Graphic Violence

Graphic from Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer, by Claire Caine Miller, NY Times, August 24, 2024.

Are Gen Z men pro Trump?  That seems to be the conclusion of a certain segment of media, perhaps exemplified, and amplified by the virality of the above graphic which appeared in the NY Times last month (and the accompanying article).  The discussions about the graphic that I've seen (e.g., a Breaking Points "debate" on the topic, to say nothing of various tweets (xeets?) about it) are eager to point out the tremendous distance between the purple dot on the left of the topmost line which represents the percentage gap between Gen Z women supporters of Kamala Harris and those of Donald Trump (i.e., Harris leads Trump among Gen Z women by 38%) and the green dot on the right-- namely the 13% lead according to the August NY Time Siena poll) that Trump has over Harris among Gen Z men.  In many of the discussions I've seen (including the NY Times articles on the topic), there does seem to be some elision of the fact that the poll is exclusively among voters in the 6 swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and that it took place after the Democratic National convention but before the widely watched debate between the candidates 2 weeks later. 

But before we get to the question at hand, can we talk about the graphic itself and the conclusions being drawn from it?  I will confess when I was originally confronted with the story I found myself too confused by the graphic to follow most of the conversations about it.  To my eyes, the most salient thing about it was not the rather typical extent to which the green dot floated to the right of the axis labeled "EVEN" for Gen Z men (about which the story screaming out to me is the exceptional rightness for Gen X-ers of both sexes aged 45 to 64), but rather the extraordinary extent to which which the purple Gen Z dot for women sits to the left.  Why then was the talk about Gen Z men?   Somehow, according to the prevailing narrative, the line represented a "Gender Gap", which according to the story was calculated as the sum of the 38% lead for Harris over Trump among Gen Z women and the 13% lead for Trump over Harris for Gen Z men or 51%.  But was this so meaningful as to warrant the discussion it got?  To me, it looked like nonsense.  We know that 38% more women support Harris than support Trump, but we don't know if Trump's support is the minimum of 0% or the maximum of 31% among Gen Z women that this number implies or somewhere in between.  Even if we knew the correct split between Trump and Harris among women, it would tell us nothing about where along the spectrum from the minimum split of 0% Harris-13% Trump to the maximum of  43%- 56% respectively that Gen Z Men's preferences fell.

The numbers appear to be related in the graphic, but that is strictly because in terms of their literal appearance they are connected by a solid line.  In fact, they have nothing to do with each other.  Does the calculation of the differences between them actually signify anything about a gender Gap? 

Fortunately we don't have to wonder.  The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University has a helpful guide to what a Gender Gap actually is.  Contrary to the New York Times operative assumptions, it is not the magnitude of the difference between the preference of women for one candidate versus that of men for another.  Rather, it is the difference between men and women's preferences for the same leading (or winning) candidate in a race.  In that case, we do not have enough information from the graphic to determine the gap-- we would need to know who overall was leading in the poll, and then we would need to know the percentage of each gender supporting that candidate.   The difference between them is the Gender Gap.  This is simply not available from the data as presented in the NY Times Graphic.

The data that can be determined from the graphic according to the Rutgers Center are the Gen Z women's Vote (that 38% lead that Harris has over Trump for women) and the Gen Z men's Vote (the 13% lead that Trump has over Harris among that cohort according to the poll.).   Clearly it appears that Kamala Harris has an exceptionally strong lead among Gen Z women in the 6 swing states in which the poll was conducted.  It's less clear, given that the margin of error in these polls can be as high as 8%,  that Donald Trump has a lock on Gen Z men's votes.  

In fact, as John Sides notes at Good Authority, the conclusions reached at the NY Times based on its poll (and the Wall Street Journal as well as several other outlets eager to spin pleasing narratives) were contradicted by at least 2 other polls taken at the same time.  Both a YouGov.com and a Pew Research Center poll found that Gen Z men,  as much supporting data attests, actually lean toward Harris, with a much smaller gap between the genders than the NY Times Siena poll suggests.  Granted, these appear to be national polls and may not be indicative of the outcome we are in store for. But it is more in keeping with what we've learned about Gen Z in the past. I am skeptical of the enthusiasm that media outlets have about Gen Z men's susceptibility to conservative talking points.  I don't doubt a contingent of Gen Z cavemen lie in wait to succeed their neanderthal forebears on the culture war front.  I just have a bit more faith in the prevailing sense of the cohort.