Times-Siena poll finds 12-point gender gap in 2026 House vote

Trump casts November midterm as referendum on his presidency

The gender gap that has defined American presidential and congressional politics since Donald Trump’s first ascent is again shaping a pivotal midterm, with women backing Democratic House candidates by 12 percentage points over men, according to a New York Times-Siena poll reported by The Guardian.

The survey found 65% of women disapprove of Trump’s handling of his job as president, compared with 52% of men, The Guardian reported. The same poll found 57% of women said they would back the Democratic House candidate in their district, while 45% of men said the same — a pattern The Guardian said played out across three key Senate contests surveyed: Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire.

In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins faces voters for the first time since Brett Kavanaugh joined four conservative justices to end the constitutional right to abortion. Her Democratic opponent, logger-turned politician Troy Jackson, has built his campaign around Collins’s decisive vote to confirm Kavanaugh after Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had sexually assaulted her when they were teens — a claim Kavanaugh vigorously denied. The Times-Siena poll shows Jackson leading among Maine women voters 53% to 44%.

The current divide has roots a decade earlier. US women, long divided by race and class, were further splintered by Trump’s rise — or, The Guardian noted, perhaps by Hillary Clinton’s defeat — along lines of educational achievement and marital status. In 2016, Trump won white women overall while Clinton prevailed among college-educated white women, a partisan reversal from the presidential election four years earlier. That year, Trump’s campaign was nearly derailed by the Access Hollywood tape, a 2005 recording in which he boasted about kissing and grabbing women without their consent. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said, later dismissing the remarks as “locker-room talk” and suggesting the tape might be fake. (The recording was not fake.) Within days, the furor was overtaken by WikiLeaks’ release of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and then-FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that the bureau was reviewing new emails related to Clinton’s private server.

That November, voters punished the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party for her emails, among other grievances, real and imagined, and handed the presidency to the man who had boasted that he could “grab em by the pussy.” Two years later, in 2018, suburban women helped propel a Democratic wave that sent a record 102 women to the US House of Representatives in what was widely described at the time as another “Year of the Women.” That same year, the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after Ford’s testimony.

A generational pattern followed. The Guardian reported that Gen Z women, many mobilized by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, became more progressive and politically engaged, while their male peers drifted rightward into Maga and the “manosphere.” Anger over the loss of federal abortion protections helped forestall Democratic losses in the 2022 midterms. But the gender gap was not enough in 2024, when Trump defeated Kamala Harris — even after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

Trump has maintained that he has empowered women throughout his business and political career. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the first woman to ever serve in the role. But polling suggests women are deeply dissatisfied with the president’s second-term performance, including, according to one national poll, one in four women who voted for him.

Trump has cast the November election as a referendum on his presidency, The Guardian reported. “Will voters cement his power — or turn over control to Democrats, and grind his agenda to a halt? It all may depend on what US women want,” the paper wrote.

Longtime Republican strategist Rick Wilson, speaking to The Guardian about Trump’s final years in office, said the country has reached a point of “negativity and pessimism” that is “unparalleled since Jimmy Carter.” “This is the beginning of the end. This is the decline. As powerful and transgressive as he’s been, the country does not have a positive outlook right now,” Wilson said.

In a separate Arizona race covered by The Guardian, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has tapped John Giles, a vocal Trump critic and former Republican mayor of Mesa who left the GOP in May to become an independent after endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, as her running mate. Hobbs, who spoke at the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix on May 2, 2024, prior to signing the repeal of a civil war-era near-total abortion ban, is making the bipartisan choice an overture to the independents and moderate Republicans she will likely need to secure a second term. Once a reliably Republican stronghold, Arizona has elected a string of Democrats statewide since Trump was first elected; in 2020, voters there narrowly backed Joe Biden for president before swinging back to Trump in 2024. The 2026 election is the first time Arizona voters will choose a lieutenant governor, a position created by a 2022 ballot measure. Hobbs faces Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, a Trump ally who played a prominent role in efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory, and his running mate Sine Kerr, a dairy farmer and former state senator.