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Kamala Harris was joined at a rally by the pop diva Beyoncé while Donald Trump sat with Joe Rogan, a podcaster popular with young men, for a three-hour interview on Friday, as the US electorate’s deep gender divisions came to the fore of the White House race.
With just a week and a half until election day on November 5, the duelling campaign events in Texas — a Republican stronghold — saw Harris seek to shore up women’s support while Trump made another pitch to his male supporters.
While Harris has leaned heavily into abortion access and women’s rights in the final stretch of her campaign, Trump and his allies have increased their rhetoric around masculinity, including sometime vulgar language — fuelling what analysts say could be a historic gender split when Americans vote next month.
A USA Today/Suffolk University poll this week offered a stark picture of the divide, with women backing Harris over Trump by 53 per cent to 36 per cent. But Trump held a similar edge with men. A similar vote on November 5 would mark the largest partisan gender gap in modern US history.
Harris, who would be the US’s first the female president, spoke in Houston on Friday night in what her campaign billed as a major address on reproductive freedoms she says have been eroded by Trump.
“In America, freedom is not to be given. It is not to be bestowed. It is ours by right, and we are prepared to fight for it,” Harris said.
A campaign official said some 30,000 people attended the Houston rally, making it the biggest event of Harris’s campaign to date.
The Democratic candidate has made abortion rights a centrepiece of her bid for the White House, blaming her Republican rival for the overturning of Roe vs Wade and hardline abortion laws enacted subsequently in Republican states including Texas.
She was joined on stage by pop star Beyoncé, whose song “Freedom” has become an anthem for the vice-president at rallies and in advertisements. The signal of support from Beyoncé was the latest from celebrities including Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris in September.
“I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said before she introduced Harris to the stage. “Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what is possible with no ceilings, no limitations.”
Meanwhile, Trump hammered one of his campaign messages — clamping down on immigration at the US-Mexico border — at an event in Austin, before sitting down with Rogan. The three-hour interview meant that Trump was several hours late to a planned campaign rally in Traverse City, Michigan, on Friday night.
Trump and his allies have for months leaned into a hyper-masculine message, from a Republican National Convention headlined by the signer Kid Rock and the wrestler Hulk Hogan, to the ex-president’s recent comments about the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.
Right-wing media celebrity Tucker Carlson, campaigning for Trump, this week stoked outrage when he described the ex-president as an angry father who would come home to give a “vigorous spanking” to a disobedient daughter.
Trump and his allies have also invested millions of dollars in television ads attacking Harris over her support for transgender rights. In one ad, a narrator says: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.”
Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, is among the most popular in the US, with some 14.5mn followers on Spotify. The controversial programme is especially popular with younger male listeners — a demographic that tends to vote less but which the Trump campaign thinks could help elect him if it turns out in large numbers.
Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh said the rival campaign events in Texas underscored how the candidates were positioning themselves 11 days before the election.
With the Financial Times’ poll tracker showing Harris and Trump in a virtual tie nationally and in all seven battleground states, Marsh argued that Trump was betting on lower propensity voters propelling him to victory, while Harris was banking on a strong turnout from women.
“There are no women to appeal to left for him. He has hit his ceiling,” she said. “What he is now trying to do is get younger men. Because young women are voting in droves, and they are voting in droves for Kamala Harris.”
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