Trump's strongest soldiers

White non-college married couples

I sometimes look askance at charts like this one.

Part of this is my longstanding distaste for the gender gap as a frame of analysis. Gender politics can be pretty zero sum, and you can’t really isolate whether or not they’re a function of men shifting right or women shifting left. If you’re a candidate, dialing up female-coded rhetoric is likely to turn men off, and vice versa.

The second reason is that by combining two or more demographic subgroups together, you can almost always show big differences between groups.

But lately, I’ve been studying gender differences more, because of what I suspect are errors of attribution in the discourse. Discussions of the youth gender gap get quite a lot of buzz, for example, but actually, most of it is due to the wide gender gap among single voters — and young voters are overwhelmingly likely to be single. To call it a youth gender gap isn’t strictly accurate. It’s really a gender gap among singles that persists with voters as they age into thei…