By Christine Rosen
Thursday, November 21, 2024
A curious thing happened on the way to Kamala Harris’s
defeat by Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The group that was
supposed to pull her triumphantly across the finish line waving hot-pink
Barbie-themed campaign signs, exuding joy, and adding their voices to the celebrity
endorsements of Beyoncé, Oprah, and Taylor Swift ultimately failed her:
American women.
This came as a shock to a campaign that had boasted in
the run-up to Election Day that the well-regarded Selzer poll had Harris
leading Trump by three points in the reliably red state of Iowa (he would beat
her there by more than 13 points). The poll, reported the Des Moines
Register, “shows that women — particularly those who are older or are
politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.” This was
supposed to be the “gender gap” election, when women, and especially young
women, were motivated to turn out to support abortion and cast their votes for
Harris, who made the issue the centerpiece of her campaign. It was one of the
few policy matters on which she staked out a clear position.
And nationwide, “contrary to much pre-election
discussion, Harris’ margin among women was actually less than
Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden,” Ruy Teixeira of
the American Enterprise Institute found. As for young women, evidently no
amount of “brat summer” posturing or Harris-themed TikTok dancing was enough to
persuade them that Harris was the best option. “Women under 30 supported Biden
by 32 points in 2020 but supported Harris by just 18 points in this election, a
14-point shift toward Trump,” Teixeira noted. Harris performed far worse with
women than had previous Democratic candidates, including both Joe Biden and
Hillary Clinton, while Trump improved his showing among younger women, white
women, and Hispanic women.
What went wrong for Harris?
In addition to her general lack of skill as a retail
politician, Harris’s campaign neglected to consider how its messaging would
sound to women outside the world in which Harris lives, with its wealthy,
well-educated, decidedly left-leaning Democratic voters.
***
She was inauthentic. Much of the enthusiasm that
supposedly surrounded the Harris campaign was manufactured, and while it
briefly energized crowds at the Democratic National Convention in August, it
was unsustainable for even the few months that Harris needed to convince voters
she was presidential material.
Consider the enthusiasm for Harris among celebrities.
After her defeat, her campaign acknowledged that it was $20 million in debt
despite having raised $1 billion. Where did the money go? According to Harris’s
campaign-finance records, much of it went to expenses related to hosting female
celebrities such as Beyoncé and for Oprah’s Harpo Productions to stage a “town
hall” with Harris. Several events in the weeks just before the election
featuring Cardi B, J.Lo, and other celebrities set the campaign back $20
million.
Likewise, much of the pro-Harris contingent online and
among younger influencers on platforms including Instagram and TikTok was also
a form of pay for play. The campaign spent $3.9 million on an influencer
“marketing agency” that paid said influencers to wax rhapsodic about Harris on
their platforms of choice. The campaign also spent $100,000 to build a set for
Harris’s appearance on the sex-advice podcast Call Her Daddy, whose many
fans heard Harris claim, absurdly, that there are no laws governing men’s
bodies the way abortion restrictions govern women’s bodies, Harris having
evidently forgotten the requirement that men must register for Selective
Service, and the history of men being drafted for military service. The legacy
media covered these celebrity appearances and influencer endorsements with
uncritical enthusiasm, but enough women sensed something was amiss with this
manufactured joy to vote against Harris.
***
She was condescending to women. In the aftermath of
the election, the New York Times hosted a roundtable with young voters
to understand why they cast their votes the way they did. Abigail, a
23-year-old woman who had voted for Biden in 2020, explained her 2024 vote for
Trump as follows: “The ad where there are two married couples and the two wives
went in to vote secretly and they glanced at each other and then both voted for
Kamala Harris — oh, my gosh. Is that what you think of married women, that we
don’t have the confidence to marry men who are our equal partners? I cannot
vote for a party that thinks that poorly of me.”
The ad, narrated by Julia Roberts and produced by the
progressive group Vote Common Good, ended with Roberts intoning, “Remember,
what happens in the booth stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz.” The ad was
notable not only for its condescension toward women, who, in its telling, lack
the courage to tell their significant other whom they support in a presidential
election, but also for its bleak view of marriage. In that sense, it was
revelatory about both Harris and the people running her campaign.
