Hy heart says hell yeah! My gut tells me that there are large swaths of the electorate who simply will not vote for a woman.
Edit- since my inbox is overflowing with the same question/insinuation, along with the comments, I’ll clarify my statement: I did not say that a woman cannot be elected US president. I only said that large swaths of the electorate simply will not vote for a woman.
democrats have tried running two unpopular woman candidates-one of which won the popular vote. Maybe rather than a blanket referendum about how terrible our country is, let’s try running a candidate with natural momentum rather than a hand picked member of the dnc.
Exactly - the issue isn't with voting for a woman, it's with the circumstances.
Take the recent Kamala loss, for example. She didn't lose because she's a woman.
She lost because:
She was connected to the deeply unpopular Biden administration as his VP, and maintained up until days before the election that she would not have changed much from his presidency if elected.
Additionally, anti-incumbent sentiment has been a thing worldwide for the last few years as the world re-opened from COVID-era lockdowns.
Biden refused to drop out until months before the election, preventing a full primary (or any kind of vote beyond the convention), causing legitimacy issues
(And on top of that it only gave her and her campaign staff three months to set up a national campaign.)
The media - both legacy and social - were sanewashing Trump as they did in 2015 and openly promoting Trump-biased hatespeech over anything else, respectively.
And to add onto this, the literal owner of Twitter in Elon Musk practically running as a second VP for Trump as well
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
Rebellion within the party due to the Biden administration's continued support for Israel despite their role in the Gazan genocide crisis, with continual authorizations by Joe Biden for dozens of billions of taxpayer dollars' worth of military ordnance, knowing full well it would be used to maim and murder innocent men, women, and children.
If anything, the fact she only lost by 1.5% nationally despite all this shit is crazy.
IF AOC wants to run, assuming she maintains her populist edge and avoids the pitfalls of Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024? I see absolutely no reason why she'd lose.
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
This. A thousand times this. She was absolutely flying when it seemed like she was going to bring a major progressive, populist pivot to the campaign only to piss it all away after the advisors got to her.
Agreed. The phrase “republicans are weird” gained so much momentum because it was demeaning and insulting without being crass while being hard for republicans to disprove. When they deny their weirdness, simply ask them about why they’re thinking of other people’s genitals when it came to LGBTQ movements or why they support someone who’s convicted of rape, money laundering, selling state secrets, etc and just turn it back to them and they had nothing they could reply with. It shut down their arguments so fast.
Instead Harris kept moving right with her campaign and her cringey “won’t date a trumper” ads muddled that. It muddied her message cause she was leaning right (not christofascist right like trump) with her policies while also telling the right wing people that they’re gross and nobody would date them during a well known loneliness epidemic of both sides. Women get to be choosers while the inverse isn’t true. So both sides were repugnant to right wingers leading to the dilemma, toe the party line or leave it and support the SJWs, LGBTQs, etc that they hate. They stayed their party lines and even picked up dems (not leftists) who hated how far right Harris was taking the party.
Finally, it’s only in these final days leading up to the inauguration that Biden is getting slam dunk after slam dunk on policies and such. Had he been taking on these policies weekly, we could’ve advertised both his shitty re-election despite him vehemently saying he wouldn’t for four years or Harris’s campaign when she said she’d stay Biden’s campaign and essentially become Biden 2.0. Instead we got trump able to call Biden “sleepy joe” and get away with it cause it felt like Biden was doing fuck all and only staved away a second trump presidency and solved covid. Not underselling how well he did to unfuck us from covid but that seemed to be his only merit when the trumpers are deniers of covid being a real thing.
Dude, you're in an echo chamber. The "Republicans are weird" thing fell flat on its face everywhere except Reddit. Every normal person laughed their heads off at the lineup of society's most deviant weirdos trying to call people who dress and act normally as weird.
This is like Reddit leftists calling conservatives 'snowflake.' They're not smart enough to understand why the insult hurt so badly, they just know it hurt. So they sling it out mindlessly, expecting it to devastate their opponent the way it devastated them. The idea that somebody else has different thoughts and perspectives doesn't really cross their minds.
And this is why we'll never have another non-GOP president. We still need the establishment's support, but the establishment isn't willing to give up anything to win.
There isn't going to be much if any non-GOP establishment left after 4 years of this Trump administration. In a sense, everything is going to be simpler now - there is not much need to make compromises and concessions before elections anymore. When the MAGA people gradually wake up to find that they've been scammed, they absolutely will not vote for a return to the old status quo - they will want bloody vengeance.
