Yes, Women Can Win!

Democrats need to retire this lame talking point before they make it true.

There’s no shortage of election postmortems floating around the internet right now. In time, I’ll be adding my own voice to the chorus - probably several times over; why did Trump win? Why did Harris lose? Yadda yadda yadda. 

For now though, there’s one, specific talking point that I want to encourage my left-leaning friends to bury forever. In concrete. Lined with lead. And with no grave marker:

“Kamala Harris lost because America won’t vote for a woman.”

Three reasons I hope folks will stop saying this immediately:

1. It’s almost certainly not true

2. It could become true if repeated often enough

3. It’s too easy

Here’s why this thesis…

Is Not True

Twice in the last eight years, a woman has gotten a major party nomination for president, and twice in the last eight years, a woman has come within a hare’s breath of winning. If, like me, you tuned out after the networks called Pennsylvania for Trump, you may not have seen that, once the absentee ballots were counted, the margins in the big three swing states shrunk considerably. Trump’s wins in all three were pretty unremarkable. Right-wing gloating about a “landslide” win was either premature, wishcasting, or both.

If you were to look at this year’s election map without knowing or remembering that it was a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, you really wouldn’t think much of it. If two ordinary, milquetoast white dudes had produced this result, you’d conclude it was a matter of the fundamentals slightly favoring one candidate over the other. Nothing more. 

Of course, this wasn’t a contest between milquetoast white dudes. It was the chance at the first woman of color to serve as President of the United States evaporating in the face of Donald fucking Trump, and all that he represents. Obviously, we’d incline towards assigning greater value and meaning to this than to a less dynamic matchup. But that doesn’t make it a wise thing to do. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should give up this hope for the future. 

What despondent liberals are doing right now is the equivalent of watching their team lose by one homer in Game 7 and concluding, “it's hopeless, we can never win.” 

Now, if you’re not in a place yet where you’re ready to hear an unflattering assessment of Kamala Harris, consider this a Content Warning: skip to the next section.

Harris was a cosmically weak candidate. So much so that had she not ticked such exciting identity boxes, absolutely everyone on the left would have spotted it and been prepared for her loss. She has no policy identity of any kind. She’s not especially articulate or inspiring as a communicator. Her star rose due to winning in piss-easy elections or getting improbably picked for things (remember, when Biden added her to the ticket, she’d just come off a catastrophic primary push that faceplanted before voting even started). She’s spent her entire career either too far to the left of her party or too far to the right, and has never demonstrated an ability to understand or navigate that. And even if none of this had been true, she ran an entire (admittedly very short) campaign without making a single promise voters didn’t have to check her website to even know about.

Meanwhile, we were wrong about Trump. The assumption was that he had a “ceiling” of support that he wouldn’t be able to crack. Well…he cracked it. Harris underperformed Biden with just about every demographic and Trump overperformed himself. (I’m not talking about overall turnout, I’m talking about margins.) Trump did surprisingly well, and Harris did surprisingly poorly. She was also - not for nothing - the product of an insultingly undemocratic non-primary that came on the heels of two previous primaries in which progressives and non-traditional voters came away feeling highly burned by the party puppet masters.  

The only way it makes sense to reduce all this to “she lost because she was a woman” is if women are literally just interchangeable objects, free of nuance and unique personalities, accomplishments, or beliefs. Sadly, it’s understandable that a lot of leftists viewed things exactly that way. Many are so far down the identity rabbit hole, they’ve lost sight of the surface. After a decade of being encouraged to see people not as individuals but as avatars for whichever of their immutable characteristics seems most relevant on a given day, how were they ever going to see past the symbolism of the first woman of color at the top of a ticket? By the way, this isn’t to say that Harris wasn’t qualified - she certainly was. But there’s a lot of a competition for *the Democrat best suited to be the party’s nominee for president* and it’s hard to imagine that if “Kamala Harris” had been “Bob Harris” folks would’ve reached the same conclusion there. 

“But Dave, it was Trump. Donald Trump. How else do you explain two highly qualified women losing to this guy?”

First, yes, Hillary Clinton was probably the most qualified presidential candidate of my lifetime. She also had more baggage than any presidential candidate of my lifetime, maybe with the only exception being Trump himself. If you weren’t aware of that…I hope you’re making the most of your youth, because you are surely under the age of 30. 

And if you still, after 10 years and 3 elections, do not understand why Donald Trump is popular - why people like him and want to vote for him - I’m sorry, but you are just being criminally negligent at this point. I’ll be writing a lot more about this, but there is no excuse - none - to still be confused about Trump’s appeal. If you really are, you need to get yourself back on Twitter, or set up a Truth Social account, or go watch some Fox News. Because if after all this, you “just don’t understand,” congratulations on your purity, but honest to God, just take a damn seat. You are not a serious Democrat. You’re a showpony. And I’m not impressed. 

