15 million voters, a good chunk has to be Democrats, had their “economic anxiety” moment and choose to let a white convicted felon, realize, racist take the presidency, Senate, and house.
Political scientists and historians will spend years analyzing the causes and significance of this election. My focus is more immediate. Although the data are imperfect and incomplete, I will offer preliminary answers…
To his credit, the writer explicitly warns us that this is a hot take and is almost certainly wrong.
Because people were unwilling to vote for a black woman president. It’s that simple.
- There are estimates of as many as 15 million former Biden voters who opted to sit this election out, knowing full well that doing so is a de-facto vote for Trump.
- Latino men, and men in general, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
- Abortion issues fared better than Harris in virtually every state where it was on the ballot.
- Harris underperformed almost universally across the country, to the point where New York, New Jersey, and California were all much closer than they should have been.
This tells me that it wasn’t the policies. People just didn’t want Kamala Harris. Maybe because she’s black. Or Indian. Or a woman. Or a former prosecutor. Or some combination of the above. But whatever the reason was, people felt so strongly about saying “Not Kamala Harris” that they stayed home knowing full well they were de-facto voting for Trump in the process.
Trump didn’t “win” this election, in that he got virtually the same votes he got last time. Kamala Harris lost this election because Democrats sent a very clear message that they are so against Kamala Harris that they were willing to hand the Presidency and the entirety of Congress instead of voting for her. This wasn’t just a loss. This was a “Fuck YOU, in particular” sent right at Harris.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters’ unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
This was a “Fuck YOU, in particular” sent right at Harris.
hmm… I think a “fuck you” would be if people went to the polls and wrote in someone else. This was more of a “meh” sent right at Harris… they couldn’t even be bothered to vote.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters’ unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
I suspect that this played a large part, but the tricky thing is: how do we confirm this? We can’t just poll people, bc they’ll rarely admit it. We can’t compare the performance of congressional candidates because people likely hold the presidency to a different standard. To make things even more complicated, Harris is mixed-race - and Americans are notoriously bad at studying that. And what do we do with the results of these studies? Clearly we still want to nominate qualified people regardless of gender or race.
Harris went from polling 3.7 points higher than Trump in August to losing by 3.4 points in November. Do you think it took people that long to realize she was a woman of color, or do you think her actions in the interim changed peoples’ perception of her?
That’s just because polling was off. This major poll right before the election had Harris up by 4 points.
Lemme guess. Media illiteracy and propaganda aren’t on the list.
If they’re not going to account for the thumbs on the scale, what the fuck is the point? I get that there are other issues, but to what extent do these factors influence people’s decisions?
Similarly, by refusing to explain why she had abandoned the progressive positions on crime, immigration, health care, and climate change, she blurred the public’s perception of her and opened the door to the Trump campaign’s charge that she was a closet radical. Thinking back to the successful campaign of Bill Clinton in 1992, some Democrats were hoping Harris would have a “Sister Souljah” moment in which she broke with some party orthodoxy in order to show her independence, but this did not happen.
So Galston recognizes that abandoning progressive positions weakened the public’s perception of her, but he thinks the solution would have been to double down and attack progressives more?