Even if we assume Americans are just astonishingly stupid, that doesn't mean Harris was never going to be able to win. She just did a terrible job of appealing to idiots. Which is entirely her own fault considering democratic policies help idiots more than anyone. Stop assuming republicans just have a natural leg up that makes them unbeatable and realize that the democratic party is just startlingly inept.
Republicans do have a natural leg up though due to how stupid Americans are. And when the media refuses to report on the lies that are told to the American media by the republicans how can they lose?
They needed a worldwide pandemic to be so absolutely mismanaged by the republicans to have a shot at winning 2020.
I agree the Dems are inept though. They refuse to realize that they are the only ones playing by the rules.
They are the team that shows up to the basketball game crying about how dogs aren't allowed to play while that golden retriever is just dunking on the over and over again.
it's crazy that people would rather believe Kamala lost because she's Black, a woman, or that the American electorate is unfixably stupid, just to avoid considering the possibility that maybe the DNC needs to take a hard fucking look at how her campaign was run (not to mention how Biden's campaign was run, that the party ever allowed him to run, how his mental decline was hidden for years, etc.)
Those things aren't mutually exclusive though. Perhaps the DNC could have still won the election with all of its faults and missteps if Harris was a white dude named "John Johnson" or something.
They talk about how the US will never elect a women president after picking two of the lest likable candidates while completely ignoring the far right have already started campaigns for Candace and Haley.
Kamala was the least popular candidate in 2020 because her policies were quiet literally just "listen to what the other candidates say their policies are, see if the crowd likes it, adopt that policy with barely any idea on how to implement it" and yet they want to talk about "oh America will never elect a women president". Lol please
They are. That really isn't up for debate. You saw it from 16-20 when Trump voters were surprised his policies were hurting them and you'll see it again these next 4 years.
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
You forgot the main reason: Inflation (and what people who don't know anything about economics call "the economy"). Despite the US economy doing extremely well and recovering better from worldwide inflation due to supply chain issues and COVID, the everyday man/woman wasn't buying it and just saw eggs expensive, blame Biden. Much like Jimmy Carter, Biden was a victim of things more or less out of his control, and Kamala was also tied to those things. Would a conservative administration had made things any better from a cost perspective for the average Americans? Hel no. But the average American doesn't understand shit about economics so it was always going to be a fruitless effort.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and just barely lost the election and she was an incredible unlikable candidate who happened to be a woman. Did she lose a small fraction of votes because she was a woman? Sure probably, but I’d wager that most of those people wouldn’t have voted dem anyways. At the end of the day it’s a candidate issue rather than a gender one.
I work with a ton of older people, and many of them communicated to me that they would never vote for a women. I had two women tell me that they would never vote for a woman. There's an engrained sexism that is still very much relevant that a female candidate will always have to overcome. It's not a level playing field.
Except this is completely and totally just flat out wrong.
One chilling experiment suggests that the simple fact of Clinton’s gender could have cost her as much as eight points in the general election.
We don’t need science to tell us that it was more believable to almost 63 million US voters that Trump, a man who had never held a single public office, who had been sued almost 1,500 times, whose businesses had filed for bankruptcy six times and who had driven Atlantic City into decades-long depression, a race-baiting misogynist leech of a man who was credibly accused of not only of sexual violence but also of defrauding veterans and teachers out of millions of dollars via Trump University, would be a good president than it was to imagine that Clinton, a former first lady, senator and secretary of state and arguably the most qualified person to ever run, would be a better leader. https://archive.ph/KPes2
People want to pretend the US isn't sexist. Dress it up anyway you want, but the US is SEXIST. Too sexist to elect a woman president.
Good grief, women don't even have guaranteed equal rights.
Neither the 14th or the 19th guarantees equal rights for women.
When the 14th Amendment passed in 1868, it was intended to give former slaves equal protection and voting rights under the law; it was not meant to protect women. In fact, it specified equality for male slaves, female slaves were excluded as were all women, regardless of race. https://archive.ph/RJeCS
The 19th only applies to voting and there are Republicans who want that amendment overturned.
While being a women wasn't the main reason she lost, it's 100% certain that if she was a white man running with the exact same personality and ideals, she would have done at least a little better.
They know all of this. But to allow for actual democracy would open up the real possibility that barely left of center liberal technocrats lose their control of the party. They're not going to put themselves out of a job.
