tonight i was — yet again — accused of being misogynistic and anti-black for suggesting that kamala harris was a disastrous candidate for president.
i want to explore why she was a bad candidate because i don’t think that is clear to people.
i went into some detail of this previously but omitted most of it during the campaign because i wanted to ensure i didn’t turn anyone off from voting for her despite her abysmal candidacy. she was always a far better option than trump and i would have supported a dead sloth on the side of the highway over trump or any republican candidate.
most people seem to think that the issue many of us had with her was either that she was black or that she was a woman — even for those of us of the female persuasion.
to be straightforward, i am absolutely not in the “never kamala” camp of the left.
once it became clear the democrats were not going to hold a real primary, which was one of their most fundamental errors, instead taking biden’s endorsement as the only thing that mattered, i backed harris in every way i could.
i don’t think a single day went by where i didn’t write about how absolutely necessary it was to back the democratic candidate, regardless of who it was. that nobody should stay home, that nobody should even consider voting third-party or protesting against harris because defeating the conservative movement was just too vital. that fascism was coming in no uncertain terms.
i suspect most people didn’t believe me, though i imagine they certainly have changed their tunes at this point, for the most part.
nearly all my criticism of harris was the same as my criticism of biden when he was presumed to be the candidate for 2024 with two exceptions. first, she is not old and senile like biden. second, biden doesn’t have a law-enforcement background.
so i obviously have no criticism of her for being in her eighties or in cognitive decline as she doesn’t have either issue. she was sixty (sixty-one now), which i believe is too old for a national leader. but she was one of the younger potential candidates, as the country has skewed its government so far into the retirement range she seems youthful by comparison with much of congress.
she wasn’t a politician. that doesn’t necessarily mean she would have made a bad president but it does create a significant problem of experience as a candidate. and likely for someone in the presidency. her political experience was realistically as a glorified lawyer. yes, the california attorney general is elected. but they’re not elected in the same sense as someone in congress or a candidate for the presidency.
her first and only real political experience was serving only half a single term in the senate, though even that is an overstatement. she spent a significant amount of her time as an elected senator trying to get the presidential nomination in 2019 after having served a matter of months. as expected, especially in california, a first-term senator with no political experience and a background in law-enforcement, she placed second-last in the primaries of national candidates with 844 votes, dropping out of the race before 2020 even began.
for comparison purposes, that is a poor showing even compared to other candidates who dropped out before the convention. cory booker received 31575 votes while andrew yang received 160733, for example.
the office of the vice president is not a political position in any real sense of the word. the vice president simply exists as a backup in case something happens to the president. they have exactly two roles. one is to break a potential tie in the senate – which she did 33 times – while the other only applies if the president dies or is in some other way unable to serve their full term. the vast majority of harris’ tie-breaking votes were not policy issues. they were confirmation/nomination issues.
so, from a qualification perspective, even assuming she was functioning in her senatorial capacity while campaigning in the presidential primary in 2019, her total political experience was three years in the senate.
what that means is that nearly the entire senate and house had more political experience when she was shoved into the presidential campaign by biden in july 2024. not to mention every democratic governor in the country.
when i say she was unqualified for the position, it is not a personal judgment. it is an evidentiary one. i don’t mean by that that she was unqualified in general as a professional. she is a lawyer with significant experience on the prosecutorial side of the courtroom and may well have made a reasonable judge at some point, though i suspect i would not have found her positions on most issues very encouraging, given that i am a leftist and she most certainly is a conservative, though not an extreme conservative in the maga sense.
that also does not mean that she was uneducated. she qualified as a lawyer with a jd after an undergraduate. that’s nothing of particular note in the education sphere but certainly typical for government work. while i would support a requirement that all candidates for congress or the white house should have graduate qualifications, she was definitely more educated than many former presidents.
there was one thing harris had going for her, though, in the 2024 election that made her perfect once she had been selected. she was the democratic candidate and trump was the republican. which meant, despite her being the worst possible choice among the democratic possibles, she was lightyears ahead of trump in terms of keeping fascism out of the government and at least partially defeating the extreme-right conservative movement sweeping the country.
it is always important to address the two elephants in the room before moving on to the policy issues. while i couldn’t care less what gender or ethnicity the candidate is, the electorate does. the left is not going to vote for a republican regardless of who they are. the center is also likely not to even consider a republican. it’s the center-right where the real undecideds lie in american politics and that makes it dangerous because the center-right is also where a lot of the misogyny and anti-black sentiment resides. we on the left vote based on policy and ignore everything else. the center-left tends to focus on policy and emotional vibes, which is where a lot of the awkward criticism of harris’ laughter came from.
i’m not sure exactly what they thought was so weird about her laughter. it sounded perfectly normal to me. my issue with it was that she never seemed to take things very seriously. but they always seemed to want to talk about it as if it was crazy, which i took to be thinly-veiled misogyny, which i would have liked to have thought was something the center-left would have outgrown but appeared not to.
