Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020 | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views
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the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.
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Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.”1
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a majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19
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When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump.
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research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing.
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this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength
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. “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.
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this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity,
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“COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.
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Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).
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One possible explanation is that the threat of business closures or other restrictions on the economy may have been alarming especially to men who identify as completely masculine. “Because employment and working is so central to American masculinity, job loss is seen as a threat to masculinity,”
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by actively seizing on the spread of COVID-19 as an opportunity to emphasize his own brand of hypermasculinity and portray his opponent as weak and ineffective, Trump may have crafted a tailor-made pitch for men whose own sense of masculinity was threatened by the pandemic.