Public Notice: Kamala Harris's hidden barrier

[Dennis Donovan]

Public Notice - Kamala Harris’s hidden barrier

Her rise and fall illustrates the Glass Cliff.

Anna Gifty
Nov 16, 2024



Black women have long had to navigate being twice as good to get half the amount of credit. Kamala Harris’s presidential run was evidence of this.

Despite the stark difference in the tenor of each candidate’s campaign and the the quality of their policy proposals, many still questioned whether they could trust Harris's leadership and opted for her opponent. Ultimately, an overwhelming majority of white voters voted Republican.

National exit polls showed that for white voters, their choice was largely a product educational attainment. Fifty-seven percent of college-educated white women voted for Harris, while 63 percent of non-college white women voted for Donald Trump. For white men, regardless of educational level, a majority voted for Trump. Contrast that with the 77 percent of Black men and 91 percent of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris.

The majority of the Black electorate, regardless of educational level, voted for Harris. But it wasn’t enough. The outcome reminded me of the Glass Cliff and the double standards for Black leaders that come along with it.

In my own experience as a Black woman studying economics and policy at Harvard, I’ve seen how leadership roles for women of color, especially Black women, come with a unique set of risks and pressures, especially when taken on during challenging times.

/snip

Aaron Rupar
‪@atrupar.com‬
New in PN: "Black women have long had to navigate being twice as good to get half the amount of credit. Kamala Harris’s presidential run was evidence of this." -- @itsafronomics.bsky.social

November 16, 2024 at 10:09 AM

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lb36dtm22s25

[xocetaceans]

1. That represents the dumbest analysis possible. Votes are not about virtue signaling. People vote on issues they think...

...are important to their lives. That the Harris campaign could not separate itself from the perceived problems of the Biden Administration in the limited time it had to conduct its campaign is not a problem of either racism or sexism, etc. The blame for that failure rests on the Harris campaign, on the delay created by President Biden's belief that he was indispensable to the future, and on the general trend of the Democratic Party to push back (as much as possible) on the populism embraced by Bernie Sanders, not on the voters who could not see the Democratic Party as an aid to them in their future lives. Yes, there are problems with racism, sexism, transphobia, etc., but if the Democrats want to keep losing, they will keep turning to racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. instead of looking at how they present their platform, goals, and message in a hostile news environment and at what those platform planks, goals, and messages actually are.

One of the Democratic Party's biggest ongoing problems is that the leaders confuse statistics that represent the macroeconomic situation with the lived effect of the economy at the level of the individual voter. Based on that confusion, the Democratic Party seems to keep claiming that the economy is strong. At a national level that may well be correct, but that is not the lived experience of all the people who live paycheck to paycheck. To those voters, all the campaign talk of the economy being strong comes across as an act of blatant lying, and based on that, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted. That is no way to win a campaign.

So, if the Democratic Party goes off to stand on a soapbox or runs to social media or to the media to keep crying about how sexist, racist, transphobic, etc. those who did not vote for Harris actually are...instead of actually addressing the real lived problems of the voters and addressing how future campaigns will help those voters understand how voting for Democrats will solve their lived problems, things bode ill for the future of the Democratic Party, and if there is a bigger buffoon than Trump, the Democratic Party will probably lose to that buffoon as well.