but the center and center-right are more traditional and poll after poll finds they tend to be somewhat misogynistic and racist. that means they might be more likely to vote for a white man than a black woman. that certainly doesn’t make it right but it does mean harris had to have a stronger showing with the center-left and left to make up for the blatant bias among undecided candidates. we also have to remember that, the farther to the right of center people are, the lower their level of education and higher their reliance on emotional decisions are on average.
in other words, popular candidates get more votes on the right while candidates with favorable policies get more votes on the left. what that means is that conservative candidates don’t have to put out plans their bases like. they just have to talk to their audiences and be liked. while candidates trying to attract the liberals and leftists have to have real plans – while they also have to be liked by the center-right voters to have a chance of national success.
what we have to pay attention to is that harris was not defeated by trump. even leaving aside the obvious voting legitimacy problems with the election and taking the results as valid, which is a huge stretch with trump and musk involved, trump wasn’t her rival.
harris was defeated by harris.
what i mean by that is that the problem for her wasn’t that people chose to vote for trump instead of her. they simply chose not to vote at all. for people who hated trump, the choice wasn’t harris vs trump. it was harris vs “fuck it, i’ll just stay home”.
in 2020, trump received 74m votes, biden 81m. in 2024, trump received 77m votes, Harris 75m.
what that means, in a nutshell, was that biden, an incompetent delusional with one foot in the grave and a tenuous grip on his mind, was popular enough to bring out six million more votes in his favor than his younger replacement four years later. given that the american population increased by about nine million from 2020 to 2024, that is an even clearer demonstration of the problem.
harris just didn’t have the support of the people who would have made the difference. if she had been able to count on the support of even just the same people who had voted for biden and not attracted a single new voter, she would have had four million more votes and likely the presidency.
so what cost her the election, other than misogyny and racism from the center and center-right?
there’s a long list of problems with her candidacy. the first one that pops up isn’t quite an elephant in the room, more of a camel. her stance on middle-eastern politics cost her votes across the board. she refused to stand up for jews and that cost her votes among both jews on the left, who would normally have voted for a democratic candidate and certainly voted for biden in droves, and christians in the center and center-right, who were single-issue voters on israel. she was also not pro-“palestinian” enough for much of the non-jewish left. so she lost a massive quantity of votes on that side, too.
that is only one example, of course, but her lawyer tendency to pick a middle-ground point of non-commitment works well in a courtroom but not so well on the campaign trail or in government. nobody knew exactly where she stood on that issue. that didn’t mean they went to trump but it did mean they didn’t feel they had a reason to show up at the polls. if she had taken a side decisively, she would have alienated one of the two groups but at least managed to motivate the other side to vote for her. on issues where people don’t have strong feelings or tend to vote single-issue, a middle-ground position might be acceptable as a strategy. nobody in america takes a middle ground on israel and a surprisingly large portion of the population really do treat israel as their deciding factor for or against candidates – as we are seeing on both sides of the new york city mayoral election at the moment.
beyond israel, the most significant issue with harris from a policy perspective was her take on law-enforcement. as a prosecutor, she sided with the police and the law. that makes her attractive to a conservative audience but not to a liberal or leftist one. it likely won her some votes in the center-right, maybe even the center. but, for those of us on the left, that can be a deciding factor – especially with young voters.
when the young liberal and leftist electorate is in the streets chanting “all cops are bastards”, a law-and-order presidential candidate is a hard sell. none of us would ever support trump or any other republican. but many on my side of the political spectrum would just see another status-quo police supporter who supports the prison system and locking people up. that alone would likely have lost her the democratic primary regardless of any other policy. biden was certainly not with us on abolishing the police but he had no real connection to law-enforcement and his candidacy was against the backdrop of trump’s policies killing more than a million in america alone from pandemic mismanagement, turning the 2020 election into a referendum on emergency healthcare more than policy in general.
another massive sticking-point against harris for many voters on the left and center-left is her position on abortion. her position, which she has stated repeatedly, including during her “meet the press” interview in september 2023 where she specifically talked at length about it, is that abortion should be federally-protected up to 22 weeks. in other words, she supports a federal abortion protection that looks very much like the limited protections of roe v wade. that is extremely limited abortion rights and many abortion rights groups agree with me that it is unacceptable in a candidate who claims to represent the rights of women.
while about a third of the american public, according to yougov/nyt polling, supports unrestricted abortion rights, that third is exactly the segment of the electorate responsible for supporting any potential democratic candidate. harris was completely out-of-step with the majority of her voters on an issue even she admitted was key for her. in attempting to appeal to undecided conservatives who want restricted abortion rights and parental consent requirements, she alienated a much larger portion of center-left and leftist voters who are abortion-absolutist single-issue voters. unrestricted (especially underage) abortion rights are the primary deciding issue for many on the left, not between supporting democrat or republican but between showing up at all. and abortion rights activists are some of the most vocal when it comes to getting the vote out and campaigning for candidates, something harris was desperately in need of with her short campaign.