***
Her campaign criticized men and offered a negative view
of masculinity, which alienated a lot of women who love men. Harris’s
condescension to women was ironic given that her most important accessory in
this election wasn’t her pearls but her husband, Doug Emhoff, who was held up
as the model of a supportive spouse and also a model of masculinity despite
having cheated on his first wife with the family’s nanny (whom he impregnated)
and having been credibly accused of assaulting a former girlfriend in public.
And yet, here was Catherine Rampell, like a correspondent from Teen Vogue,
with her fawning Washington Post profile of the second gentleman:
“Doug Emhoff, Modern-Day Sex Symbol.” Rampell called him a “dreamboat” and
gushed, “Most important for this sexy sobriquet: Emhoff is secure enough with
his own masculinity to sometimes prioritize his wife’s ambitions over his
own. What. A. Hunk.”
What. An. Embarrassment. Rampell dismissed concerns about
Emhoff’s personal behavior and instead lauded him as an “ideal partner” because
“he’s a high-achieving alpha but isn’t threatened if his wife is, too. He loves
his job, but he loves his wife more.” Such sentiments were echoed by other
journalists, like the Time writer who said Emhoff’s performance on the
campaign trail was a “master class in how to be a guy’s guy as well as a wife
guy.” At the Guardian, a columnist praised Emhoff for being an “antidote
to lousy men everywhere.”
Meanwhile, men who weren’t Doug Emhoff were being told by
leading Democratic politicians that they were lousy if they didn’t vote
for Harris. Harris campaign surrogate and former first lady Michelle Obama was
the exemplar of this trend. She scolded men who might have been
considering voting for Trump as follows:
Let me tell you all — to think that
the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is
simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this
world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our
country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender
equity. So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves, what side of
history do you want to be on?
Scolding men is a strategy, but it assumes that most
women have fathers, husbands, and sons whom they fear and mistrust rather than
love. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Political culture on the left has long
demonized traditional masculinity (calling it toxic and patriarchal), and many
leftists assume the rest of the country shares such views. No wonder they
thought that ignoring stories about the second gentleman’s ungentlemanly past
behavior and slapping a camouflage hat and flannel shirt on a performative,
progressive, and not-so-masculine Minnesota governor would persuade men and
women to vote for Harris-Walz, or that they might move votes by targeting men
directly in ads featuring hired actors who awkwardly pretended to do manly
things while endorsing Harris. The result: Democrats lost even Walz’s home
county in Minnesota to Trump. Women didn’t buy what the Harris campaign and the
legacy media tried to sell about the new Democratic version of
masculinity.
***
Harris doubled down on an extreme pro-trans agenda. In
the final days of the election season, shortly after Donald Trump held a
campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, Democrats were
celebrating the shocking Selzer poll. The media coverage of the rally focused
on a joke about Puerto Rico made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, but they should
have been paying closer attention to something Trump himself said that night —
something that proved a decisive issue for many voters, especially women, in
this election. “We will get . . . transgender insanity the hell out of our
schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports,” Trump said. Throughout
the election, Trump made it clear he also opposes the medical transitioning of
children.
By contrast, Harris refused to offer any departure from
the Biden administration’s position on transgender issues, including, most
recently, the administration’s broadening of Title IX’s definition of
discrimination to include “gender identity,” which the administration
interprets to mean that schools that take federal money must allow males access
to women’s lockers rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams if they “identify” as
female. Biden had previously hosted trans activist and wannabe celebrity Dylan
Mulvaney and other trans activists at the White House, including one man who
bared his fake breasts on the White House lawn, and Biden himself had called it
“immoral” when several states banned the medical transitioning of children. As
a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act, which, among other things, allows
men access to female-only prisons and shelters.
These are wildly unpopular positions among Americans. As
Madeleine Kearns of the Free Press reported, “Polling shows that nearly
70 percent of Americans oppose males in women’s sports and sex-change
procedures for minors.” The women driving their daughters to soccer and
volleyball practices after school have surely seen stories about trans players
on women’s sports teams dominating women’s competitions, taking college
scholarship opportunities away from girls, and injuring female players. Many
likely watched in horror as some of the world’s most elite female boxers were
brutally pummeled at the Paris Summer Olympics and bested for a gold medal by a
man who calls himself a woman.
