Thank you, Kamala Harris
Thirty-six hours to go…
And so, in the end, is it really about her being a woman?
Many particular factors have made this presidential election cycle exceptional: for starters, the inability of both parties to bring in new blood, making the two original candidates the oldest and second-oldest presidential candidates in American history; Trump’s legal convictions for sexual predation and graft; the extraordinary cult following of Trump that regards the legal convictions as irrelevant; the shear brashness of Trump in running a campaign of falsehood and crudeness, demeaning the office he seeks by shedding all appropriate decorum; the accompanying breakdown of the traditional Republican Party; the magnitude of economic challenges faced in the post-pandemic world that make the public deeply dissatisfied; the visceral sense of doom we feel about climate change; wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon; above all, democratic values under attack not only in the US but round the globe. And then there was Joe Biden’s belated departure from the race.
While carrying all of this in my soul, the most outstanding moment of the election cycle, for me, was when Kamala Harris stepped forward firmly and showed she was ready.
Some, perhaps many, of us at one time or another have found ourselves in a situation where we had the chance to rise to being someone larger than we had ever been before. The decision to step towards that call is an act of will, tempered by knowing that we will have to grow to meet the challenge.
Kamala Harris’s situation on July 21 was of this order. It is a sobering honor to be the container holding an historic moment for everyone.
She knew without a doubt she was the person of the hour. The demands of the situation, rather than her being a woman or a person of color, were what called, and she has continued to present herself as the person best qualified to do the job she seeks.
Biden’s slowness to get to grips with his decline shortchanged her. She would have benefitted from primaries where she could have honed her message, and from a longer campaign where the public could become more familiar with her.
But Harris is not a person to linger with frustrations. She assesses her options and moves forward without drama. And when he finally decided, she was ready to go.
Abortion’s polarizing power
Even though Harris is not campaigning on gender, many are saying this is a presidential season defined by gender. One candidate is a proud and open sexual predator, convicted of sexual abuse and defamation against journalist E. Jean Carroll, and of falsely categorizing his hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels as a campaign reimbursement.
Curiously, the same candidate, though originally a supporter of women’s right to choose, took up the anti-abortion torch when he recognized it would earn him the support of pro-life Christians in the Republican party. His appointment of three pro-life Supreme Court judges made possible the Supreme Court’s removal of a constitutional right to abortion through the Dobbs’ decision of 2022. Abortion policy has become the prerogative of state legislatures, twenty-two of which have since passed measures limiting abortion. In some cases, the new laws are so stringent that doctors are intimidated from performing related medical procedures that are essential to women’s health. Thus the “abortion issue” has turned into a “women’s health” issue.
As a nation and a people, we differ in our views about abortion. For some, the sacred right to life starting at conception transcends every other consideration in this matter, and that view deserves respect. But you can adhere to a personal moral and spiritual code that does not accept abortion and still recognize that a government ban is not a suitable solution. Not least it invites other seriously negative health outcomes for women and denies them the dignity of being able to make their own decisions about their body. This is Harris’s position.
Will the many women who feel strongly on this issue propel Kamala Harris to victory? According to Newsweek, the rise in numbers leaning towards the Democratic position on abortion has been largely thanks to women’s shifting views—up from 51 percent just before Harris entered the race in July 2024 to 55 percent in October. These figures are up from 48 percent in July 2023.
But a majority of men support abortion also. As of October 2024, 52 percent say they support the Democratic Party’s position. This is so even though the numbers of men supporting the Republican party’s position has risen from 33 percent to 40 percent in the past year.
As a result, Donald Trump is now tempering his message on abortion. He has refuted the notion, repeated by Kamala Harris in their debate on September 10, that he would pass a federal abortion ban. He takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade but now makes confusing assertions along the lines that states should decide the matter.
Abortion is one of the polarizing issues – if not the single most polarizing issue – of our time. Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, underlines how each new assertion on this subject from one side draws an escalating assertion from the other. "Those who align with the Democratic view, often advocating for broader access to abortion, appear to feel a stronger need to assert their stance as states enact more restrictive measures.” For this reason, says Panagopoulos, the issue of abortion is “becoming not just one of policy preference but one of identity for many voters."
The voting gap between men and women
But there are a number of other factors that put gender at the heart of this presidential campaign season, not least a sharpening of men and women’s differing views in general. Among all registered voters, 51 percent of women tilt to the Democratic party, and 44 percent to the Republican party. Young women say they’ll vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. Eighty-one percent of Black women support Harris. Women have been registering and turning out to vote in greater numbers than men in every election since 1980. And in this election cycle, women have been turning out for early voting in greater numbers than men.
Notable within these statistics is the fact that white women, when considered as a separate category, tilt to Donald Trump. Trump won the white women’s vote in 2016 and 2020. Now a key question for Harris is whether she can bring them across to her side of the line.
