Less than 24 hours before American voters cast their ballot, pundits and pollsters were dead sure of a close verdict. “National polling is neck and neck but even swing states are so,” conservative historian Niall Ferguson said in an interview.
We know now that Donald Trump won, and decisively, 301 to Harris’s 226. It’s a victory that comes on the back of women voters, Latino voters and even African-American male voters. Far from being a coin toss, all the swing states fell behind Trump.
Kamala Harris had the better funded campaign with far more celebrity endorsements from Beyonce to Taylor Swift. Why did it go so badly wrong?
Hindsight hand-wringing commentary is looking at various reasons. From Harris’s lack of a clear message on the economy to the Democratic party’s failure to read the room, including concerns about illegal immigration. From Harris’s support for Israel that cost her the Arab-American vote to her failure to distance herself fast, and far, enough from Joe Biden.
While all of the above has undoubtedly played a role, what is undeniable is the role of misogyny. After 59 elections since 1789, America is not still ready for a woman, especially a Black woman president.
Compared to 87 countries that have elected women heads of state, the US is looking positively Neanderthal. Even its neighbour Mexico earlier this year voted for its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
An election says as much about its voters as it does about its leaders. What do you say about voters who chose to ignore Harris’s proven advantage of a career as a public prosecutor who put away men like Trump (“I know his type,” she said soon after replacing Biden)? These are voters who chose the alternative of Trump, a convicted felon who faces charges of sexual assault by over two dozen women and who has been ordered to pay defamation costs running into millions of dollars against a woman who says he raped her.
Trump won despite making statements that became more deranged as voting day grew closer. He has consistently taken credit for appointing three Supreme Court judges who overturned Roe v Wade that set abortion rights back by half a century. He has called Harris a “low IQ individual” who is “dumb as a rock”. Hours before voting, he imagined Republican Liz Cheney, who openly endorsed Harris, face a firing squad.
It didn’t make a dent to the electoral outcome.
Harris was simply held to a higher standard, as Michelle Obama pointed out days before the election. And that standard was still not high enough.
Yet, while rejecting Harris, voters have cleared the way to undo abortion bans in seven states including Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Missouri is now the first state where a vote will undo one of the most restrictive bans on abortion in the country.
America may have failed to vote for its first woman president, but for the first time in its history as a democracy, two Black women, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks, will serve in the Senate. In Delaware, Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
The president-elect’s first appointment is also cause for some cheer. By naming Susie Wiles, the political strategist from Florida who has run his political operation for the past four years, as his White House Chief of Staff, the first woman to hold the powerful position, Trump has made a smart move. Not only has he appointed the best person he considers for the job, he’s helped break at least one glass ceiling. He might have defeated Harris through a sexist, abusive and ugly campaign, but, he’s now trying to say, he’s not against women. At least not all women.
Yet, to clutch at these silver linings and ignore the threats made during his campaign would be foolish. Trump has promised to crackdown on “transgender insanity”. He has said he will stop transgender athlete participation in women’s sport. He routinely misrepresents gender transition care for minors, including hormone therapy, as something that is decided by schools that bypass parental consent. If he pulls Medicare and Medicaid eligibility for gender transition, it will “effectively halt most of that treatment across the country,” notes Washington Post.
Eight years ago, pundits had predicted a clear win for Hillary Clinton. The New York Times had prepped a dummy page one with a bold font headline heralding Madam President. Then the results came in. Clinton’s defeat was attributed in part to complacency among her women supporters who, sure about her victory, didn’t bother to go out and vote.
Leaving nothing to chance this time around, women were exhorted to cast their ballot. Republican women were reminded that their vote is a secret and so they were free to endorse Harris without their families ever knowing. There’s an awful sense of déjà vu that the same man who defeated Clinton has now trounced Harris.
Trump heads one of the “most prolific harassment and intimidation machines in the country with almost zero political cost,” writes Jill Filipovic in The New Statesman. His MAGA (make America great again) followers “have hounded anyone they see as his enemy” and is “among the most disturbing and under-appreciated dynamics of contemporary US political life.”
The ugly triumphalism among Trump’s MAGA followers has been sickening. On November 6, even before Trump had been declared the winner, white supremacist Nick Fuentes tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” The Institute for Strategic Dialogue notes a 4,600% increase in similar hashtags. Elsewhere there are reports of Black students receiving texts asking them to report for work as slaves on plantations.
The response was swift and angry with some posts calling for American women to revolt against men by adopting South Korea’s 4B movement that follows the four rules of no sex with men, no dating men, no giving birth and no marriage.
The following article is an excerpt from this week’s HT Mind the Gap. Subscribe here.
