The day before the election, I blogged that if Donald Trump won, a large part of it would be because of the lingering effects of the pandemic and Vladamir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, both of which caused inflation to skyrocket all around the world. I definitely stand by that statement because it has been shown that globally this year, as John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times noted, "...governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that... held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records." Interestingly, this is not a conservative or progressive thing: while the Democrats lost big here in America, the conservative Tories in England just suffered their worst loss on record. One way of looking at it is that there is one thing that everyone all over the world can agree on: we all hate inflation, especially when it effects the price of food.
So, being an incumbent in a time of global anger at incumbents made this election an uphill battle for Kamala Harris. But there was another factor here. In the last eight years, Trump has run three campaigns and won two of them; the only time he lost was when he ran against another man. Now, both losing campaigns had their own set of difficulties: Hillary Clinton had a history of legal troubles, Harris had to step into a campaign just before the convention, but it's still hard to say that gender didn't play any role here, especially given that Harris played it up by giving talkshow host Oprah Winfrey a prime speaking role at the convention and then appeared on the female oriented political talk show The View.
One of Harris's big strategies was to make abortion a central issue of the campaign, which made sense give that this was the first presidential campaign in the post Roe world. To push that issue, Democrats put abortion support on the ballot in 10 states, hoping to drive out the pro Harris female vote. In 8 of those 10 states, the abortion support won, but in several of them Trump still won the state, meaning that voters voted for abortion rights while also voting for the man who caused those rights to be threatened in the first place. In Arizona, for example, more than 60% of female voters voted to protect abortion rights, but only around 50% voted for Harris.
The sad fact of the matter is that it just seems that there are millions of Americans (perhaps even tens of millions) who just won't vote for a woman for president, even if they agree with them on the issues. And they're not all just men. (Trump has now won a higher percentage of the white female vote than his opponent in all 3 of his electoral contests.) Way back in 2013 I first wrote about this issue, and I don't think its changed that much. That is, a combination of fundamentalist religious beliefs and the sheer masculine nature of the president being known as the "commander in chief" of the armed forces, have driven many people in this country to think that our president should be a man.
And Trump, for all his despicable sexism, is very much the epitome of the all American male success story for around half of the country. While some see the fact that he cheated on his first wife with his second, and then on his second with his third, all the while boasting of his many sexual partners in between, as proof that he sees women as disposable, others just see him living the rock star celebrity lifestyle they wish they had. To them, the sexism is a feature, not a bug.
Now that the Democrats have suffered two stinging losses with female candidates running against a man I truly believe to be a sexual predator, the question arises as to whether there will ever be a female president. Sadly, it's really hard to say; the only real way I could see it happening is if both parties were to run female candidates at the same time, an unlikely but not impossible scenario. Until something like that happens, I think we will be stuck with men leading the country for years to come.
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