The Quinnipiac polls conducted throughout October show that in five of the seven key swing states, Harris had a significant lead among women (between 51 percent and 61 percent of likely female voters would vote for her), while Trump had a comparable advantage among men in the same states.
The gap between men and women creates an overall 21 percentage point divide, according to the Washington Post’s average of October national polls, where Harris leads by an average of 11 points among women while Trump leads by 10 points among men. This is roughly similar to the 2020 and 2016 national exit polls.
Another significant voting gap is the one between college educated and high school educated voters, which is 29 percentage points, with Trump ahead 10 points among people without a college degree and Harris ahead 19 points among those with one.
And the gap between men with only a high school education and women with a college education is 43 percent, reflecting two entirely different life experiences and mindsets. This highly significant statistic helps capture the nature of the deep social chasm in the US today.
Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency contributed to a rise of women’s involvement in politics, as seen through demonstrations like the Women’s March of 2017 and more women running for elected office. Moreover, even though the #MeToo movement pre-existed the political rise of Donald Trump, it went viral following his victory, putting the spotlight on sexual misconduct as never before.
Same sex marriage
Another aspect of the gender issue at play in this election is that same-sex marriage could be challenged by the current Supreme Court if we have a Trump victory. Justice Clarence Thomas made this clear by issuing a concurring opinion at the time of the Dobbs decision in 2022 proposing that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
In 2015, the Supreme Court found in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. But 30 states still have laws on their books that prohibit marriage equality, so that if Obergefell v. Hodges were to be overturned, these state bans would come back into effect. To offset this possibility, three states – California, Colorado and Hawaii – will, on November 5, ask voters to vote on propositions affirming the right to gay marriage.
Are women finding greater self-confidence as a result of Harris’s candidacy?
Abortion, gay marriage, and sexual predation are topics we know well and they have been under discussion for some time, but gender took a further ironic turn last week when an ad was released where actress Julia Roberts tells voters — women specifically — that votes are secret and therefore, if you and your spouse disagree, you can vote for your chosen candidate and your spouse will never know.
The right-wing media were quick to criticize this appeal to marital deception. The purpose of the ad, of course, is to remind women once again that they have agency. As a result, one in eight women and one in ten men have revealed that they have at some time voted differently from their spouses and not told.
All of us women who have made the transition from a limited notion of our possibilities to putting ourselves out there in the high-stakes game of professional life, watch Harris with personalized interest. I sit in front of the TV and quietly tell her not to wave her hands so much, to lower the register of her voice, to smile less, to be more serious. We women have worked on these very things to ensure that we will be taken seriously. Even if I worry for her, seeing her blow those cautionary suggestions to the winds and be content to be herself is a delightful bursting of the bubble. I am taken by surprise…. Oh, maybe we can be ourselves after all. Maybe we actually don’t have to expunge from our self-presentation those things that men tend to ridicule.
“We don’t know who she is,” is a frequent complaint about Kamala Harris. Given the amount of time she has spent in large public gatherings with vast TV coverage, as well as social media’s efficient spreading of the word, it would be reasonable to ask why so many people say this. Is it because they are expecting something that they are not seeing? What is it they are looking for that, if she were a white man, they would not be looking for? Is “We don’t know who she is” really a statement of unease because they are looking at a black woman claiming the right to lead the most powerful country and they don’t know how that is supposed to look?
Of course this is the least of it for Harris. Her opponent makes a practice of demeaning anyone who disagrees with him. In the case of Harris, as well as other women, he feels entitled to use epithets like “weak” and “dumb as a rock.” There are “Trump or the Tramp” T-shirts. And the whole thing about her laughter. She introduced the idea we could laugh at Trump, pronounced him “unserious.” She proposed joy as an antidote to a national politics rife with ugliness and crudity. She brought a breath of fresh air. She got in return pejoratives suggesting her joy is the handiwork of an airhead. Nothing she does goes undisparaged by Trump.
In spite of the fact that Kamala Harris has been remarkably able in presenting herself as a post-DEI candidate, make no mistake, she has a thirty-five year career behind her in which, at every step, she was forced to overcome the tensions that her race and gender presented. As the daughter of highly accomplished immigrant parents – an Indian woman and a Jamaican man – she has succeeded again and again.
Harris is not ideological. She is pragmatic to her fingertips. She takes problems on their merits. She instructs her speech writers to cut away the fluff and sentimentality. She gets down to business. As a person of color as well as a woman, she knows that she has to be better than everyone else in order to be given a voice. In the fifteen weeks since her candidacy was declared we have come to know her as a person with trustworthy instincts who cares about the American people and wants to be a unifier.
She stepped forward assertively when the moment came, and has run a superb campaign, allowing the Democratic party to be a genuine player in this election cycle. Thank you, Kamala Harris.
