Why did white women and the Democratic base abandon Kamala Harris? My view from the campaign trail

On the Saturday before Election Day, I travelled from Washington DC to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend one of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ last campaign rallies.

It was extraordinary how many women were in the crowd – young Black women in particular. There were also older, suburban, white women who looked like they could have been Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s sister or cousin.

There were many men, who were just as enthusiastic. But they were far outnumbered by the women.

Harris was warm and charismatic, and the women in the crowd had such a huge reaction to her. They saved their biggest cheers for her lines about reproductive rights – North Carolina has very strict abortion restrictions, which are affecting women across the state.

Overall, though, I got a sense of cautious optimism from the crowd. There was absolutely no complacency. People were very nervous and anxious about the impending election against Donald Trump, especially since North Carolina was one of the seven key battleground states. You could sense a kind of distrust in the broader American electorate.

Cynical decision-making and misogyny

One of the focal points of Harris’ campaign was her outreach to women voters. She made this election about freedom for women to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive health.

And while this message did resonate with many women – in particular younger women – it didn’t with others. According to exit polls by the Associated Press, 47% of women over the age of 45 voted for Trump, as well as 43% of women aged 18-44. More than half of white women overall also voted for Trump (53%).

Exit polls by CNN also found that while Harris did better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 with white women with college degrees, white women without degrees overwhelmingly supported Trump.

This says a lot about the decisions that some women made in the election. It seems possible that what Trump was able to do was give these women enough wiggle room to reconcile what might seem to be otherwise irreconcilable. For instance, they could perhaps believe that Trump wouldn’t actually implement a national abortion ban, simply because he has said he would not. Or they may simply believe that Trump’s policies wouldn’t necessarily apply to them.

I think this led to some potentially cynical decision-making among voters, much as there was in 2016.

And as expected, Harris also did worse than Trump among men. At least some of this - alongside the voting patterns of white women - comes down to structural racism and misogyny and the toxic mix of the two. Trump’s entire campaign was structured around appealing to men and mobilising them to vote, in particular younger men.

There was clearly a level of discomfort among men with the idea of a woman president. And there’ll be a lot of recriminations about Harris’ inability to appeal to those men, even though she had an entire event devoted to “white dudes” and put forth an economic plan specifically for Black men.

I think she did run an effective campaign overall, judging it on the basis of campaign tactics, but the underlying structures and divisions of American politics were hard to overcome. Trump didn’t create these divisions, but he exploits them like no one else can.

This is also partly because the Democrats – even Harris’ campaign – seemed either unwilling or unable to really address these structural divisions, economic inequality and their own role in the greatly changed economy in the US, dating back to the decisions of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

Where to now for the Democrats?

Harris also had to walk this impossible line in attempting to be the “change candidate” while not disavowing the Biden administration.

There’s been a lot of attention in the US media today about a moment in early October on The View, a popular talk show, in which Harris was asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, if given the chance. And she said nothing came to mind.

It’s entirely possible the Democrats will take the wrong lesson out of this campaign. There are recriminations already coming from the right of the party that Harris had moved too far to the left and should have spent more time trying to appeal to Republican voters in states like Pennsylvania.

But I think you could make the opposite argument – that the Democrats failed to listen to their base in places like Michigan, where there was so much anger for the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. In the Democratic primaries earlier this year, for instance, some 100,000 people in Michigan voted “uncommitted” instead of for Biden.

And when you consider the fact that Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian representative in Congress, was re-elected with a huge majority in Michigan, as was Representative Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, this suggests Harris’ campaign did not mobilise the base in the way that it needed to. They didn’t listen to what the base was telling them.

The Democrats need to look now at offering real structural economic change that addresses inequality and a reassessment of the US role in the world.

They can’t underestimate the appeal of Trump’s line about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance – that this wouldn’t have happened under a Trump presidency. Many Americans are exhausted with American-led wars or American involvement in wars overseas - and I think that’s another thing the Harris campaign and Biden administration were either unable or unwilling to hear that.

Emma Shortis is Director of the International and Security Affairs program at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.