News of President Joe Biden’s Sunday announcement that he was withdrawing from the presidential race – as well as his secondary statement that he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement – has kicked the media fangirling for Harris into high gear.
Predictably, the sexism, woman, and race cards are already being played in an effort to blunt legitimate criticisms from Harris’ many critics, including of course the Trump campaign, which has already come out with some hard-hitting ads targeting Harris specifically for what she knew about Biden’s cognitive health.
On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” for instance, co-moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan both fretted over how Harris would be attacked by Donald Trump and Republicans, citing his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Brennan even went so far as to proclaim without evidence that Harris would be subjected to attacks that males weren’t because “That’s just a fact”:
O’Donnell: “I wonder, though, how worried the campaign is. Donald Trump ran against a woman, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. It was personal. He called her nasty, her called her a lot of other words. I wonder whether those same types of attacks would work in 2024? There will be a different dynamic running against a black woman.”Brennan: “There last time we saw a woman at the top of the ticket, Hillary Clinton, there was quite a lot running against Donald Trump — there were quite a lot of attacks against her. And there is a mind towards what is the lesson from then, how do we apply it now?”[…]Brennan: “I can only imagine that and a woman at the top of the ticket will take slings and arrows that a male candidate won’t. That’s just the facts and we know it. So, they’re looking at the vice presidential candidate carefully.”
Watch:
The New York Times did their part as well, conveniently rounding up a handful of female Democrat rank-and-file voters and activists who were concerned Harris would be held back due to sexism:
“Women are angrier, and that could be motivating,” said Karen Crowley, 64, an independent voter and retired nurse in Concord, N.H., who would not vote for Mr. Trump, did not feel like she could support Mr. Biden and now planned to back Ms. Harris.
Among the motivations Ms. Crowley cited were the demise of Roe v. Wade and comments and actions by Mr. Trump that many women see as sexist and misogynistic. “A woman president might be more possible now,” she said.
But for female voters and activists eager to break that elusive glass ceiling, there was also fear that sexism would remain difficult for Ms. Harris to overcome.
“It’s a patriarchy out there,” Ms. Crowley said. “She’s smart and she’s a prosecutor, but there are a lot of old white men who will want to stop her. The only thing wrong with her is that she’s a woman.”
Left out of all this breathless reporting about poor Kamala supposedly having to fend off “sexist” attacks are troubling numbers for her dating back to her failed 2019 run that are at odds with the narrative that Harris has an uphill climb because of those stereotypical knuckle-dragging white conservative males we keep hearing about.
Harris’ approval ratings at times as Vice President have also shown her polling lower than Joe Biden among black voters, such as this one from USA TODAY/Suffolk University in January:
But the findings reveal difficulties she herself has with the Democratic base. She gets lower job approval ratings than Biden among Black voters, 56% compared with 68%. She lags Biden among voters younger than 35, too, at 27% compared with 32%.
Of course, a lot can change in six months – and it definitely has – but the fact remains that Harris has had a rocky road when it comes to earning overwhelming support from core Democratic constituencies. Remember, even a small drop in percentage points among these groups in November could mean the difference for her between victory and defeat in battleground states.
Couple that with the rise in support among black male voters for Trump, and you’ve got a potential recipe for disaster for the Harris campaign on Election Day.
And that rocky road I mentioned has had little to nothing to do with Harris’ gender or race and everything to do with her ability – or lack thereof – to perform the tasks she’s been given, as evidenced for example by her disastrous handling of the border crisis. She’s just not very good at what she does, and it shows.
Though the woman/sexism/racism cards are going to loom large over this presidential race from now until November, rest assured that ultimately, Kamala Harris’ worst enemy will always be… Kamala Harris.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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