On one level, these new findings reflect a consistent pattern that has obtained since 1980. Trump — like the two George Bushes and Ronald Reagan before him — holds a set of policy positions that split men and women. Most important, since winning office, he has opposed social welfare and safety net programs and supported a massive military buildup.

In April 2017, Pew Research Center reported that men would prefer a “smaller government with fewer services” as opposed to a “bigger government with more services” 53-42, while women were just the opposite, favoring a bigger government with more services by 54-38. Gallup, in turn, found that over four decades of polling, “men favor the United States’ going to war to resolve disputes much more than women do.”

Trump has added something new to the mix, something more primordial and atavistic.

I wrote to Dan McAdams, a professor in the psychology department at Northwestern who studies the Trump presidency. McAdams sent me his views on Trump’s allure:

Trump personifies an approach to leadership that many men find deeply appealing. It is a primal appeal to social dominance. Everybody — men and women — knows that social status can be seized through physical power and threat; the strongest, biggest, and boldest may lord it over the rest of us. But boys and men have more direct experiences of this kind of thing growing up — on the playground, for example, in gym class, in the military, and in various other socialization venues wherein male strength and bravura are praised and deeply prized, even as they also evoke fear and submission.

McAdams cited the comments of the primatologist Jane Goodall, who compared Trump’s behavior to that of a chimpanzee.

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Goodall told James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic in 2016.

In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.

Along similar lines, Christopher Boehm, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California, wrote a February 2016 New Scientist article about his views of Trump:

For my money, I turn to primate politics and the tactics of alpha males. His model of political posturing echoes what I saw while studying Tanzania’s wild Gombe chimpanzees. One stood out: Goblin, an alpha male. He threatened or attacked rivals who looked like they might challenge him, often acting sharply and pre-emptively. Similarly, Trump knows who and when to attack to maximize intimidation. In an attack, the male chimp’s long black hair stands on end as he charges at his rival, which may either race up a tree screaming or stand and fight. Trump’s competitors have mostly been racing up trees.

In a similar vein, Alex Castellanos, the Republican media consultant best known for his notorious 1990 “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms, addressed the gender gap in response to my inquiry:

“We are in the middle of an unprecedented political and cultural gender war,” Castellanos, a strong Trump supporter, declared. “On one side of this war, we have Trump, alpha males and the women who love them. On the other side are beta males and the women who want to be them.”

In Castellanos’s view, the Trump side

flies the flag of manliness and strength which it sees as necessary to hold the world together and keep it from continuing to unravel in uncertain and perilous times. It is fighting to preserve not just manly strength but gender itself, the cultural differences between male and female. The other side is seeking to overthrow the patriarchal hierarchy that has run the world since we lived in caves. It seeks to create a sexually egalitarian world by extinguishing gender and its differences.

Castellanos argues that Trump,

is the last hope of those, like me, who would preserve the old patriarchal hierarchy. That’s why white college educated suburban women hate him: he is the political embodiment of the regressive threat to the evolution of postmodern female identity. Simply put, Trump’s alpha dog manliness and strength are a threat to the evolving independence and power of women. He “would take women back.” He represents the world as it was, where women were kept “in their place.”

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, sees the same traits in Trump that Castellanos sees, but with a less adoring gaze. Pinker emailed in response to my inquiry, that Trump is

almost a caricature of a contestant to be Alpha baboon: aggressive, hypersensitive to perceived threats to his dominance, boastful of his status and physical attributes (including his genitals), even the physical display of colorful big hair and a phallic red tie. Men may identify with such displays.

Why, Pinker asked, would men be more pro-Trump now than they were when he first took office? Pinker answered his own question:

The latest battle of the sexes has the media, educational, and workplace establishments sympathizing with women and demonizing men. Much of this is justified and long overdue, given how women are exploited and discriminated against, but it may leave some men feeling defensive, belittled, and eager for a champion. This may especially affect lower-status men. High-status women may justifiably protest their treatment at the hands of high-status men, but lower-status men may feel less sympathy for them, particularly if they feel demeaned and disenfranchised.

How much, then, can Democrats and liberals bank on the votes of women to block the Trump agenda in 2018 and to vote him out of office in 2020?

History is not encouraging on that score. The modern gender gap first drew sustained public attention in 1980, after the election of President Ronald Reagan. At the time, many political strategists thought it would diminish Reagan’s re-election prospects in 1984. To give one example, Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, published “Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President” in January of 1984.