Like many women, I’m having a horrible flashback. It’s 6 am on November 9, 2016 — the day after the United States presidential election that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. I went to bed assuming Clinton had won.
I remember thinking to myself on the night of that election that there was nothing to be worried about. Americans would do the right thing and vote for the most qualified person, not the reality TV star. I came into the dining room where my partner was sitting reading the news and looked at him hopefully when he told me, still in shock: “Trump won.”
I was wrong eight years ago and I was wrong today about Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of beating Trump.
I hoped the polls were wrong and the race was not as close as it appeared to be in the swing states. I believed women would come out in droves to protect their reproductive rights. I hoped and assumed that white women, in particular, would turn out for Harris en masse. That was a false hope.
Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election after handily winning several swing states. He’s also on track to win the popular vote, something he failed to do in ’16. In fact, he has done better with almost all demographics in 2024 than he did in 2020.
Tight race
It was a hard-fought battle and, according to the polls, neck and neck right up until the final days of the campaign.
In hindsight, several questions have been answered that were not so clear just a day ago. Will America vote for a Black woman? No. Will Harris be able to do what Clinton couldn’t do eight years ago? No. Will she break the Oval Office glass ceiling? No.
The fact that these questions were still in play in 2024, as Harris waged a disciplined campaign against an opponent as flawed and felonious as Trump, seems revelatory about the misogyny and racism that bedevils America.
Gender played an outsized role in the election for several reasons. The overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022 galvanized women across the U.S., especially when the deaths of several women after being refused pregnancy or miscarriage-related health care illustrated the consequences of these extreme anti-choice positions.
Concerns about women’s reproductive rights and Trump’s casual dismissal of sexualised violence seemingly gave women, young and old, a cause to embrace.
A survey in Iowa conducted by vaunted pollster Ann Selzer showed women 65 and older were voting for Harris by a two to one margin, though Trump ended up winning the state.
TikTok videos showing Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” comments went viral among young TikTokers who weren’t old enough to remember when the remarks originally surfaced in 2016. They spoke of their astonishment that their fathers and anyone with daughters, sisters or mothers could vote for such a person.
But it was not enough, even though exit polls suggested a majority of women cast their ballots for Harris. Women apparently preferred Harris, but not by the margins her campaign had hoped.
Trump’s allure to men
On the other side of the gender equation are men. Trump’s appeal to young men increased as their apparent fears of being overtaken by women’s gains in equality were exploited.
This is a disturbing trend. According to a September NBC poll, women backed the Democrats 58 per cent to 37 per cent, while men supported Republicans 52 per cent to 40 per cent. Research has shown that young women have become more liberal while young men have become more conservative, perhaps because they are angry at falling behind and losing their former advantages.
The candidates themselves recognized the differences in support with their choices of podcasts and media appearances. Trump spent three hours with Joe Rogan — who subsequently endorsed him — for his podcast that skews heavily towards young men while Harris went on Call Her Daddy, a podcast directed at women under 35.
In the end, the U.S. voted for what is called “hegemonic masculinity,” a cultural valorization of stereotypical male traits, and Trump’s endless and regressive belittling of women and “feminine” men won the day.
The impact of white women
Another key factor in the campaign was race.
Exit polls suggested white women without college educations overwhelmingly voted for Trump, while white college-educated women cast their ballots for Harris.
Prior to the election, most white women said they backed the Republican Party, but suggestions their support for Trump was wavering now seem unfounded. Exit polls suggest Harris didn’t perform as well with women voters as Joe Biden did in 2020.
We don’t have the final numbers yet in terms of how white women in swing states ultimately cast their ballots, but they probably weren’t good. Democrats ran videos, one narrated by actress Julia Roberts, pointing out the obvious constitutional guarantee that women have the right to vote any way they wanted to — and that what happens in the ballot box should stay in the ballot box.
The backlash against these ads was illuminating, suggesting there are still many men who think their wives should vote the way their husbands do and that it’s a betrayal if they don’t — and perhaps Trump’s win suggests their wives agreed.
The loss of reproductive freedom was evidently not enough for white women to go against their race, their class interests — or possibly their husbands.
Black, Latino men
The other racial factor in the campaign was the perception of the dwindling support for Harris from Black and Latino men. Trump also increased his share of the Latino vote.
And according to a New York Times poll, while Obama was supported by 93 per cent of Black Americans in 2008 and Biden was supported by 90 per cent in 2020, support had fallen to 73 per cent for Harris in 2024.
Is this the result of sexism or internalized misogyny? Could Black men not bring themselves to vote for a Black woman?
Barack Obama’s plea to Black men certainly seems to suggest a problem with sexism within that cohort of voters.
After the 2016 election, the American Psychological Association coined the anxiety around the election results as election stress disorder.
That stress has returned as the world now watches what will happen as Trump, with no guardrails, no checks and balances in place and billionaires by his side, attempts to remake America in his own authoritarian image.
Meredith Ralston, Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.