If Harris loses, it won’t be due to gender or race. This will be the main reason | Opinion
Kamala Harris is a history-making candidate as the first Black woman to be a major-party nominee and the first candidate of Indian descent at the top of a ticket. She stands an excellent chance of becoming the first female president.
There’s already a pre-emptive blame game suggesting, however, that if she loses, it can only be because some men — particularly some ethnic groups — will not vote for a woman.
There are certainly such voters. But they are few, and they are outnumbered by those eager to elect a woman or minority (or both). If Harris loses, it won’t be because of her gender or race. It will be more because she represents an unpopular administration. It will be because too many voters saw a candidate whose views were at best undefined and at worst deliberately obscured to hide her leftist ideology. And, as is the case with every losing campaign to some extent, it will be because she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.
A recent CBS News poll dove deeply into the “gender gap,” a regular feature of American politics that is enhanced in this campaign. Overall, women are breaking big for Harris, while more men support Donald Trump, polls show. But the CBS survey was interesting for what it revealed about voters’ feelings toward the candidates.
Asked if Harris would be a strong leader, voters broke pretty much along the lines of who they said they support: 44% of men said Harris would be, while 56% said she would not. Among women, 55% said she would be strong, and 45% said no.
On Trump, women split 50%-50%, while men rated him a strong leader, 64% to 36%. But he’s not winning that big a share of men, so clearly, strength only takes a candidate so far.
What’s more interesting (and rare) is that the pollster asked directly whether those assessments were motivated by gender. Among voters who called Harris strong, slightly more men (26%) said it was because she is a woman than did female respondents (23%). And fewer voters of both genders who rated Trump strong said it was because he’s a man (19% of men and 16% of women).
Biases can be buried deeply enough that those who hold them don’t see them. But there’s plenty of evidence that Harris’ gender may help at least as much as it hurts. Renewed excitement among Democratic women, particularly Black women, was palpable as soon as Harris replaced Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.
Black and Hispanic men seem less open to Harris and more willing to vote for Trump. No doubt, some of that is misogyny. But there’s been a significant realignment, especially among young working-class men, that predates this campaign. Education level and class are increasingly better predictors of how such groups will vote than ethnicity.
After all, the trend among minority men was apparent when Biden was still the nominee.
Sussing out the impact of Harris’ biracial heritage is trickier. But despite our conflicts over race, the country is unmistakably less racist than ever. Barack Obama won twice. There are also clear signs of a boost among Indian Americans and even the broader category of Asian Americans.
It helps, too, that Harris’ campaign has deftly handled her groundbreaking status. She hasn’t repeated the mistake of Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 slogan “I’m with her” centered her pitch on herself rather than the needs and hopes of voters.
As Harris’ battle with Trump remains a toss-up, though, there have been moments of scolding that could turn off more voters than they attract. Obama’s harsh words for younger Black men were particularly condescending.
“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he said in a recent campaign appearance, addressing the “brothers.” It was a remarkable departure from Obama’s own campaigns, when he soaked up the benefits of his history-making status by letting others make the point, while he focused on voters’ views.
The Harris campaign is also reminding women that they can vote differently from their husbands, even secretly if they want. It’s at best a deeply condescending view of how a voter decides; at worst, it’s a sexist trope that insults independent-minded women.
Harris’ bigger problem is a campaign that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, other than a winner, for a candidate who can’t — or won’t — say exactly what she aims to accomplish. When she sought the Democratic nomination in the 2020 campaign cycle, Harris ran further to the left than almost anyone else in the race. So far, in fact, that she washed out earlier than the other big-name candidates. You know you’ve overdone it when Elizabeth Warren seems more moderate to Democratic voters.
Harris has tried to disavow those radical positions without explaining how she came to deviate from them or what exact policies would replace them. So, plenty of reasonable voters have decided there’s too much risk that her real aims are the ones she so passionately argued for in 2019 — curtailing the American energy industry or eliminating employer-based health insurance, for instance.
Voters know at a glance that Harris is a biracial woman. They can’t be as certain what’s in her head, and that’s a bigger problem than whatever sexism and racism lingers in America today.
