Opinions are like noses, everyone has one. I have no idea who coined that phrase, but it is certainly true. And it’s especially true after a major election. Trump winning both the electrical college and the popular vote came as a surprise to many. Now the interpretation of how this outcome happened and what it means begins. Hit any news site and there are noses everywhere.
There are a couple that are going to be obvious I’d like to address:
Sunny Hostin, outspoken progressive member of The View, said that this was not about policy, it was a referendum on American culture – specifically noting that Harris is a woman of color. She won’t be the only one saying some version of “America is not ready for a woman president” or “America is not ready for a woman of color as President.” My response to that is that Kamala Harris received over 67 million votes, with more to be counted. She received over 47% of all the votes cast. And she started out as a fairly unpopular vice president. Had the Democrats had a legitimate primary season, she would likely have not won the party’s nomination. She was the first one out in 2020.
But for whatever the behind-the-scenes workings of the Democratic leadership were, she became the nominee with only about 100 days to go before the election. She worked hard, but her “handlers” also worked hard to protect her from herself. She was hesitant to answer any questions directly, hesitant to sit down for any “real” interviews, and hesitant to pin herself down on virtually any policy position. Her team was hopeful this rope-a-dope, I have a positive vision for America and Trump is a nazi, fascist, racist, dictator wannabe, strategy would be enough. It was enough for over 67 million Americans. It seems disingenuous to dismiss the result based on the assumption that the other 70 million are simply racist or sexist.
Another factor that works against Hostin and her ilk is that Trump won approx 20% of the black vote. In 2020 he only won 10%. I’m sure those 10% of black voters who chose not to vote for Harris would love to see another black president. But for a host of reasons, they decided Harris wasn’t the one.
The best analysis I’ve read so far comes from Peter Savodnik of The Free Press. In his article, We Blew it Joe, he says basically the opposite of Hostin. To summarize, he says that Republicans have been incessantly talking about the core issues facing America. Not always cogently. Not always presenting the best plan. But at least they are talking about them. Democrats have been talking about everything but those issues. He concludes:
They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ very honest, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.
The second opinion I have heard is that Trump-supporting men forced their wives to vote for Trump even though they didn’t want to. The Harris camp even launched an ad campaign just days before the election to combat this obvious threat. Trump did do better with women in 2024 than he did in both ’16 and ’20. But I don’t suspect it was because suburban and rural women were dragged to the poles by their neanderthal husbands. While Trump’s role in appointing the justices that overturned Roe v. Wade did galvanize a portion of the female voting bloc as anti-Trump, one must remember that there are nearly 30 million Catholic women plus another 12-15 million evangelical women in the U.S. While I can’t quantify what percentage of that 40+ million women are solidly pro-life, it is not an insignificant number. Another aspect of the Harris platform that likely affected the women’s vote is her progressive attitudes about trans rights. A sizable percentage of women don’t want their daughters sharing locker room facilities with biological males and they don’t want activist teachers in schools convincing their sons and daughters that they were born into the wrong body.
I also have a nose, and what mine is telling me is that a combination of real policy positions and a rejection of parts of progressivism is the reason people chose to vote for Trump over Harris. I don’t believe her skin tone nor her gender were a factor in the outcome. In short, Savodnik got it right and the progressive post-election analysts will likely continue to see the world through the “oppressed vs the oppressor” lens of intersectionality and critical theory. To them, her race and gender are the only possible reason enough white people didn’t vote for her, even in the presence of more compelling reasons supported by data. Democrats need to take heed. If they continue to embrace this ideology, they’re going to continue to see an erosion of their support from their traditional strongholds, like African Americans, Hispanics, and suburban women.