‘They've given up on the idea that they can get women.’ How Trump is turning to the other gender gap for victory.

The 2024 election — it’s a contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But increasingly, it also looks like it’s girls versus boys.

Poll after poll is telling the same story: a Times/Siena survey this month showing Harris up 16 with women and Trump up 11 with men; a set of Quinnipiac polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showing Harris winning women by about 20 points in each. Meanwhile, according to a running average by the election quants at Split Ticket, Trump is on pace to win men by an even bigger margin than he did in 2020 — by about 9 points nationally.

But those numbers only tell part of the story.

The other half is from the mouths of the voters themselves. Which is where this episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast begins.

Sarah Longwell is the publisher of The Bulwark and is well known for her work as a Never Trumper.

But what she does with the rest of her time is talk to voters. Lots of them. Longwell has conducted hundreds of focus groups — you may have heard some of them on her podcast, The Focus Group .

While many of Washington’s top operatives have been digesting the election through polling datasets, she’s been taking a different approach: just asking people straight up what they think about Trump and Harris and what could change their minds.

Playbook’s Rachael Bade caught up with Sarah in her downtown Washington offices on Thursday and asked her to connect the dots from all of these hundreds of focus groups. In so doing, she laid out the stakes for what is arguably the biggest question of the 2024 election:

Why are men and women veering so far apart politically?

The answers to that may surprise you.