just as important to the left and center-left is the queer community, where harris often says she fully supports people but, when it comes to specifics, rarely does. her positions on transgender issues, in particular, are much more similar to republican views than those associated with us on the left. during the election, she avoided any specific questions about trans issues, simply saying she would “follow the law”, whenever they were raised. she may have thought that was a clever way to sidestep the issue but the queer community and its allies heard that as nothing but a clear declaration it wasn’t worth supporting trans people publicly because it was politically problematic.
while i repeatedly discussed and wrote about this during her campaign – and biden and obama’s, for that matter – it became even clearer with the release of her memoir, “107 days”, that she sides with conservatives in the same way newsom and buttigieg recently have, demonstrating that the democratic party of today is willing to throw the trans community under the bus every time. some say this is because democratic leaders like harris are out of touch because they are baby-boomers. i suspect it is just a reflection of their conservatism rather than anything to do with their age. my parents and their friends have a decade or two on harris and have no such issues with the trans community.
she also made it very clear that she only supported a guaranteed right to gender-affirming care when that care was “medically-necessary” and that parental rights, for her, trumped the rights of trans children, not to mention the rights of trans adults not being able to access care not deemed necessary by medical providers – unlike elective care provided routinely without government intervention for cosmetic procedures. she even refused to support mandated rights of things as basic as children choosing names and pronouns at school or having access to puberty-blockers until they were older to delay irreversible damage the wrong puberty might cause.
while these might seem like trivial issues to conservatives, this lack of support for the trans community was an overwhelming issue for much of the left, leading people to declare “never kamala” and even campaigning for their friends and coworkers to protest by not voting.
the other nail in the coffin for the left and center-left supporting harris’ candidacy was her stance on immigration and border control. there are few issues as holistically clear left of center as immigration policy. we nearly universally believe in open borders. harris, however, was very clear about wanting stronger border security, reduced immigration and fewer undocumented immigrants. her position was certainly not as violent as trump’s and she was vocally opposed to his mass-deportations and family separations. but she even went so far as to release a campaign ad stating she supported increasing border patrol agent numbers and tightening security along the border to prevent migration.
beyond these, she was also unpalatable to the left and center-left because of her refusal to support universal basic income, universal free healthcare for everyone, universal mandated vaccination, standardized non-privatized education, the elimination of religious exemptions and public religious programs like religious schools, elimination of tuition fees for college students and federal protections against censorship and book bans, though none of those likely had significant impacts on the election results. they just made her a less-desirable candidate to a large segment of the electorate who already saw her as a conservative who just happened to be less-extreme than trump.
during the period when biden was running and it was still expected he would drop out and a primary would take place, i strongly advocated for newsom as the best candidate. not as the best possible president of the possibilities in the democratic party but the best candidate overall in terms of being able to be elected and being able to govern acceptably. his position has somewhat changed since then in some significant ways but i still believe he would have been the strongest candidate in terms of winning the election against trump, though probably not as close to acceptable in the white house, mostly for his failure to support vulnerable communities like trans people and his willingness to engage with conservatives instead of treating them like the enemies they are.
the most significant point in his favor is that he is an experienced leader of a powerful state while harris was a half-term senator with no other political experience and realistically no personal support, only a party willing to push her as an alternative to trump.
lots of options would have been better than harris, though, not just newsom. whitmer, pritzker, shapiro, buttigieg, even hochul. harris was just a silly mistake from the obama-biden acid trip who will hopefully crawl back under her rock and stay there where she should never have surfaced from.
as far as misogyny goes, i strongly support women in political leadership. there certainly aren’t enough women in the democratic party, especially at the national level. some good female leaders at the state-governor level like tina kotek or muriel bowser just aren’t presidential-candidate strength yet in terms of name recognition and funding, though kotek especially would have made a great president if she could have been elected.
someone like lauren underwood or shontel brown is just too junior to get generalized party support.
being a good candidate doesn’t just mean being a good potential president. it means being someone the party and the general public might actually support with enough money and enthusiasm — as well as being a good potential president.
there were good potential candidates who were women — gretchen whitmer likely at the top of the list in terms of both electability and leadership.
she’s done good things for michigan. tina kotek has been good for oregon but oregon is a difficult stepping-stone to the presidency, while michigan is a powerhouse of political support and money.
while i think a black candidate could certainly have won, if a good black candidate had been available, there really wasn’t one on offer. wes moore doesn’t have the national support necessary and nobody in the black caucus was either senior or known enough to get support.
yvette clarke has the recognition but i doubt even the democratic party or the rest of the black congress would see her as a serious candidate at this point. ayanna pressley has the charisma and gravitas to get wide popular support but her stance on jewish issues and arab-nationalism makes her a dangerous choice, as much as she positions herself well on many other issues.
the issues with harris are not gender or ethnicity. i think those made her more difficult to get elected because of an outdated electorate that does have deep-seated misogyny and anti-black sentiment. but that’s not at all my issue with her. it’s about her policies and her background. her policies look like biden’s and obama’s. in other words, they look like old-fashioned republican policies. my issues with harris are with how she would treat minorities and people without healthcare or employment. they are exactly the same problems i had with biden, a white man.