Kamala Harris Lost Because She Is a Black Woman

Don't let the false prophets of colorblindness gaslight you.

In the pioneering work of the late, celebrated Harvard sociologist Devah Pager, she found that black applicants without criminal records were less likely to receive callbacks for positions than white convicted felons. As a trained criminologist, I became familiar with this work in graduate school and found it astonishing. This week, we saw the spirit of this Pager finding play out at the highest level in America. Donald Trump, a convicted felon who also encouraged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, received over 74 million votes to defeat the current vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office in 2025. For how long? Well, that is to be determined.

Some have claimed that this is a stunning and surprising comeback after his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden. Regular readers should not be surprised at all, as I saw this result coming months ago and told readers to mentally prepare for Trump’s return to the White House. Donald Trump’s victory was entirely predictable because he ran a cunning white supremacist campaign against a black woman. The truth of the matter is that a black woman was never going to be elected as president of the United States in 2024.

Racism and misogyny are at the root of Kamala Harris’ electoral defeat. When someone makes this obvious, common-sense claim, there are people who disingenuously act as though one is saying that there are absolutely no other factors that can be used to explain the election result. This is just a purposeful attempt to ignore the argument being made and avoid uncomfortable discussions around race and gender. There were a number of factors that were not in Kamala Harris’ favor during this election, including the fact that she was set up to fail by a tremendously selfish Joe Biden who waited until the very last minute to terminate his insipid reelection campaign, basically setting up Kamala Harris (or anybody else who would have been the Democratic nominee) with a truncated window to mount a challenge to Donald Trump.

It is also important to note that Democrats have imprudently chosen extreme stances on social issues and foolhardily allowed the online far left to dictate what their national messaging should be in a country that is decidedly not leftist in political nature. The Democratic Party needs to understand that social media is not real life and do more to appeal to specific groups, including white Americans of all social classes. Are these structural issues that Democrats need to strategically fix for future elections? Absolutely. But this would work as an overarching narrative to explain Kamala Harris’ specific loss if she ran a campaign based on transgender children and bathrooms or any other boutique far-left ideas. She did no such thing. Kamala Harris ran a disciplined, centrist campaign that even successfully reached out to disaffected Republican voters.

With all of the constraints that Kamala Harris had, she raised a billion dollars in such a short time and ran an impressive and practical (albeit imperfect) campaign that she ought to be commended for. Yet there are people who are savagely and relentlessly criticizing her and nitpicking her imperfections as if she had a full campaign window and ineptly bumbled her way through it. Kamala Harris was an excellent candidate. That there are people who think otherwise is merely evidence of the stunning bias that Harris would have had to overcome to win. She objectively destroyed Donald Trump in their debate, so much so that he refused to do another one. She weathered the storm of racist and sexist criticism she received with grace. She even went into the enemy territory of Fox News and dominated Bret Baier, all while being consistently derided as a “low IQ” person. (See my essay addressing the “low IQ” claims against her.) The issue with Kamala Harris is the country that she was running in—not her actual campaign. Kamala Harris would win an election in any serious country that isn’t averse to electing a black woman as its premier.

If one were to take every single thing about Kamala Harris—the resume, speaking style, debate ability, and even her imperfections— and just make her a white man, she would have defeated Donald Trump in a landslide. People don’t want to consider the fact that America is a country where race and gender matter. In fact, you are rewarded with treacly adulation in America for adhering to a colorblind and gender-unconscious approach to analyzing politics. People will tell you how intelligent and level-headed you are when you refuse to acknowledge the reality of racism and misogyny and focus your attention elsewhere. Intellectually insecure people who get their sense of worth from the cheap blandishments of white racists live for this kind of utterly false praise.

I have previously pointed out how the black feminist theoretical framework of intersectionality would be important to understanding Kamala Harris’ performance in this electoral contest. Again, one does not need to be a black feminist intellectual to see the utility of this theoretical framework where it clearly makes sense. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Harris, despite having more overall votes than her, did not win the popular vote. Barack Obama won both of his presidential elections. Harris obviously did not win her presidential election. Clinton is a white woman. Obama is a black man. Neither of those candidates experience the dual disadvantage of being a black woman in a country that has been inarguably hostile to both blackness and womanhood.

Because of people’s dogged refusal to even acknowledge race in modern political analysis, the Bradley effect was barely mentioned in the run up to the election when polls were favorable to Kamala Harris—or at least showed her neck and neck with Donald Trump. (I discussed the Bradley effect in a previous essay.) Even after the election where it was shown that a lot of the polls were wrong, many are still not discussing the Bradley effect! Desperate to look sophisticated on the news, “pundits” prefer to talk about the economy and every other issue. Colorblind political analysis, particularly in the American context, will always be flat at best, and wildly inaccurate at worst.

