Once again, a woman for president was just too much for Americans to bear. Kamala Harris was soundly beaten by an angry white man.
By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on November 11, 2024.
OTTAWA—After his decisive victory against U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris last week, Donald Trump needs to get some new hats.
The stench of sexism and racism wafted from voting booths as those who wanted to turn back the clock cast their ballots for a convicted sex offender.
Trump’s numbers in most areas exceeded his previous election bids. In his first attempt, Trump made it to the White House with the electoral vote, but not the popular vote. On Nov. 5, he got it all. There is nothing stopping him now.
David Axelrod, a Democratic adviser to multiple presidents, said after the vote that racism and sexism both played a role in Harris’ loss. Given the United States has previously voted for a Black president in Barack Obama, one has to assume that gender was the deciding Harris negative.
An exit poll by Edison Research found that Harris received the majority of her support from women and minorities. As for women, she won 54 per cent of their votes, while Trump secured 44 per cent. However, the white vote generally gave Trump an edge of 12 per cent. As for Latinos, they moved toward Trump in numbers not seen in the 2020 race.
On the race front, post-election numbers show that Harris garnered 80 per cent of the Black vote, but Obama received 93 per cent. Why was there a 13 per cent drop? Was it because some Black men couldn’t vote for a woman?
Women all over the world are mourning the Harris loss because it felt that, once again, a chance to elect a woman president in American was shattered not by a glass ceiling, but a concrete one.
Harris ran a flawless campaign. She was positive, upbeat, and energetic compared to a waddling Trump who bored crowds with his incoherent, droning speeches.
A woman voter dressed as a handmaid at a Pennsylvania voting booth said it all. Without uttering a word, the anonymous woman sent a clear message of what was at stake in the election.
Margaret Atwood, renowned Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale, made her own plea to American voters to support Harris for president.
According to her publisher, Atwood’s novel explores “themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of women’s reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence.”
That was the narrative for women in this election.
Once again, a woman for president was just too much for Americans to bear. Harris, who took over the Democratic reins from an ailing President Joe Biden 100 days ago, was soundly beaten by an angry white man.
Trump’s multiple character flaws were on painful display in the campaign, including the fact that almost no one who served with him in the White House supported him. His last week of campaigning was a disaster.
The hope that former congresswoman Liz Cheney be put before a firing squad prefaced by a self-inflicted wound at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York. Multiple participants levelled insults at women, Blacks, and Jews.
Harris herself was alleged to be a sex worker working with her pimps. Then came the now infamous insult to Puerto Ricans when a comedian called their home a floating island of garbage.
Harris faced a double whammy. As a racialized woman, she fought prejudice against her gender and her race.
Despite her comfortable majority support with women, the men did her in. The more education they had, the more likely they were to support her. But opposition from young men and those with less than a high school education was ferocious.
Harris cannot be faulted on her campaign. Her message was solid, and she delivered it with an ease of confidence reminiscent of a real leader.
Now Democrats must reboot while MAGA Republicans are already discussing a successor to the aging president-elect. In a media interview, a young Trump voter said he thought the perfect successor was vice-president-elect J.D. Vance.
The man who thinks America is being run by a “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” is the next great white hope.
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.
