I say this as a woman who is pretty bummed to say this.
I don’t think women candidates can win over enough men to get votes on a national level. Radicalized men aren’t ever going to empathize with women and sure as hell aren’t going to vote for one anytime soon.
Obviously there is a lot more than that, but it’s a big part of it.
I still think it was policy and not gender :/
But I understand that the evidence isn’t exactly clear on this.
Exactly.
Harris was dead last on my preferred candidate list in 2020, and it had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with how little I trusted her due to her background as a cop. And she got hammered in the primaries that year, so I’m certainly not alone. I didn’t like her performance as VP (she had a pretty poor public opinion score up until she became the candidate for Pres), and she certainly didn’t convince me that she had any interesting policies this time around.
Likewise for Hillary Clinton. She was dead last on my preferred candidate list long before she won the nomination, and she didn’t get any better after winning.
In both 2016 and 2024, I voted for a third party because neither major candidate interested me (and it didn’t matter because Trump won my state by ~20% in each election anyway). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people who would have voted Democrat didn’t bother voting or voted for a third party because they found her uninteresting. Her policies suck, her campaign sucked, and she has pretty much no charisma. It has nothing to do with her being a woman and everything to do with her being a crappy candidate.
So my vote is on a mixture of:
- no real primary, just a candidate switch (feels very undemocratic)
- poor, vague policies, especially on the issues people seem to care about most (inflation)
- very little charisma
- weird obsession with getting celeb endorsements instead of appealing to the average person
Being female doesn’t register at all.