A 25-year-old woman who participated in the New York
Times postelection roundtable spoke for a lot of women when she said, “I
think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that
said, ‘Kamala represents they/them. Trump represents you,’ that was so
compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.”
Indeed, the ad — which ended with the simple phrase “She’s for they/them, he’s
for you” — shifted the race “2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,”
according to the New York Times. It probably also served as a stand-in
for many culturally elite views that most Americans don’t share but that
Harris’s campaign embraced. Or, as writer Andrew Sullivan, no fan of Trump,
correctly, and bluntly, summarized, the overarching message of a radical
pro-trans agenda contains within it much that is anti-woman:
The Democrats’ insistence that
women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any
major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you
remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in
sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological
men convicted of rape?
***
Harris’s nonstop fearmongering about abortion might
have backfired. Abortion was the central pillar of Harris’s campaign. Her
advertising strategy included blanketing the airwaves and online ad spaces with
horrifying stories about “Trump abortion bans” and claims by women who said
they were not able to get treatment for miscarriages. Harris repeatedly lied
outright on the campaign trail, insisting that Trump was seeking a federal ban
on abortion — something he has many times stated he does not support.
But as Lillian, a 27-year-old voter from Virginia, told
the New York Times, she was swayed in part to vote for Trump again in
2024 after doing so in 2020 because, she explained, “I saw an ad from Democrats
about abortion misinformation that really made me upset. I said, ‘You know
what? I’m going to vote for Trump. Everybody hates him. They’re lying about
pregnancies. Let’s just do it.’” Democrats spent more than half a billion
dollars on pro-abortion ads this election cycle, only to find out, as Marjorie
Dannenfelser noted at National Review Online, that the stale trope of
women as downtrodden, wimpled victims of a Handmaid’s Tale–like society
didn’t capture the way women feel or the wide range of concerns other than
abortion that they had in mind when they stepped into the voting booth. Most
notably, exit polls revealed, women cared a great deal more about pocketbook
issues such as inflation and the affordability of daily goods.
***
It’s clear that Democrats and their partisan boosters in
the media have little respect for the message women voters sent this election —
or the fact that one of the few demographic groups with which Harris did better
than Biden in 2020 was white people earning more than $100,000 a year. Rather,
Harris boosters immediately recast as villains the white women who were
supposed to be her saviors at the ballot box. “This will be the second
opportunity that white women in this country have to change the way they interact
with the patriarchy,” MSNBC host Joy Reid fulminated, while The View co-host
Sunny Hostin blamed Harris’s loss on “uneducated white women.” Nikole
Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, who likes to cosplay as a historian,
posted on X, “Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans —
including white women — have claimed a belief in democracy while actually
enforcing a white ethnocracy.” Nation contributor Joan Walsh (a white
woman) agreed, noting, of Biden, “He’s got a couple things that my girl Kamala
didn’t have. A penis, and that nice white skin.”
Writing in the Atlantic, Xochitl Gonzalez invoked
that reliable hobgoblin of the feminist Left, false consciousness:
What about [Trump’s] female
supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for
president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and
content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This
remains true today. . . . Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as
the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.
In truth, Democrats who refuse to acknowledge just how
nontraditional and uncommon their party’s values have become have only
themselves to blame for Harris’s loss. “The Democrats really are no longer the
party of the common man and woman,” as Ruy Teixeira put it. “The priorities and
values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal
America which only partially overlap — and sometimes not at all — with those of
ordinary Americans.” In other words, while Democrats scorn “trad wives,” most
American women and men are concerned about the deterioration of values in this
country, and they voted accordingly; a study from Cambridge University’s
Political Psychology Lab found that nine out of ten Trump voters believe that
“American values and beliefs are being undermined and cherished traditions are
under threat,” compared with 45 percent of Harris voters who hold this
view.
If Democrats want to win over women in future elections, they will have to address women’s legitimate concerns rather than pander and condescend to them with celebrity endorsements and false commiseration over their supposed oppression by the men in their lives. Manufactured joy and fearmongering do not a winning campaign strategy make.
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