Was America Too Sexist and Racist to Elect Kamala Harris?

Title: Was America Too Sexist and Racist to Elect Kamala Harris?

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Since Election Day, if you've been listening, you've been hearing us center different potential reasons on different days for Donald Trump's win and Kamala Harris's defeat. It'll be time to end this series soon and just move on to watching the Trump administration govern. We'll talk about that in some of today's show, but there are all these reasons that need to be discussed for the outcome of the election because every Western party that saw pandemic inflation on their watch has gotten thumped in their next election.

Because Biden dropped out too late, leaving Harris too little time to introduce herself to voters. Because the racism and sexism tax on a Black and South Asian woman candidate was too steep to overcome. That's the one we're going to talk about now. Because the Democratic Party is too identified with censorious and extreme-sounding identity politics. Because the Democrats failed to offer a true populist economic alternative to Trump's economic populism on the cost of living.

Yesterday we talked about the role of the so-called manosphere, bro media platforms, and the right's strong presence there, but now we will focus on the role that racism and sexism played in the election even outside those platforms. The idea that the racism and sexism tax on a Black and South Asian woman candidate explicit or unintentional bias, was too steep to overcome.

We have two guests for this. Nadira Goffe, associate culture writer at Slate, who has an article called There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation, and Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Thank you both so much for coming on. Welcome both of you to WNYC.

Nadira Goffe: Thanks for having us.

Debbie Walsh: Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Nadira, we can get right to the point of your article. It's in the sub-headline which says, it wasn't the fascism-loving felon whom voters couldn't trust. It was the Black woman. Want to expand on how you think her race and sex factored into her defeat?

Nadira Goffe: Sure. Like you said, there are a lot of reasons that people are speculating as to why Kamala lost, but I do think that one of the reasons we can't overlook is her identity and the way it has been used against her or maybe just poo-pooed away by certain people throughout her shortened campaign. I do think that while the other reasons that everyone's talking about matter of course, if you just look at the facts that she was running against a fascist who is a convicted felon, and there's all of this talk about policy, ignoring the policy with that fact, there has to be more than just their platforms or their bases that factor into people's votes and why she didn't get the votes that we thought she would.

Brian Lehrer: Your article calls this the deepest truth. You use those words. The deepest truth cannot get lost in all of these other reasons that you also cite. Why do you think it's the deepest truth, or how much if you can put a how much on it?

Nadira Goffe: Oh, gosh, I don't know if I can put a how much on it, but I don't think it's a secret that this country was founded upon racism and I don't think it's a secret that those ideals still persist, but I think what actually really interested me about Kamala is that it seemed like, given her background and her connection to Black capital and Black institutional support, and additionally, given her ability to assimilate to whiteness with that background or within that background, that she was primed to capture both the Black and white vote, and that's not something that happened.

I do think that a part of it could be policy. It could be all of these things, but to me, given all of the things that people have said about her, given even the emails that I have coming into my inbox after this piece was published, given Trump's comments questioning her Blackness, I think that we can't overlook racism at play here, for sure.

Brian Lehrer: I always wondered if Trump was accusing her of not being Black or embracing Black identity later, not to try to distance her from the Black community, but to try to make sure every white American knew she was Black because you could look at Kamala Harris face if you didn't know her previously and maybe not be really sure. I don't know there's any way to prove it, but I had this theory that Trump, rather than trying to paint Kamala Harris as inauthentic, which he was explicitly trying to do in that comment, he was also trying to tell white America, "Hey, don't forget this lady's Black."

Nadira Goffe: Yes. I also think that it was a form of providing a distraction. A distraction from maybe all of the valid reasons to vote for her or the valid criticisms of him that people could say. Instead, now we have all of these news cycles and headlines talking about her identity and is she Black or isn't she Black when we all know what the answer is. I absolutely saw that as a tactic against her and manipulating her identity and her race in that way.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can take this on directly, too. What role do you think racism and or sexism played in the Presidential election result? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or any questions for our guests about the racism and sexism tax, if you want to call it that, that Kamala Harris may have had to pay in the voting. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text for Nadira Goffe, associate culture writer at Slate, who wrote the article we've been talking about so far, and Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers.

Debbie Walsh, how do you begin as a political scientist to quantify or measure the effect of that racism or sexism in the outcome? Nobody put that on their exit poll forms as far as I know, "I voted against Harris because I don't trust a Black woman."