It is clear that people were deliberately lying to pollsters in ways that are entirely consistent with the Bradley effect. Some people think that Barack Obama disproved the Bradley effect by winning two back-to-back presidential elections. However, this is misguided. It is better to think of Barack Obama as a political aberration that we are unlikely to see in America again for a long time. Moreover, comparisons of Kamala Harris to Barack Obama have always been unwise and tenuous. It is a statement of fact that in the 235 years since George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States, every single president has been a man that was born to a white woman. Giving Kamala Harris just over 100 days to shatter this history made little sense. Kamala Harris is black and Indian. Obama being half white helped him electorally. Kamala Harris was never going to be as embraced as Barack Obama was.

In order to make it seem as though Kamala Harris’ race and gender were not the problem, some people have tried to make it seem like she was just the wrong black woman, and they would have enthusiastically voted for the right one. For example, on the Joe Rogan podcast, there were attempts to make it seem like Michelle Obama would have defeated Donald Trump if she were to have run in Kamala Harris’ place. This is such obvious nonsense, but there are people who actually believe it. Fortunately, I was alive (and in college) when Barack Obama was running for president, so I distinctly remember how the American public “warmly” greeted Michelle Obama. I can confidently say that she would have been derided as a word salad-spewing, DEI dunce if she were to run for president today, much like Kamala Harris. When she was a presidential candidate’s wife and First Lady, she was attacked relentlessly in ways similar to (and sometimes worse than) Kamala Harris. Just off the top of my head, I remember:

1.    She was depicted as an American flag-immolating terrorist next to Barack Obama on the cover of The New Yorker.

2.    She was relentlessly depicted as a simian by racists, including being called an “ape in heels.”

3.    She was called a transgender by Joan Rivers.

4.    She was attacked for her Princeton undergraduate thesis and practically derided as being illiterate by the late Christopher Hitchens in a Slate piece.

The idea that Trump wouldn’t have intensified the racist and sexist hatred against her and that she would have been widely respected by the American public as an accomplished black woman and intellectual with Princeton and Harvard Law pedigree is comical. It is a patent fiction that America is a nation that is champing at the bit to elect an accomplished black woman to the office of the presidency. There is no black woman in 2024 who could win a U.S. presidential election.

Some think it is very clever to argue that Trump’s relative success with minority voters is evidence that he is not racist and that Kamala Harris’ defeat has nothing to do with race or gender. This analysis makes little sense when subjected to even minimal scrutiny. First, contrary to the prevailing narrative, Trump did not do that well with minority voters. He did best among Latino men. Trump won the election by getting white people to vote for him. Second, Trump’s relative success with minorities did not occur in a political vacuum. In other words, there were votes for Trump and there were votes against Kamala Harris that benefited him. That some minority voters preferred openly xenophobic Trump to Harris can be best explained by misogyny and the preference for male leadership over the leadership of a woman, not to mention a black woman. Third, pointing out that Trump did better with minorities than any other Republican in recent history is not evidence that he didn’t run a white supremacist campaign and is fantastic at appealing to minorities, like some pundits are laughably suggesting. It’s just evidence that he benefited from running against a black woman. If George W. Bush ran against a black woman, I am almost certain he would have outperformed Donald Trump with minority voters.

Some have been thinking forward to 2028 and have started putting out names for potential Democratic candidates for the presidency. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are both candidates that have been cited as potential White House hopefuls. Both candidates would be dangerous gambles for the Democratic Party because of their race and gender, respectively. Someone who would be a good candidate is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, not because he is a better or smarter politician than any of the aforementioned candidates, but because he is a white male who looks even more suited to play President Fitzgerald Grant on the hit TV show Scandal than Tony Goldwyn does. In a country as pitiably shallow as America, this is something to consider in the wake of Harris’ loss.

Despite the desperate attempts of the false prophets of colorblindness to gaslight, race and gender are the principal reasons why Kamala Harris lost. It is demonstrably silly to pretend that the vast majority of Trump voters are wonks who were animated by Trump’s sophomoric advocacy of protectionist policy and ran to the polls to vote for him exclusively because of the economy. Given the fact that the majority of living Nobel Prize-winning economists stated that Kamala Harris’ approach to the economy would have been better than Trump’s, it makes little sense to argue that people who voted for Trump actually cared about which candidate would be objectively better for them economically. (Also, it is another essay for another day how conservatives are expediently abandoning their long-held commitment to free trade to support Trump’s tariffs.) Any attempt to minimize racism and misogyny in the 2024 presidential election is to engage in fundamentally unserious political analysis. The bright side for those engaging in this unserious analysis, however, is that they’ll be condescendingly patted on the head and told how “oh so very smart” they are by pseudo-sophisticated halfwits. I’m sure that will make it all worth it.