct than about preventing the spread of COVID-19, and more likely to oppose a national mask mandate.)
Personally, if you feel the need to identify yourself as “completely masculine” we’re already dealing with some issues. But then again, the question was weird so who knows how people interpreted it.
Of course, the idea that men who identify as more masculine would be more supportive of the president isn’t that much of a shocker considering they have been among his biggest fans from the beginning. According to the AEI survey, that was true this year as well: When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump. These men may also be more likely to subscribe to a more traditional ideal of masculinity that echoes Trump’s “just shrug it off” attitude toward the pandemic. In fact, research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing. One analysis even found that men who were considered more sexist were more likely to report having contracted the virus.
Daniel Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of one of the studies that found more masculine men dismissing COVID-19 precautions, told us that this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength. The pandemic, he added, may have sent these tendencies into overdrive, leading some men to oppose public health restrictions and forgo protective health measures like wearing masks. “COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.
It’s hard to completely untangle these effects from the impact of partisanship. Men who identify as completely masculine are disproportionately likely to be Republican, and as we’ve written before, Republicans have been consistently less likely to report feeling worried about the pandemic and to support public health restrictions on businesses and individuals. But arguably, this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity, according to Daniel Cox, director of AEI’s Survey Center on American Life and a FiveThirtyEight contributor. “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.
But there is some evidence from the studies on COVID-19 and masculinity that identifying as more masculine or supporting conventional gender roles has had an independent effect on men’s response to the pandemic, separate from how they identify politically. In the AEI poll, too, Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).
It’s gives a whole new definition to the notion of “toxic masculinity” doesn’t it?