Since Kamala Harris’s decisive loss to former president Donald Trump on Tuesday night, the legacy media has blamed the regular bogeymen: sexism and misogyny. It’s Hillary Clinton déjà vu. Men just weren’t ready for a woman to take the White House, they lament.
But it turns out that many women weren’t ready either.
Harris led among women by an average of 11 points. That’s a decrease from the 15 point lead Joe Biden commanded in 2020 and Clinton’s 13 point lead in 2016, according to a Washington Post average of October national polls. Harris shed support among women compared to her Democratic nominee predecessors, despite being lauded as the candidate of The Girls.
British pop star Charli XCX anointed Harris “brat” at the start of the summer, kicking off a polling honeymoon and a season of media-astroturfed momentum. Celebrities claiming to be champions of women’s empowerment, from Beyonce to Jennifer Lopez, lobbied aggressively for Harris. Amid a devastating hurricane aftermath in the southeast, Harris went on Call Her Daddy, a top sex podcast especially popular among young women. But that pop culture pandering was less potent than Democrats had hoped. The exit data showed that some young women aged 18-29 had actually defected from Harris, even after they were fed a diet of all their favourite female entertainers.
Given high female turnout in the early vote, Trump’s strategy banked on men showing up in droves on election day. He appeared on manosphere-adjacent podcasts, from Joe Rogan to Theo Von, to solidify that base, and that paid off. Trump did not stoop to the low of Harris’s silly song and dance to court young women, and yet he made inroads with this demographic, too, performing better with them in 2024 at 40 per cent than in 2020.
To be sure, the gender chasm still persists, with a whopping 16 points separating young men and young women. In this race, Trump maintained his 44 per cent support among women overall from 2020, while 54 per cent of women chose Harris this time. But if Harris sent out a rallying cry that women needed to kick Trump to the curb to stick it to the patriarchy, a lot didn’t heed it.
Much of the Harris campaign’s messaging focused on abortion. The final play was to ratchet up nightmarish visions of the Handmaid’s Tale, suddenly switching from a mood of “joy” to fear as the race tightened. Ads relied on hyperbole, with misleading examples of pro-life laws allegedly causing women’s deaths, such as in the case of Amber Thurman in Georgia.
Following the fallout after Roe v Wade’s reversal, Democrats expected abortion to be the top issue for women. But only two out of ten women ended up ranking it as most important, according to the Independent. There was a great opportunity cost to this political miscalculation for Harris. As Trump hammered home his ironclad issues of the economy and immigration, Harris released ambiguous plans on both, leaving much to be desired for voters.
It’s also plausible that millions of women didn’t want to elect a vapid cipher as their first female president. Clinton, for all her scandals and shenanigans, was one of the most cunning women in politics. She had genuine talent in rhetoric and strategy. After Biden’s abrupt ouster at the eleventh hour, Harris had the herculean task of proving herself to an already sceptical public. She skipped the primary process without a single vote cast, ascending to the nomination without demonstrating that she was qualified. Just like men, women could clock Harris as an imposter.
Harris’ team and media could still claim that the women who voted for Trump suffer from internalised misogyny, or promote the idea that women can be sexist against women. In reality, many women’s reasoning was simple. Their lives were better under Trump, rendering hollow Democrats’ warning that their rights would be revoked under a second term.
If he wanted to end democracy and disenfranchise women, he would have done it the first time around. And if Kamala wanted to fix the nation’s crises, she would have done it as vice president.
Caroline Downey is a staff writer at National Review and visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum