I feel it’s pretty relevant to women, at the very least.
You’re not actually arguing against any points I’m making, you’re just posturing in an irrelevant way to try to high road me. Do you think liberal women think it somehow advanced women’s rights for Hillary and Kamala to lose, relative to what happened to women’s rights under Trump? You seem to be engaging in exactly the sort of stuff I describe where it sounds good, it would be nice, and it backfired so much it did nothing but damage the cause that was behind it.
A Catholic couldn’t be elected President (Al Smith)…until one was (JFK). America was absolutely NEVER EVER going to elect a black man as President…until it did.
The party shouldn’t try to nominate a woman because she’s a woman. BUT if a woman goes through the primary process and garners support and votes, Dems shouldn’t vote against her in the primaries just because she’s a woman.
It should be the least of our concerns with over three years before the matter comes up, but I would hate to see a viable woman candidate emerge and Dems vote her down on “I personally like her and think she’d be a great President, but 2024 proves with geometric logic that America’s not ready for a woman President, so I better vote for J. Milquetoast Whiteguy.” If nothing else, it’s disheartening to women voters for the Dems to join the antediluvians in perpetuating “no woman will be President.”
I am not saying that Kamala should run again, but to declare that women and POC should off the table by default seems wrong to me.
Such Faustian bargains tend to be very hard to undo. Before to long it simply becomes that the temporary policy becomes permanent to maintain power.
We’ll end up with a Democratic party that is defacto sexist and racist.
I agree here. We need the best candidate, regardless of their gender or race. If we refuse to support someone for that reason, it will kill the energy for that candidate and ensure a loss.
“The Democrats need to be more racist and sexist so we can win elections,” isn’t the sort of point that needs explicit rebuttal. Its sufficiently repugnant on its own merits, no one actually needs to explain why its a bad idea.
If we ran catholics twice against an absolute clown and they lost both times, I would like to think that that party would probably hesitate to run a catholic again, let alone enthusiastically try to get a catholic elected as a goal in and of itself.
Obama was a pretty unique political force in a way that Kamala Harris is not. The zeitgeist was very different, too – bizarrely I think 2024 might actually be more hostile to a new minority who hasn’t won before running for the presidency. Social media / propaganda / culture wars has created a massive anti “DEI” backlash which, which while evil and embraced by shitty people, is undeniably a strong factor in the current social climate.
Really, the republicans should run a woman. They’ve trained their base to fall in line no matter what - their partisanship is stronger than any other factor in their decision - and so even misogynistic men would vote for a republican woman. And of course you’d pick up a lot of people who, for various reasons, wanted to vote for a woman candidate. It really makes very little political sense for democrats given that they already have the “women should be able to be president too” vote.
The best candidate will include whether or not they can win the election as a factor. If you’re pretty sure they can’t win an election, they’re not the best candidate.
I called out your lack of substantive argument and your high road preening and you doubled down on it. I expected better from you.
If you could go back in time and change the democratic candidate to a generic white guy (let’s say Kaine from 2016 and Walz from 2024), would you do so? Of course not, because by your own implicit logic acknowledging the reality of the situation and changing strategies would make you more racist and sexist. So you would gleefully choose to get Trump elected again and then lecture us about your moral superiority for doing so.
And I expected better than, “Never run a woman for national office again,” from you, and yet here we are.
I don’t agree with you that the fundamental defect in the Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2024 was, “Has a vagina.” If I had the ability to rerun either of those races, I’d go with different candidates, but my primary basis for picking the best person to do it would not be “Do they have the acceptable form of genitalia?”
You sincerely don’t believe that being a woman was a disadvantage from the perspective of electability for either candidate? You have so much faith in the American voting public that they have no bias whatsoever against women versus men when it comes to electing a president?
Yes, I understand that you think women would be just as good at being president. I agree. Stating the obvious that we both agree on is not giving you some sort of moral edge over me, though you clearly believe it does. But I’m not talking about our personal beliefs of the capability of women, I’m talking about the realities of the American voting public, and the realities of the outcomes of whether minorities benefit from giving a greater chance for fascism to win in order have representation. This is what I mean when I say you’re not even engaging with my argument.
I think, given the way that you have straw manned my arguments, that you believe that acknowledging the reality that other people are shitty about it somehow taints you with the stink of misogyny. You believe it’s some sort of moral failing on my part that I acknowledge that being a woman works against electability for a presidential candidate because somehow that acknowledgement must come from the same sort of bigotry that actually reduces the electability of a woman. It’s ironically exactly the sort of attitude I was describing in my original post. Where you choose what you perceive to be moral superiority over the actual benefit or harm of the groups and ideas whose causes you champion.
Do you really think the only reason Harris and Clinton lost was because they were women? Do you actually think Tim Kaine had a shot at winning the White House? 2016 was littered with straight white guys who couldn’t beat Trump. Why wasn’t Jeb Bush’s penis sufficient to secure a victory over Donald Trump? What is it about Tim Kaine’s penis that you think would have been different?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on what is or is not “obvious.”
I’d like to think that the US is ready for a black female president but gestures at everything make me think otherwise.
I think it’s a sufficient reason. There are probably hundreds of factors that went into the actual outcome, but I believe that probably 90%-100% of mainstream democratic candidates would’ve beat Trump in 2016. Hillary had a lot of disadvantages, many of which were ignorant, hateful, and unfounded. But yes, being a woman definitely was an obstacle to overcome, something that lowered her chances of winning.
Almost certainly. Even in 2016 Trump was a clown and he hadn’t had years of cultists doubling down and learning to defend his behavior. It took a very unique opponent – someone who had decades of hatred and bullshit thrown against her – to give him a path to victory.
This is an absolutely unjustified personal attack. It shows the weakness of your position. You can’t argue my points, so instead you’ll ad hominem and imply I’m a racist and a sexist for holding them. This is the last response you’ll get out of me because that is incredibly scummy behavior.
Harris didn’t lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was a milquetoast candidate. The election was pretty close. It was within her grasp. She gained some votes because she was a woman and she lost some votes because she was a woman. Maybe she lost more votes than she gained because of her gender, but that’s not the only reason she lost. If she had a dynamic, engaging, and charismatic personality, she could have gained more votes to overcome any votes she lost because of her gender. However, a woman going into the 2028 election is going to have a very big hill to climb. Two women have now lost. There will be a lot of talk about whether there will be a third loss. That will drag down her campaign. If she can’t get herself out of the muck about whether or not she’ll be the third loser, she’ll lose. She’ll have to be an unbelievably outstanding candidate to overcome the obstacles that she’ll face that a man won’t.
Uh huh. And in 2024?
You seem to have lost your thesis, here. Did Clinton lose because she was uniquely vulnerable, or did she lose because she’s a woman?
Yes, what a deeply unfair conclusion to reach when someone argues for preemptively barring women and non-whites from running for high office.
So, any future arguments I make against your posts in this thread are going to stand unchallenged?
Fuck, sounds like a good deal to me. Was this supposed to make me feel bad or something?
So yes, I realize I just said I’d not be engaging with you, but I learned a fun fact: you can’t actually block moderators on this board, which is shitty. I had intended not to read your reply, but now that I did I can’t help myself but to respond:
I asked you this question, which you ignored:
“You sincerely don’t believe that being a woman was a disadvantage from the perspective of electability for either candidate? You have so much faith in the American voting public that they have no bias whatsoever against women versus men when it comes to electing a president?”
Why don’t you answer that question? I mean, I know the answer to that. Because you know the answer is yes, and the only thing I’m doing is taking that to its logical conclusion. You believe that I’m racist and sexist and probably every other ist because I’m willing to answer that question with a yes, so you can’t answer it with a yes, even though it would be your honest answer if you had the courage to answer it.
Both. In the real world, things have multiple factors going on. Hillary was one of the most hated people in the country, mostly for stupid reasons, and that obviously worked against her. But even a woman without all that baggage bucked the trends of American expectations and prejudices and still would’ve had a more difficult time than a man. Trump was a uniquely bad candidate – I’ve been saying since that election that both sides ran the only candidate that could lose to the other. Any generic male democratic candidate beats Trump easily. Any generic republican candidate (say, Mitt Romney again) beats Hillary easily. It was only a tight race because they were both just about as bad a candidate that could be realistically picked for their side.
You are again engaging in straw manning, as you have consistently been this entire time.
But yes, it is actually a deeply unfair conclusion to reach, because I have explained my position fully. It logically makes sense, and is fully supported without needing to imagine some sort of alterior sexist/racist motive. You can’t even actually argue against my points, you can only realize how much logical points make you feel, and try to dispell that discomfort by tainting my message by poisoning the well to disqualify my points. But it is absolutely baseless. You have no good faith rational grounds on which to accuse me of racism and sexism.
You’ve never actually made an argument against me. Like if I asked you, like a philosophy 101 class, to diagram out your argument, it would not form a cohesive one.
You should feel bad when someone who is engaging in good faith in a discussion stops engaging with you because you’re engaging in bad faith and resorting to extreme and unsupported attacks on their character.
…I think Harris was a terrible candidate. Who ran a terrible campaign. And should not run for president again.
But the problem wasn’t this particular individual candidate. It’s that the Democrat institutions are (in a very different way to the Republicans) fundamentally rotten at its core. After Clinton lost there should have been a reckoning. Instead: the same people are still running the show. And instead of falling on their swords after Harris’s failed campaign, they’ve been “patting themselves on the back”, convinced that they didn’t do anything wrong, and will ultimately I believe be complicit in the slide to authoritarianism.
I think that ultimately Harris (or whoever the Democrats ran) could have won if they had developed a long-term strategy to combat the rise of MAGA. But by the time Harris was at the top of the ticket that ship had already sailed. The time to be planning for the 2024 election was back in 2016. And now with the Republicans (and "centrist/right-leaning Dems) effectively in charge of everything, the landscape has completely changed.
If they were to run with Harris again, she would lose, not because of any fundamental issues with her. But because the Democrats as a party are hopelessly lost, don’t have a clear vision or strategy, and it would be a clear sign they had run out of ideas.
We are in an area of pure opinion here because the effect of being a woman, on voter behavior, is most often unconscious.
By itself, I think some voters find being female candidate is a plus. And for others it is a minus. And I sincerely do not believe I know how that balance averages out.
However, my sincere data-free belief is that both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris had issues with their campaign made worse because they were women.
With Hillary Clinton, it was Monica Lewinsky. Also, having more than one child would have helped.
With Kamala Harris, I think the big one was her unusual racial mix. With no evidence, I think that one of Trump’s most brilliant pieces of lying demagoguery was to criticize Harris for only being recently Black. This highlighted that, at first glance, it is hard to classify her. By now you may be thinking – that has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Maybe true. But maybe when you add femaleness to the rest of a complex identity package, it was just too far from the while male default.
Another question to ask: Wouldn’t every female candidate have some such issues, so that everything in this long post so far just comes down to women being unelectable?
My answer to my own question is Val Demings. Looks Black, husband is Black. Perfect number of children (3). Solid marriage as far as I know. My sincere belief is that if Biden had picked Demings for veep in 2020, she would now be president-elect.
If I am correct about the above, Democrats should nominate someone other than Harris in 2028. But I would never discourage Harris from seeking the nomination.
Not pointing at anybody, do you guys seriously think having a vagina is such a serious problem to aspire for presidency in usa ?
I’m always surprised when people don’t figure that one out on their own. Obviously the software isn’t going to let you ignore the moderators. How would that even work?
Sure. Did it have an effect? Almost certainly. Was it the only reason they lost? Absolutely not. Was it the most important reason they lost? No, not even remotely. Is proactively deciding to not run any more women or non-whites a reasonable reaction to their lose? No, in fact, it’s a pretty racist and sexist reaction.
Assertions with absolutely no evidence. Again, Trump beat a dozen straight white men to win the White House the first time. Four years later, he got more votes than he did the first time, despite his opponent in the general being a dude. He increased it again in 2024. The idea that Trump is an unelectable clown, if only we’d stop running all these women against him, is unsupported by the facts. People voted for the clown because they wanted to be ruled by a clown, not because they were scared of what Clinton or Harris has in their pants.
An you should feel bad when someone engaging in good faith discussion comes away with the impression that your position is racist and sexist. I mean, good luck with figuring out a way to say,“Democrats should only run white men,” without coming across as racist or sexist, but it’s hardly my fault you failed to thread that needle.
Being female likely does not make getting elected any easier for a candidate, compared to a hypothetical male candidate with the same qualifications, ethnic background, etc. And, we do have some evidence (yes, I know, a very small sample size of 2) that suggests that it may well make it more difficult.
Culturally, we still have the issue that the exact same personality traits and aspects which are generally seen to be a positive for male leaders (commanding, resolute, tough, decisive) are things that are seen, by many Americans, as being negatives for women: women who have those traits are frequently stereotyped as being “bitchy,” “shrill,” “abrasive,” and “nasty” (a word that Trump frequently employs against strong women).