How Gender Relations Define Today's Politics

Explanations of the Donald Trump phenomenon often start with conservatives versus liberals, the rural-urban split, or perhaps race and immigration. Those all play a role, but the accumulation of evidence is validating a hypothesis from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: a big and very fundamental split in American electoral politics today is between different understandings of sex and gender relations.

I am struck by a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. Millennial women, defined as the group born between 1981 and 1996, favor Democrats by an extraordinarily large 47 percentage points. Millennial men also lean Democratic, but the gap is much smaller, only 8 percentage points. Because the Democratic Party has not had huge national triumphs as of late, the obvious inference is that the Republican Party is doing something to turn off those millennial women.