Debbie Walsh: Wouldn't that be much more convenient when we do our post-election analysis if they would ask those questions? But they don't. I don't want to appear to be Pollyanna in Hell, although there are days that that's what this all feels like, but I want to try to get away from the narrative that women can't win, that a Black woman can't win. I think we went down that path a little bit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost and there was tremendous disappointment.

There was hand wringing, "Can a woman ever get elected?" I think in many ways that led us to the 2020 election where, while we had six women on the Democratic debate stage who represented an array of ideologies within the Democratic Party, and while many, many people said, "Oh, I love Elizabeth Warren," or "I love Kamala Harris, but we have to win this time, and we can't risk going with a woman or a person of color."

Therefore, we ended up with, and the last Democratic presidential debate, two elderly white men. I think when we look at what we have seen in this last election, we know that absolutely race and gender were part of this equation and part of this campaign with Donald Trump basically creating this climate of hate speech. He used the race card, he used the gender card. He played to that from Beginning to end, but the reality was she was in fact ahead of Joe Biden in polling before Joe Biden dropped out.

Joe Biden likely would have done worse, by all indications, in this election had he been the nominee. I think we do have to look at this in the multidimensions in the way this played out. I think that she did an extraordinary job in 107 days against a man who basically has been running for president since 2016 and someone who had been able to define himself and find that base and play to that base. Sadly, that base includes an awful lot of this hate and playing on identity.

She was also running in this climate where people were looking for change, and she was absolutely tied to a presidency that people felt had failed them in some ways, particularly around the economy. We see women having done, frankly, quite well around the country in some really tight races that helped the Democrats hold on to some pivotal seats, like Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie, listener writes in a text message, "Let's talk about white women also voting against their own interests." What would you say to that listener? We get a lot of comments like that.

Debbie Walsh: Yes. White women are not monolithic. We see Black women have been absolutely the backbone of the Democratic Party. We have certainly seen white women splitting their votes. College-educated white women, a majority of those women have supported the Democrat, and in fact, Kamala Harris did better with those women voters than Hillary Clinton did or Joe Biden did. Democrats have consistently been losing with white women without a college degree.

There's an issue there around class that I think is really an important one that the Democrats have to look at, but women are not monolithic. We certainly saw an awful lot of women who in fact say they are pro-choice, who at the end of the day ended up voting for Donald Trump, which is also fascinating.

Brian Lehrer: Nadira, a lot has been made about Harris not going on Joe Rogan on his podcast, but you wrote about where she did go on that didn't get as much press at all. You wrote that she was "willing to charm voters by going on podcasts like Call Her Daddy." For people who don't even know what that is, what is that podcast and why did you focus on it or mention it in your article?

Nadira Goffe: Call Her Daddy is a podcast-- It's a video podcast. I believe that most people who tune in watch it on YouTube or some other video platform. It's a podcast that is catered towards young women. I believe it's a barstool sports podcast. The types of things that they talk about on that podcast, though I'm not the most indebted listener, are a range of topics. Some are very candid interviews with celebrities. Most are interviews with celebrities nowadays.

They can range from topics to their sex life to scandals to politics, but the politics is usually light and rare. I would say that the podcast, as far as I have encountered or as far as I know, is usually concerned with more interpersonal issues and how celebrities and other notable figures have been living their lives, and the juicy gossip that we really want to know about them. For Kamala to go and Call Her Daddy was a really strong choice and a pivot that I wasn't necessarily expecting.

I think it really fits into the entire strategy that they had to really get young voters and particularly young female voters into the voting booth and to vote for her. I think it's part and parcel with the whole brat summer and Kamala's brat ideal. I think that it really played into that tactic of Kamala saying, "I'm reaching out to this demographic," or "I'm speaking to you." I also think it was a really great showing for Call Her Daddy to say that, "We're going to really invest in this and we're going to give this platform."

There has been a lot of conversations about why she didn't go on Joe Rogan. If she should have gone on Joe Rogan, I don't know that it would have necessarily been a good space for her. I don't know how much she would have been able to say things that would sway the listeners of Joe Rogan towards her or towards her side or to vote for her. I'm not sure about that necessarily. I don't know how well that would have gone for her, to be completely honest.

I do think that the Call Her Daddy showing was definitely a sign that she was trying to get a certain demographic to really show up.

Brian Lehrer: Darlene in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Darlene. Thanks for calling in.