Could Become True

If what you want, during your lifetime, is to see a woman become the President of the United States, the absolute last thing you should be doing right now is caterwauling about how “America is too sexist to vote for a woman.”

Say that’s true. And you’re a Democrat who likes winning. If America really is just too sexist to vote for a woman, what’s the sensible thing to do next time? And the time after that? And after that? Clearly, it’s to…not nominate a woman.

Let’s try one that’s obviously correct: America is not ready to elect a president with a chin tattoo that says “GET IT HERE” and an arrow pointing to their mouth. I think we can all safely agree on this point. Under these (plainly true) circumstances, it would be a colossal mistake to nominate Senator or Governor GET IT HERE for president, because even if they were a truly excellent public servant, there just wouldn’t be any chance they’d win. And it matters very little how effective one would be as president if they’re definitely never going to become president.

Conventional wisdom can harden easily in politics. And having a bunch of people lamenting on TV and social media that a woman can’t be president because the country’s too sexist is the surest way to make that happen. In fact, that’s literally what conventional wisdom is.

The bar is likely to be higher anyway for the next woman to seek the nomination. After two losses to Trump, not many Democrats are likely to place as high a premium on candidate diversity as they’ve done in the recent past. We really don’t want to be adding yet more obstacles by contributing to (or indeed creating) a climate of fear surrounding picking someone other than a dude. This is a narrative that could be willed into accuracy if we’re not careful.

A final point on this: beware professional media personalities who are singing the same song of woe now as they were before the election. Just one example: MSNBC’s Joy Reid gets paid millions of dollars a year to tell her credulous audience how racist their country is, and she was at it very early on election night when it started to become clear that Harris had lost (it was wyt wymnz fault, dontcha know). Expecting her to change her tune now is probably not reasonable given that her actual livelihood depends on her being able to continue selling this story. 

And the same is true of journalists, bloggers, podcasters, youtubers, substackers, and professional-class activists up and down the line. Audience capture is real. If the food you put on your table comes from fans or followers who tune in expecting a certain message, and you stop feeding them that message, they might stop feeding you. Doesn’t mean these people are all lying, of course. It just means you’d do well to be on the lookout for ulterior motives, because in a media environment this saturated, almost everyone has one. 

Is Too Easy

One big reason to check yourself before spreading the idea that Harris lost because “women just can’t win” is that it totally lets her, the Democrats, and most especially you, off the hook.  

If it’s really the case that “America is too sexist for a woman president,” well look at that! Turns out, you’re totally innocent! You didn’t do one thing wrong, there was nothing you could have done any differently, and best of all, you don’t need to change moving forward. You are perfect, just the way you are. The problem is everyone else. 

Isn’t that suspiciously convenient? Because really any alternative to the *just too sexist* explanation could mean: “You screwed up, you could’ve won if you hadn’t, and you need to make some changes going forward.”  

Narrative A: you get to carry on exactly as you like.

Narratives B, C, D, E, etc: you need to accept culpability and do some hard, uncomfortable work.

Is it any wonder so many have gravitated toward the former and angrily shunned any of the latters? 

The left needs to reckon hard with its echo chamber problem. Never mind that a huge number of Democrats utterly failed to understand their enemy in this election, echo chambers have another deleterious effect: they reinforce a lot of bad communication practices. In an echo chamber, there’s no one around who needs convincing. You get points and prestige not for making the best argument, but for making the loudest or the most extreme one. Thoughtfulness isn’t rewarded. Uniformity is. And political engagement can quite safely become a thing you do to feel good, instead of a thing you do to change minds or win stuff. 

Feeling good…feels good. I get why so many like to play this game for back pats and high fives. It’s a lot more comfortable and rewarding than getting yelled at or finding yourself out on a limb all by your lonesome. The impulse to give yourself permission to keep doing that thing that feels good and not switch to a thing that feels bad is totally relatable. We all have lives. There’s only so much time in a day to doom scroll. Making that time intentionally unpleasant would be like an alcoholic pissing in his own beer. 

But Dems have spent the last three elections standing in a private room and singing to an audience of only ourselves. Anyone to offer notes, or propose a change in repertoire has been swiftly invited to step out. Now, we don’t realize that our tunes are tired. We’ve slid off the pitch and fallen behind the beat. On some level, I think we must sense it, which is why we’re so afraid to open the doors. It feels much safer to conclude that nah, we sound great, and just sing louder. But it’s not safer. Because they can hear us outside. 

And, guys, we fucking suck.