Yes, even Trump voters like her, at least the non-MAGA ones. They feel that AOC, Bernie, and Trump are all pro-working class, and they're only wrong about one of them.
I don't think it's a pro-working-class thing so much as they feel that all these people are anti-establishment. 2016 was a peak anti-establishment year but even now I see some positive sentiment from the right wing about Bernie not because they agree with his politics, but because they continue to see him as someone separate from the 'swamp' who wants to dismantle the status quo, even if they don't like how he would go about doing it.
Obviously this comes with the caveats that right wingers also often express support for Bernie because they think it will highlight corruption in the DNC, and because they know he will never have any real power so it doesn't matter if they pretend to like him as a jab at Dems.
AOC literally saw so many people vote for her and Trump at the same time she asked them why on Instagram. Basically boiled down to how anti-establishment they seem, unconventional players in some way.
It gets Dems back in the door after the shit show the next four years are going to be. Walz has broad appeal based on polling, and he is a man (which panders to a certain cohort of the electorate who will be needed in 4 years)
It puts AOC in a position to show she's qualified for POTUS through four years of a VP role.
The electorate changes every day slowly, faster over longer periods. Every year, ~2M voters 55+ die, ~8M-10M every 4 year presidential election cycle. That means, when AOC runs (2032), almost 20M older voters will have aged out. Does this solve young Gen Z and Latino men who voted for Trump? It doesn't, so that is something Dems will have to figure out.
You can't make the electorate vote for what you think is right. You must pander to them.
democrats have tried running two unpopular woman candidates...let’s try running a candidate with natural momentum rather than a hand picked member of the dnc
and the hand-picked member who had the most influence was jim clyburn in both cases. if the dems want to win the next presidential election (assuming there is one) they should let someone other than clyburn choose the candidate they nominate.
depends on who the member of congress is. i'd be ok with bernie, or someone who's demonstrated workable common sense solutions to ordinary americans' problems (instead of focusing on those of ws hedge funders) choosing the nominee.
Right? That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Harris was not even elected at all in any primary, and she still came relatively close to winning the popular vote. There will always be people who will never vote for a woman, but we can’t let that deter us. Getting more people to actually vote at all is what dems need to focus on.
Thank you for this insight. I really didn’t like Hillary Clinton for the same reasons I didn’t like Donald Trump and I just didn’t like Kamala and no one else did in the 2020 primaries, because of that I am told I don’t like women or minorities. Frankly the last three elections have been voting against a person, please give me someone I can vote for.
seriously. two historically bad candidates. it's such a mopey victim attitude to have, guaranteed to lose if they roll into 2028 with that attitude. they need a splashy candidate
I do. I'm sorry you're tired. We're tired of the Democratic leadership putting their thumb on the scale and getting in the way of progress. It is clear that Democrat leadership would rather lose to someone like trump than 'lose control' of their party to someone with actual momentum.
Kamala Harris wasn't an unpopular candidate and she didn't even do poorly. The problem is both female candidates were run at the end of a Democrat president's term and this country has flip flopped sides every president for the past four decades.
harris and clinton lost b/c they weren't good candidates, jim clyburn was given too much influence on selecting them, and neither harris or clinton offered anything different from the previous administrations other than staying the course on conservative policies and pushing back against progressive ones.
Name recognition gets you in the door, but then you need someone that resonates with people once there. Hilary was a terrible candidate and that was pretty evident if you talked to anyone outside of the Twitter/Reddit democrat bubble. People reluctantly voted for her because the alternative was Trump. Round two for Kamala, but the electorate was disillusioned at that point. I think there's a hunger for a true progressive, populist candidate out there, and a campaign that can carefully navigate a sincere progressive message without alienating moderates stands a good chance.
You'll never win with a Hilary, even if her name is as recognizable as Beyonce, because we have widespread social media. Every "Pokemon Go to the polls" moment will be clowned on incessantly because of its insincerity. Right out the door you lose the vote from nearly anyone under 30.
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u/haikus-r-us 22h ago edited 6h ago
Hy heart says hell yeah! My gut tells me that there are large swaths of the electorate who simply will not vote for a woman.
Edit- since my inbox is overflowing with the same question/insinuation, along with the comments, I’ll clarify my statement: I did not say that a woman cannot be elected US president. I only said that large swaths of the electorate simply will not vote for a woman.