Darlene: Hi, thanks. I, like many people, are disheartened and just very, very sad. It's been very difficult to listen to a lot of the media. I listen to NPR regularly talking about what if, what if. I am very happy that we are now-- what I believe fundamentally is Racism, the racism in this country that would support and vote for a person, 64 felons, convicted of rape, we know the horrible business practices, that would elect him. I hold that it is fundamentally racism. Yes, misogyny played a part and misogyny impacts women, but racism, that is inherent and has been in this country. I'm very glad to hear finally talking about this fact. Thank you. Continue with all that you do. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Darlene. Thank you for calling in. Debbie Walsh, is there a way to even begin again for you as a political scientist to pick apart the racism from the sexism and inspect which one played how much of a role in whatever bias against Kamal Harris?

Debbie Walsh: That's really the challenge, to disentangle the two. I think it's important that as we try to do that and we try to look at all of the data that's coming in, and still much of it is to come in as all of the exit poll data is weighted and reweighted and we look at turnout to really understand that racism was clearly at play here. I just want to say again that Donald Trump used that every step of the way. We have to reckon in this country with that.

What do we do as a country in terms of coming to grips with that, allowing that to be such a key part of his narrative and to be able to really understand how that worked and how it was at play? The place where I was most struck by it, interestingly, was all of the things that he said, but there was one moment where Tucker Carlson introduced Donald Trump at a Turning Point event where he looked out at that audience of largely white men and talked about the fact that how could it happen--

This was the same introduction where he talked about spanking America and equating America to a 14-year-old girl, which was creepy enough in and of itself, but when he talked about how could it be in America that she, Kamala Harris, was now at the top of the pyramid and what did that mean for everyone else, meaning all of you white folks sitting in the audience? It has been this constant drumbeat of the Trump campaign that was this divisive, them-us, zero-sum game, "If someone else gets anything, it takes away from you. You are now relegated to the bottom of the heap. What does that mean for your future?"

That's been the divisiveness that Donald Trump has been instilling since he came down that escalator in Trump Tower back in 2015.

Brian Lehrer: Nadira, do you want to get in on that same question at all?

Nadira Goffe: Yes, and I will definitely agree with all of that. I would also say that the party line response to claims that racism had a part in the turnout of this election is, "Well, we had a Black president. Well, we elected Obama, so what do you mean?" I do think that there are multiple things at play there. One is that a lot of people have said this, but we seem to be in a cultural socio-political climate that is really born of a backlash to that presidency and to the fact of having a Black president.

Also, during that presidency, Michelle was not necessarily viewed kindly by everyone. She was called an ape or a gorilla twice. One by a West Virginia mayor and one by, I believe, a co-chair of Trump's first campaign. It wasn't necessarily entirely a welcoming environment for that presidency. The truth is, people saw Kamala, they know that she's the current sitting vice president, that she was a US Senator, that she was the Attorney General of California, and they compared her to Trump.

The person they couldn't trust, the person that they didn't think could do the job, was Kamala. I do think that at a certain point, you have to just reckon with the idea, or to me, the fact that race plays a part in that, even if we had a Black president. This is all a culmination of a reaction to that entire era.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the role that racism and sexism may have played among the various factors in the defeat of Kamala Harris for president with Nadira Goffe, associate culture writer at Slate, who has an article called There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation, and Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers.

On that question of picking the two apart from each other, we're getting a number of texts that say, basically-- here's one. "The racism and sexism against Black women are inextricably intertwined. That's why the term misogynoir was coined." Another one saying, "You can't disentangle racism and sexism." We're getting a lot of pushback too. Debbie, here's a term text that says, "I believe blaming racism and sexism is a simplistic and easy explanation of Kama's defeat. She was evasive answering challenging questions and didn't have an overall vision or broad economic platform," writes someone identifying as Natalie in Manhattan. Your response?

Debbie Walsh: I question that. In her campaign, she talked about substance, and to compare what she laid out as a platform, what she talked about compared to what Donald Trump would get up at his rallies and talk about, I don't think you can compare them. I do think this is a place where we saw a real double standard. It came not just from the public, but from the media as well.

This constant drumbeat of, "She needs to put more meat on the bones of her policy plans," and "She's telling us enough, and we need her to do more interviews so that she tells us more of the details of every plan that she has," while Donald Trump would get away with, "I have a concept for a change in healthcare and I'm going to have tariffs." That felt like the entire plan, and because it's Donald Trump, people just have either given up and said it is what it is, or they accepted.

I do think there was a terrible double standard there that she was held to, particularly given that she had, and I don't think we can say this enough, 107 days to pull together this campaign.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen: Hey. Thank you very much for taking my call. I wanted to say that I did think that, first, there was a few points I thought she should have touched on and she didn't. I thought that she ran a very careful, trying not to make a mistake, campaign, and therefore there were one or two missteps. I thought that when they asked her about her being down the line with Biden, she could have easily turned around and said, or should have said, too, that, "Well, Nixon disagreed with Ike. Did Pence have any disagree-- against Trump or Gore with Clinton? Basically all vice presidents, we have our opinions, but we follow the president's lead. I would do things differently."

