President Joe Biden's lead among female voters has waned since the 2020 election and is smaller than former President Donald Trump's support among male voters, according to an average of more than 30 polls conducted during the last six months and compiled by The New York Times.
Surveys show that inflation has played a more central role in the change in Biden's margin of support among women between 2020 and 2024, which shows the Democrat just 8 percentage points ahead of Trump among female voters since the 2020 presidential election.
The Biden campaign in late February announced it was launching "Women for Biden-Harris," a nationwide program to organize and mobilize female voters to give him and Vice President Kamala Harris a second White House term. Biden’s wife, Jill, was to lead the effort.
Women were a crucial part of the coalition that elected Biden in 2020 and his campaign aims to recapture that with the reinvigorated effort.
AP VoteCast showed a 9-percentage point difference between men and women in support for Biden and Harris: 55% of women and 46% of men. That was essentially unchanged from the 2018 midterms, when VoteCast found a 10-point gender gap, with 58% of women and 48% of men backing Democrats in congressional races.
The drop in support for Biden has been significant among Black and Hispanic women, according to a new set of polls conducted by KFF, a nonprofit organization that focuses on health care research.
The president's support among men has fallen further, especially among young men and men without a college degree, according to the Times.
"Once the campaign kicks into high gear, abortion will rally the women," Celinda Lake, a Democrat pollster who has been studying women’s voting behavior for decades, told the news outlet. "And as much as Trump wants to right-size himself, he can’t stop himself from bragging about how he overturned Roe v. Wade."
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.