Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Democrats bet on women showing up in force. They didn’t.

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At least one thing was taken for granted before voting day – women across the US were going to turn out for Kamala Harris.

Just as months of relentless polling showed Harris in a virtual tie with Donald Trump, many of those same surveys told the story of a yawning gender gap.

It was a strategy Harris’s team was betting on, hoping that an over-performance among women could make up for losses elsewhere.

It didn’t happen.

Across the country, the majority of women did cast their ballots for Harris, but not by the historic margins she needed. Instead, if early exit polls bear out, Harris’s advantage among women overall – around 10 points – actually fell four points short of Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Democrats suffered a 10 point drop among Latino women, while failing to move the needle among non-college educated women at all, who again went for Trump 63-35, preliminary data suggests, external.

The shortfall was not for lack of trying.

Throughout her 15-week campaign, much of Harris’s messaging was aimed directly at women, most obviously with her emphasis on abortion.

On the trail, Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her pitch. She repeatedly reminded voters that Trump had once bragged about his role in overturning Roe v Wade – a ruling that ended the nationwide right to an abortion.

“I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justice took away from the women of America,” Harris said at her closing address in DC last week.

Her most powerful advertisements featured women who had suffered under state abortion bans – deemed “Trump abortion bans” by Harris – including those who said they were denied care for miscarriages.

The strategy, it seemed, was to harness the same enthusiasm for abortion access that drove Democrats’ unexpected success in the 2022 midterms.

Abortion rights remain broadly popular – this Gallup poll in May suggested, external only one in 10 Americans thought it should be banned.

And even these election results seemed to underline that. Eight out of the 10 states where abortion was on the ballot voted in favour of abortion rights.

But that support did not translate into support for Harris.

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