2024 Election Post-Mortem: Religion and the Gender Gap

Narrowing for Christians - Increasing for Secular Americans

When you teach certain classes at the college level, you just know you are going to have to cover certain subjects. Any introductory biology course should touch on photosynthesis, a class on philosophy should cover logical fallacies, and any course on American history has to spend way too much time talking about the constitutional convention. We also have concepts like that in political science, too.

If one were to teach any course on political behavior, it’s almost universally the case that one class period should touch on the gender gap. It’s pretty simple to explain - men tend to vote for Republicans and women favor the Democrats. I love teaching it because it’s easy to throw together six or eight graphs that make that point incredibly straightforward. (I recommend this resource from the Center for American Women and Politics which has collected a bunch of data, for what it’s worth).

This isn’t a finding that has a whole lot of caveats. Take an average man and find an average woman who matches him on demographic characteristics. The woman is going to be more inclined to vote for the Democrat, on average. Once that fact has been established, then you can get into the fun part of the discussion with the students: why is this a near universal truth in the United States?

The media has been toying around with the gender gap a whole lot in the wake of the 2024 election. The Washington Post published, “The story behind the rightward shift of young men.” New York Magazine asked, “How Did This Become the Gender-Gap Election?” and Vox ran one with the evocative title, “This is why Kamala Harris really lost.” They all are trying to understand how much gender drove Donald Trump to a second term. You can probably guess how I am going to try and add to this discourse - what about the gender gap when it comes to religion? If we compare just white evangelical men and women, is it still there? What about atheists? Or Jews? Let me show you.

This is the share of each gender that identified as Republican between 2008 and 2024, broken down into sixteen different religious groups.

I think we are all going to be drawn to the graph in the top left - white evangelicals. Men were slightly more Republican than women between 2008 and 2020. That gap has now disappeared. That’s a very big deal. You also see a pretty similar phenomenon among white Catholics, too. The gender gap disappeared in 2024. For Latter-day Saints that’s been the case for about five years now. Also notice how the share of Mormons who are Republicans has dropped just a bit in the last couple of years, too.

But there are a bunch of other groups with a pretty consistent gap. Non-white evangelicals and Catholics fit this description. So does the mainline. Mainline men are 6-8 points more Republican than mainline women. The gap is particularly large among Jews, which is notable. Yet even among the nones - atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particulars - it’s a rock steady finding: women are less likely to be Republicans compared to men. When I say it’s a near universal truth, this is what I mean. The gender gap cuts across religion.

Okay, given everything that I’ve written about how the religion gap is closing among young men and young women, I feel the need to do the same analysis above but break it down into a couple different age categories. I used the data from 2022, 2023, and 2024 to give me a large enough sample size to do this type of fine-grained analysis.

I want to point out the outliers, first. These are instances in which women are more likely to be Republicans compared to men. I can find just a very small handful in this entire graph. Among white evangelicals between the ages of 18-35, 68% of women are Republicans compared to 63% of men. Commence the think pieces there! Among Latter-day Saints between the ages of 51-64 there’s a ten point gap. There also may be one among Muslims between the ages of 36 and 50, but the sample size is a bit too small to be certain. Out of a possible 64 comparisons, women are more Republican in maybe 3 of them. That’s the gender gap in action.

What else jumps out to me from this graph? The Republican bump among non-white evangelical and non-white Catholic men in the middle age categories. That certainly raises some questions. You can also see how young Black Protestants men tend to be more Republican than women of the same age. But you can also see how agnostic men are significantly more Republican than agnostic women of the same age. That’s not so evident among the atheists in the sample.

However partisanship is not always the best metric of such a thing - actual voting behavior could tell a more compelling story here. I analyzed the gender gap at the ballot box for atheist/agnostics, Catholics, and evangelicals across the last five election cycles.

Yeah, there’s a clear and unmistakable gap in each and every comparison that I’ve put together. Men were significantly more likely to vote for the Republican whether it be McCain, Romney, or Donald Trump. The size of the gap does bounce around a little bit from election to election, though. For instance, among atheists and agnostics, the gap was five points in 2020 but then ballooned to nine points in 2024. Among Catholics and evangelicals the gap actually narrowed in 2024 - something I will circle back to in just a minute.

After I stared at this graph for a couple of minutes, I detected an interesting trend that is worth highlighting. In 2008, 44% of Catholic women voted for McCain. It was 67% of evangelical women. In 2024, 54% of Catholic women supported Donald Trump. It was 73% of evangelicals. In other words, Trump managed to win over a pretty significant share of Christian women in the prior 16 years. Ten points for Catholics and six points for evangelicals. For men, his vote share was up 3 points among Catholics and 2 points for evangelicals. Women are warming to Trump.

But I wanted to sort out just how much more likely a man is to vote for the Republican compared to a woman. There’s a simple way to do that - a regression analysis. I controlled for the most likely factors here: age, education, income, and race. Holding all those things equal - how big was the gender gap?

Here’s what the data shows: in both 2016 and 2020, the odds that a man voted for Trump were about 1.39 times the odds that a woman did, after controlling for key factors like age, education, income, and race. This is a closer to apples-to-apples comparison because it accounts for other characteristics that might influence voting behavior.

The 2024 result is even more interesting. In the Harris vs. Trump matchup, the odds ratio dropped to 1.17, meaning the difference between men and women was much smaller than in the previous two elections.

Why was this the case? The earlier graph helps explain it: men’s support for Republicans has remained relatively steady over time, while women have shifted significantly toward the GOP. In other words, the gender gap isn’t narrowing because men and women are moving toward the center — it’s narrowing because women’s voting patterns are becoming increasingly similar to men’s.

But I can’t just end it there, can I? Let me show you the exact same analysis however this time around I broke it down into three religious groups - evangelicals, Catholics, and atheist/agnostics.

I was struck by these results — the gender gap appears to be narrowing for some groups while widening for others. Among evangelicals, the pattern was remarkably stable in 2016 and 2020, with men having about 1.6 to 1.7 times the odds of voting for Trump compared to women, after controlling for education, income, age, and race. But that shifted in 2024. In the most recent election, the odds ratio dropped to 1.22, meaning the gender gap among evangelicals was much smaller than in the previous two cycles.

A similar pattern appears among Catholics. From 2016 to 2020, the gender gap was fairly consistent, but in 2024 it narrowed significantly. Comparing 2020 to 2024, the difference between men and women was cut roughly in half.

The story is very different for atheists and agnostics. While the gender gap is closing among Christians, the data suggest it may be widening among secular voters. In 2016, the odds that an atheist or agnostic man voted for Trump were 1.50 times the odds for a woman in the same group. That increased slightly to 1.59 in 2020. By 2024, it rose again to nearly 1.90.

It’s important to note that these differences are not statistically significant, so we should be cautious in drawing firm conclusions. Still, the pattern is suggestive: while Christian men and women are becoming more similar in their voting behavior, secular men and women may be drifting further apart.

So - is the gender gap really a thing when it comes to religion? Yeah, I think it’s clearly still there. On average, a man is more Republican than a woman. That’s true when looking at Protestants, Jews, or atheists. You can only find a handful of cases where it’s reversed. But that last bit of analysis may be pointing to the fact that the gender gap might disappear for evangelicals in the next couple of election cycles.

Or that could possibly be a Trump thing? It’s hard to know at this point.

Code for this post can be found here.

---

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.