Kamala Harris’s Secret Weapons

The racist and sexist attacks on Democratic nominee-in-waiting Kamala Harris were as predictable as they were familiar for those who watched Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vie for the Oval Office job. A “DEI hire,” sneered Republican Representative Tim Burchett. A “childless cat lad[y]” with no “direct stake” in America because she had not given birth to children, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said (perhaps forgetting that no U.S. president has ever given birth). “Laughing Kamala,” Donald Trump dubbed her, while Fox news ran a video of “giggling” Harris laughing in a variety of situations. It’s “one reason voters seem to detest Kamala Harris,” host Sean Hannity said.

Here we go again. But this time, it’s a double whammy—not only is Harris being hit for her “otherness” (including desperate attempts to say she is not qualified to run for president because her parents were not born in the United States), but she is getting the same gender-based treatment Hillary Clinton did in 2008 and 2016, with conservative foes calling her unqualified (despite a long career in public service), and the crude crowd on social media referring to her “sordid sexual history” and calling her the “side chick” who slept her way to the top after briefly dating former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown decades ago.

Obama survived the racist assaults to win, helped by the late Senator John McCain pushing back against the bigotry launched at his general election foe; and while she garnered a majority of the popular vote, Clinton barely lost her presidential race to Trump, who needled her relentlessly with gender-based comments. Can Harris overcome both lines of attack—especially since Trump has made such bias-based attacks central to his campaign?

As recently as 2020, the answer might have been no, with pundits predicting that America was “not ready” for a Black and Asian female to hold the world’s most powerful job. The chattering class has argued that America’s first female president would have to be someone in the mold of a Margaret Thatcher—conservative, “traditional” (reportedly cooking for her husband nightly, and sometimes for her cabinet), and less threatening to men. Worries about a Black and Asian woman’s electability abound, especially with a second Trump presidency a real possibility. (I have articulated some of them myself in these pages.) Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, displaying a clinical cluelessness about the importance of abortion rights to Democratic women in particular, penned a The New York Times op-ed before President Joe Biden dropped out arguing for Democrats to nominate Republican Senator Mitt Romney—a “safe” white guy who opposes virtually everything Democratic except the desire to keep Trump out of the White House.

But this year, Harris may benefit from a perfect storm made up of shifting demographics and a post-Dobbs environment. More than three decades after the Year of the Woman sent then-record numbers of women to Congress, a Harris victory could be the prize accomplishment of another historic year for her sex—this one defined by an electoral revolt by women upset about the loss of reproductive rights.

Abortion was once a hypothetical campaign talking point because its legality was settled law. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and some states have moved aggressively to ban or severely limit abortion access, “now it is a voting issue,” Christina Reynolds, spokesperson for EMILY’s List, told me. Already, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the pro-choice side has prevailed in every state that has had a referendum on the issue—including conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Reproductive rights referendums are on the ballot in key states including Nevada, Florida, and Colorado, with Arizona likely to have one as well, and proponents believe they will spur turnout among Democrats and left-learning Independents.

Women are already a majority of voters, and since 1992, they have favored the Democratic presidential candidate, according to exit polls. White female voters, however, favored Trump in both 2016 and 2020. But even if the abortion issue isn’t salient enough for Harris to flip white women to her side, Trump’s advantage is shrinking because America is browning: white women made up 37 percent of the voting electorate in 2016, but 32 percent four years later. With the U.S. Census Bureau projecting that whites will be a minority by 2045, white women’s share of the electorate is expected to continue shrinking.

And there’s reason to believe Harris, in a post-Dobbs world, could improve among another key group: suburban female voters who can make the difference in battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. A June CNN poll found that Biden would win suburban women with 49 percent to Trump’s 43 percent. But Harris, who has been the Biden administration’s very vocal point person on reproductive rights, would take that group with 55 percent, compared to 39 percent of suburban women who said they would cast votes for Trump.

There is also a different political calculus around race this year. When Obama won in 2008, whites made up 74 percent of the vote, according to exit polls. That dropped to 71 percent in 2016 and then to 67 percent in 2020. Republican presidential candidates have won the white vote consistently for decades, but that voter group is shrinking, reducing the GOP advantage.

In just eight years, minority voters will outnumber white, non-college educated voters, William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow with Brookings Metro, told me, a “stark contrast” to the year Obama was first elected. “Clearly, the demographics are moving in a direction that if people voted like they voted for Obama,” when the makeup of the electorate was less favorable to a person of color than it is now, “the Democrats would do very well,” Frey said.

One of Harris’s biggest obstacles is the self-fulfilling prophecy of assuming a woman of color can’t get elected to high office, Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said in a webinar with reporters Tuesday. Despite women’s achievements in electoral politics, there’s never been a Black female governor, she noted. “Kamala Harris is electable,” but “there is a persistent barrier facing women: … the perception that they cannot win over electorates that have long favored white men.”

Harris has gotten off to a stellar start, quickly gathering enough delegate pledges to secure the nomination, raising record amounts of money, and fielding a rush of volunteer signups. But the exhilaration period following a tumultuous and painful few weeks for Democrats will almost certainly fade as the two-person campaign takes hold. It’s going to get ugly, and Harris will be forced to fend off more misogynistic and racist attacks from an opposing candidate who traffics in them. But it’s possible America is at another tipping point, accelerated by demographics and abortion rights, where the country can finally have a president who represents a majority in the country—women.