I do agree 100% as a Black person, yes, there was racism up in there. There was also sexism. She was asked to explain herself constantly while this man could get up on the stage and sway to the music for about a half hour and nothing was said about it, and the media just showed it and played along. I think that these next four years are going to be pretty much him doing madness. Some of the people who've been nominated.

He's going to do madness, and the reporters, some will have a backbone and try to ask a question, but a lot of them are going to get shot down. "You're nasty. Shut up. Don't want to hear from you." Some of them will sit there and take it. Anyway, I thought I'd let that off my chest.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you did, Stephen. Thank you. Call us again. A text, Nadira, related to some of what Stephen just said is coming in, and it says, "The bias here in this discussion is the idea that she should have been elected because she's a Black woman." Yet I think what Stephen was articulating in part was the fact, the reality that she was trying to run a conservative campaign by not drawing any attention. That one of the things that she did was to not draw any attention in anything that she said, or almost none, to the fact that she would be the first woman or Black woman or South Asian president.

Nadira Goffe: Right. I would say that what you said was true. I don't necessarily remember her really haranguing on the point that she would be making history or that her identity was the foremost thing that she was running on. I don't necessarily agree that there was the assumption that she should be president because she's a Black woman. I think the assumption was that she should be president because she's not Donald Trump. I think that those are two maybe entirely different things.

She just happened to be a Black woman. I think what is confusing about all of this, or maybe rather unsatisfactory about all of this, is that I've had a lot of conversations with family members, with friends, with people I know, and we all mourn the fact that Democrats have to cater to a much larger range of the political spectrum. In criticism of her, there are people who think that her policies were too left. There are people who think that her policies were too right.

There are people who think that she didn't have any policies at all. I think if we want to talk about that double standard if we're comparing it to Trump, like Debbie was saying, the question is, what was his platform? Besides lies and his reputation and the fact that he's charismatic and people really they listen to him and they pay attention to him, what was he actually running on? I think if you compare those two things, then the idea that Kamala Harris should have been president just because she's a Black woman is, again, blown out of the water.

She should have been president because she's not Donald Trump. I think that's the thing that people are reckoning with, that they're mourning, that we're arguing about or debating about.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I have a different point of view. I don't think racism and sexism played a significant role in the way the Democratic Party was decimated. I think that that has now become an excuse instead of facing what really happened. I think what really happened are a couple of major things. One is that Biden did a lot of damage to the party and so did the Democrats, because I don't think his dementia, or whatever you want to call it, suddenly appeared at the debate.

I think a lot of people in the White House knew about it, including Kamala Harris, and they tried to hide it from the public, which they did successfully until he got on that stage. There's a lot of resentment towards that. I think that was a factor in the loss of trust in the Democratic Party. I think the other thing is that the good things that Biden did that Kamala Harris was not able to take advantage of were his economic policies that people didn't know about, the reason he was funding Ukraine.

He should have been having, or somebody should have been having those fireside shouts every week. The people who were so enthused about Donald Trump said what they said, "It was the economy, stupid." They said that again and again and again, and it should have been addressed. Instead, it became to her detriment. You had to really search to find out what was going on with the economy. That was not communicated at all, let alone well. That includes her.

As far as the money to Ukraine, which the Trump voters saw as, "You're giving money to Ukraine instead of us because you put them first ahead of us," where were the weekly conversations about Neville Chamberlain, World War II, history that apparently people are not learning in public school to say, "Look, no, if we don't help Ukraine fight them there, we're going to have to fight them here. It is in your interest." That was not--

Brian Lehrer: Not communicated. Let me go because we're running out of time, but thank you for putting so much interesting stuff on the table. I do want to just go back to one thing that Lauren said when she referred to Biden as having dementia. Just to be respectful, I don't think he has dementia or anybody has really come close to diagnosing him with that. There's been a cognitive decline, certainly, but I just don't want to let that word dementia sit out there unremarked upon because it doesn't seem like that's what it is.

Nadira, listening to the list that Lauren gave us there, maybe especially the economy part when the polls did show that so many of the undecided voters, the ones who didn't really love either candidate, were looking for the best solution to their cost of living struggles, a lot of working-class people of various backgrounds and that Harris ran certainly in the end game on trying to discredit Trump much more than trying to lead an alternative economic populist movement to the one Trump was trying to lead over mass deportation and tariffs and stuff.

