The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) has been tracking gender gaps in presidential vote choice since the gender gap emerged in the 1980s. A gender gap in voting refers to the difference between the percentage of women and the percentage of men who voted for the winning candidate. We spent the 2020 election season tracking gender gaps at the national level and in battleground states, as well as the “women’s vote” which is percentage point advantage that one candidate has over the other among women voters- that is, the difference in support for the major party candidates among women voters only.
In 2020, for the first time in nearly two decades, major media outlets relied on more than one election survey to analyze voter behavior in the presidential election: Edison Research’s national exit poll and the Associated Press’ VoteCast (conducted by NORC). In light of differences between these surveys and their sampling limitations, CAWP’s analyses of gender and voting behavior in 2020 consider trends across these surveys and findings from Latino Decisions, recognized for its more sophisticated and robust sampling of racial minority voters and a methodology that includes greater respondent access to multi-lingual surveys than the Edison exit poll, and the Cooperative Election Study (CES).
The tables below include available gender gap and women’s vote data disaggregated by various demographic categories such as race, ethnicity, age cohort, area type, marital status, and religious affiliation. Where available, comparisons to 2016 presidential election survey data are also provided from the same sources.
To access survey data directly from sources, see:
Edison Research National Exit Poll 2020 (as reported by CNN)
Edison Research National Exit Poll 2016 (as reported by CNN)
AP VoteCast 2020 (as reported by Fox News)
Latino Decisions American Election Eve Poll 2020
Latino Decisions Election Eve Poll 2016 (includes link to Asian American Decisions Election Eve Poll 2016)
Cooperative Election Study (CES) 2020 (preliminary data)
Cooperative Election Study (CES) 2016