Breaking down the the yawning gender gap dividing Gen Z: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, we break down our latest poll showing how Gen Z voters are viewing the presidential race in the final days. Plus, national political reporter Ben Kamisar looks at the explosion of outside spending this election cycle. And senior political reporter Jonathan Allen explains what the location of Kamala Harris’ closing-argument address reveals.

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The Gen Z gender gap: Women drive advantage for Harris, with men divided

By Stephanie Perry, Marc Trussler and Mara Haeger

Half of registered voters under 30 years old plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and one-third are lining up with former President Donald Trump, according to the latest NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll, powered by SurveyMonkey.

And among young voters who say they will vote in the presidential election in November, Harris leads 56%-36%, a 20-point advantage. With some young voters leaning toward other candidates on the ballot besides Harris and Trump, that’s just shy of the 24-point margin President Joe Biden enjoyed among voters under 30 in 2020 (60%-36%), according to the NBC News exit poll. 

Within Gen Z, though, there are notable divisions among different groups — and the gender gap is particularly significant. 

Young women said they’ll vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. Young men were essentially even, with Harris having a 2-point lead.

Men (46%) were more likely to say Trump has the right temperament to serve as president, compared with women (30%). Mirroring that, women (65%) were more likely to say Harris has the right temperament compared with men (55%). 

The gender differences splashed across the issues young voters say are most important to their votes. While inflation and the cost of living ranked as the most important issue among both men (35%) and women (29%), they differed on what came next, with 13% of women selecting abortion, compared with 4% of men. Among men, 13% cited threats to democracy as their most important issue, compared with 9% of women who picked that issue.

There were also large gender differences over the role abortion policy will play in choosing a candidate. Just under half of young women (48%) said they would vote only for a candidate who shared their views on abortion, compared with 36% of men.

Read more from the poll →

📊More numbers: A national CNBC poll among all registered voters shows Trump at 48% and Harris at 46%, a 2-point difference that is within the margin of error. 

Outside spending eclipses $1 billion in the presidential race, setting a new record

By Ben Kamisar

Outside groups have poured an astounding $1.1 billion into the presidential race with less than two weeks to go before Election Day, an NBC News analysis found, surpassing the record set during the 2020 election.

The figure includes spending from super PACs and other groups not directly affiliated with the candidates’ campaigns and party committees over the course of the primary and general election campaigns. 

To put the current level of outside spending into perspective, the $1 billion-plus figure dwarfs the gross domestic product of more than a dozen countries. 

The frenetic pace is already ahead of where things stood at this point four years ago, when there had been more than $910 million in independent expenditures by Oct. 24. In total, more than $1 billion was spent in the 2020 presidential contest.

Kamala Harris, whose presidential candidacy is only months old after an unprecedented summer switch at the top of the Democratic ticket, has been the subject of more than two-thirds of the total outside spending this cycle. 

Read more from Ben →

What the location of Harris’ closing-argument address reveals

By Jonathan Allen

No matter what Kamala Harris says in her closing-argument address to the nation Tuesday, she will be sending the message that Donald Trump is simply unfit for the office they both seek.

Her choice of venue, the Ellipse at the foot of the White House, is where Trump rallied his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, and urged them to march on the Capitol. In a small dining room next to the Oval Office, he watched silently as a mob sacked the Capitol in a vain attempt to overturn his defeat.

Since then, Democrats have wrestled with the tension between their core conviction that voters should reject Trump because they have concluded he is an existential threat to the republic and polls that show many voters are focused on more tactile issues such as abortion, inflation and immigration.

Some voters say they don’t feel they know enough about what Harris would do on key policy questions. It’s a double-edged sword, because that means she hasn’t closed the deal with less than two weeks to go before Election Day but, at least in theory, has room to do so. And still, it’s not clear whether she can do anything to satisfy those voters.  

Harris is likely to make a final pitch to them that aims to cross the “t’s” and dot the “i’s” of her agenda, a stab at converting late-breaking swing voters with a positive message about her own policy plans. But just with her choice of location, she is more clearly trying to juice her base and turn swing voters against Trump. 

When her popularity was rising in the weeks after she took the reins of the Democratic Party, Harris steered away from the case-for-democracy argument that had been the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s platform. Now, as she heads down the homestretch neck and neck with Trump, she’s returning to it. 

If she wins, the speech on the Ellipse will no doubt feature prominently in the lore of Harris’ improbable and historic victory, a moment when she rose to the occasion of defending democracy. If she loses, it may be seen as a last missed opportunity to focus on issues that more directly affect voters’ daily lives.

🕘 Closing time: Harris is also enlisting some of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars to help her make her closing argument. Monica Alba, Carol E. Lee and Yamiche Alcindor report that Harris is set to appear with former President Barack Obama in Georgia on Thursday and with former first lady Michelle Obama in Michigan on Saturday, the first time she will campaign with the Obamas this cycle.  

But one prominent Democrat Harris has yet to enlist is Hillary Clinton. The decision underscores Harris’ lack of emphasis on the history-making potential of her candidacy in her pitch to voters, a stark contrast to Clinton’s approach in her 2016 campaign, Monica Alba, Yamiche Alcindor and Gary Grumbach write. 

As for Trump, his campaign is focused on immigration, inflation and foreign policy in the final days of the race. But as Jonathan Allen and Katherine Doyle note, Trump himself is ramping up personal attacks on Harris. 

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

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