In addition to what your article was about, that people just trusted the Black woman less than the fascist felon, were you frustrated also by any of the things she did and didn't do substantively?

Nadira Goffe: Oh, absolutely. I will concede that she had a much shorter time period than usual to mount a platform to run her campaign, but I do think that there are maybe many decisions that I was scratching my head about. I also just think that Democrats lately haven't really been the best at talking to people, at getting messaging out there in a way that resonates with people across the board. I did question some of the plans about the economy. I questioned her lack of response on the war in Gaza.

I questioned a lot of things, but at the end of the day, it didn't seem to me like her platform was empty. It seemed to me like she was working with the best that she had and that she was really, and one of the callers was absolutely correct about this, trying to run a very careful campaign, where she was trying not to alienate anyone too far on either side. I understood that as if we elect her and we get her into the White House, then we can, as the kids say, let her cook and we can we can see what happens.

It didn't put me off that she wasn't running a very staunch, very passionate, very strong campaign set on specific ideals and a very tight-knit plan, because none of those things usually come to fruition anyway during a presidency. I was more concerned about someone who was making common sense, someone who seemed to actually care about human beings, someone who had all these base requisites to then eventually having what would hopefully be a prosperous term.

I think that maybe I trusted her for being what Trump isn't. Debbie might have more specifics on this, but I also didn't necessarily feel that her campaign was void of any ideals.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie, on that briefly, and then I'm going to ask you a closing question.

Debbie Walsh: Sure. I think she did stick to her values. I think you saw it when she talked about a care economy, when she talked about an economy of opportunity for people, when she talked about reproductive rights and abortion, and where she was, I think, quite passionate on those issues. I think at the end of the day, one of the things that we have to also take a look at is the fact that Democrats voted for the Democrat, Republicans voted for the Republican. Independents leaned more towards the Democrat.

The question is about turnout. Maybe there was an awful lot of emphasis on trying to reach out to those Republicans who might be disaffected from Trump. Maybe there needed to be a little more effort in turning out that Democratic vote to get those numbers up. I think there are going to be a lot of questions moving forward and looking at all of this, and I think it's really important to make sure that the questions of race and gender are in the mix of the why this happened.

Brian Lehrer: We could go on if we had more time, probably all day, because we're getting so many calls and texts with various versions of, "Duh, yes, of course, racism and sexism was a big reason, if not the biggest reason that she lost," and others who were saying, "Oh, come on, you're talking about identity again when really there are all these substantive and political reasons." Just acknowledging that we're getting so many on both sides of that.

Debbie, to wrap it up, other countries have elected female heads of state. Recently Mexico, which you might not think of as the most feminist country, as a caller pointed out the other day, or at least argued, who had some Mexican background. We've had near misses now. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both came close. I wonder if you think that the global context and the near misses set up strategies for some hypothetical next female nominee lessons learned.

Debbie Walsh: One of the reasons that I think it's been harder in the US is our system. It's not a parliamentary system. The whole structure of parties and the way candidates rise up and officeholders rise up through the system is really quite different. That has made a difference, I think, for us. Maybe I want to end on a slightly more positive note and thinking about strategies for the future.

I want to just really point out that for the first time in US history, which is pretty shocking that it's 2024 and this is the first time it's happened, but we will have two Black women serving in the United States Senate at the same time from Delaware and from Maryland. There have only been four Black women elected to the United States Senate and one who currently serves-- Laphonza Butler from California, who was appointed.

We saw women outperform men in both parties, in the primaries in this cycle, in congressional primaries. We have also a woman as vice president. We've seen a woman as speaker of the House in this country twice. Same person two times, who I think will go down in history as one of, if not the most effective speakers in Congress to ever serve. We've had women leading state legislative chambers on both sides of the aisle across the country. Women are electable. Women get elected. They get elected to very high levels.

We do have this barrier to break. The good news is there are more women now than ever positioned to run for the presidency. We have a record number of women currently serving as governor. We have women serving in the United States Senate at numbers that are among the highest that we've seen. Women are better positioned and there is still all of the challenges we've been talking about, and hopefully, we will not have women who have to run against candidates who use race and gender in this weaponized way against future women candidates.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie Walsh is director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers. Nadira Goffe, associate culture writer at Slate, has an article called There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation. Thank you both so much for coming on.

Nadira Goffe: Thanks for having us.

Debbie Walsh: Thank you.

 

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