First-time voter Adriana Rodriguez said her cousin had a life-threatening medical condition during pregnancy and that she worries Republican abortion restrictions endanger women. “I never felt my vote would count, so why should I go,” said Rodriguez, 32, of Las Vegas. “But this time it really feels like it affects me.”

Adriane Smith, 54, a black nurse and farmer from Coralville, Iowa, said anger over the state’s six-week abortion ban was driving women to vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris. “Now we see a quiet storm of women voting their concerns at the ballot box,” Smith said.

American women spoke loudly in today’s election, with a majority voting for Harris. But whether they delivered the surge of support her campaign was counting on to make her the first woman President was not yet clear, as Donald Trump’s campaign worked to run up the score with men.

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Early exit polls found women favoured Harris by 10 points, compared with President Joe Biden’s 14-point advantage in 2020. Men preferred Trump by nine points, about the same as four years ago. Results are preliminary and change as additional interviews are included and results are weighted to match vote tallies by region.

The early exit polls found more than half of voters nationally were women, roughly the same as the share in 2020, according to exit polls that year. White women rose to about 4 in 10 voters, according to preliminary exit polls, compared with 32% in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, early exit polls showed that women broke for Harris by 12 points while men sided with Trump by 14 points, compared with 11 points for both in 2020.

The split between the genders was thought to be so pronounced that as Election Day drew to an end, Trump surrogates explicitly called for men to come out to vote. Trump adviser Stephen Miller and activist Charlie Kirk took to social media today encouraging men to head for the polls.

“All the men of America need to fulfil their duty, get to the voting booth, and end the invasion once and for all,” Miller wrote, referring to undocumented immigration.

People wave Harris-Walz campaign signs to passersby in Fayetteville, Georgia. after a campaign that has seen the Democrats courting women voters. Photo / Kendrick Brinson for The Washington Post

Harris and her party had spent the years since Roe vs Wade was overturned aggressively courting female voters, confident that furore over Republican efforts to restrict abortion access would send furious women to the polls. Harris argued, forcefully and repeatedly, that Trump was responsible for Roe’s downfall, that a second Trump presidency would mean further restrictions on abortion rights and that the prohibitions could bleed over into other aspects of American life.

That message resonated with many voters, such as Emily Willis, a 28-year-old medical student in Suwanee, Georgia, who lives in one of the nation’s hotly contested battleground states, which had visits from both presidential candidates in the race’s closing days. About 1 in 10 voters nationally said abortion decided their vote, trailing other issues such as the economy or democracy.

Since Roe vs Wade was overturned, Georgia’s six-week abortion ban has been on Willis’s mind, especially after she became pregnant in February. She said she gave birth to her first child three weeks before she cast a ballot. Hers was a planned pregnancy, but she was adamant the decision to terminate a pregnancy should be a woman’s.

“It’s always men, and men without medical backgrounds, making decisions for women,” Willis said, adding that women “want a voice”.

As Vice-President, Harris has been out front in the White House’s efforts to galvanise angry women against Trump, saying Roe was overturned because of a pair of Supreme Court appointments made by the former President and labelling the decision “Trump’s abortion ban”.

“This is a healthcare crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis,” Harris said during an abortion-focused speech in September. “He brags about overturning Roe vs Wade – in his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it’. He says he is proud.”

In March, Harris became the first sitting President or Vice-President to tour an abortion clinic, and earlier this year she went on a reproductive rights tour through battleground states. The Democratic National Convention featured the stories of several women who faced sometimes life-threatening difficulties since Roe fell. Harris supporters have even left notes in women’s bathrooms, reminding people that ballots are secret and women should vote in their own self-interest, regardless of what the men in their lives say.

The outrage over Roe’s overturn stanched a predicted “red wave” of Republican gains in the midterm elections and Democrats hoped women would also lend their support to the woman trying to become the nation’s first female President. Harris expanded the argument into a broader attack on Republicans – bolstered by large-scale ad buys, grassroots canvassing and phone and text-banking – saying that they’ve ushered in an America where the women of today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers, and stand to lose more if Trump wins the White House.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris has been out front in the White House’s efforts to galvanise angry women against her rival, Donald Trump. Photo / AFP

Ever since Harris’s ascension to the national stage, she was long thought to be the natural inheritor of the multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition that put Barack Obama in the White House. Harris’s mother was from India and her father is a Jamaican immigrant. She is the first Vice-President to graduate from a historically black college – Howard University in DC, where she held her election-night party. It seemed a perfect fit for the “big tent” of the Democratic Party, which is increasingly powered by black women and other minority voters.

Trump’s overtures to women voters centred on vowing to “protect” them and stating his support for IVF by calling himself the “father of fertilisation” – comments that Harris called offensive. His campaign argued Trump’s messages on immigration, crime and the economy appealed to women as much as anyone.

Trump’s advisers assessed since the northern hemisphere summer that the voters who could tip the election skewed young and male. Rather than chase traditional Republican constituencies such as suburban and college-educated women who were drifting away from Trump, the campaign bet on activating young men, black men and Latino men who historically voted less reliably.

With that goal, Trump sought out predominantly male audiences in non-political settings such as mixed martial arts matches, a car race and podcasts recommended by his 18-year-old son, Barron.

“Before I didn’t think it affected my life. It was something older people did,” said Austin Crawford, 35, who voted for the first time in his life this week at a church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. “I should have been voting the whole time.” Crawford said he voted for Trump because of affordability, safety and international standing, and he also voted for a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights.

In the closing month, Harris spent considerable effort trying to court what many thought would be another natural electorate: black men. Some polls showed the demographic’s support for Harris didn’t reach its level of support for Biden or for Obama. Harris engaged with black media and was aided by perhaps her top surrogate, Obama.

Trump’s campaign saw an opportunity to extend gains with men to black and Latino voters, usually through economic appeals. Pollsters said disillusionment with politicians from both parties drew some voters to Trump.

“You could vote till you was 90 years old and still not vote for anyone who’s going to fix everything,” said Shane Burgess, a 58-year-old laid-off automotive worker in Detroit who voted for Trump. “Maybe it’s a bad vote, we’ll see.”

During an unannounced stop at a Harris campaign field office in Pittsburgh, Obama made direct remarks about the group’s hesitancy to support Harris.

“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said, adding that it “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers”.

Harris dashed to urban areas, including Philadelphia, Detroit and Erie, Pennsylvania, to meet with black entrepreneurs and highlight what she called her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men”, aimed at helping the group build wealth, expand their access to lending and help them start or expand businesses. But that lack of enthusiasm comes as some Democrats conceded the party has not always focused on black men enough or kept all its promises.

Still, Harris and her surrogates sought to stress that racial progress was more likely to happen with a Democrat in the White House.

“We cannot allow circumstances to take us out [of] the game, because then basically what we’re saying is all those people who are obstructionist – who are standing in the way of change – they’re winning, because they’re convincing people that it can’t be done, so ‘take yourself out. Don’t participate’,” Harris said during an audio town hall with Charlamagne tha God that largely focused on race and was broadcast live to 140 radio stations. “Look at that vicious circle … let’s not fall for it.”

Some of Trump’s overtures offended black Americans, such as saying he gained support because he had a mug shot or that immigrants were taking “black jobs”. Still, small inroads with a traditional Democratic bedrock had the potential to decide pivotal states.

Early exit polls from Georgia showed a similar share of black voters supporting Democrats as in 2020. About 8 in 10 black men and about 9 in 10 black women supported Harris, according to Georgia’s early exit polling. In 2020, 92% of black women and 83% of black men supported Biden.