There are going to be plenty of postmortems of the last election, trying to understand how Trump managed to win. These analyses will look at exit poll data to see what they can learn about who people voted for and why, and break it down by demographic categories. There will of course be analyses of many factors such as campaign messages, strategy, and tactics.

I looked at data on the number of votes going back to the 2008 election and have made the chart below. Each vote total is in millions, as is the US population at that time. We see that the percentage of the US population that voted this year was roughly the same as past election years, except for the sharp increase in 2020.

The one thing that jumps out (and has already been noted by others) is the huge drop in the number of votes that Kamala Harris got compared to what Joe Biden got. It was lower by a whopping 13.3 million, while Trump’s dropped by just 1.6 million. The decline in Trump’s votes can be explained by people getting disenchanted with him. But what could explain the massive drop for Harris? There was hardly any difference between Harris and Biden in terms of policies and she was a better campaigner than him.

We need to note that Trump won when running against women (Clinton, Harris) but lost when he ran against a man (Biden). This fact, coupled with the sharp drop in Harris’s vote totals, bcak to Clinton levels, suggests to me the possibility that Harris lost not because people switched to Trump but because many Biden voters could not bring themselves to vote for a woman and simply did not vote. The fact that Barack Obama was able to win suggests that being Black was not as disqualifying factor for him so that leaves gender as a possibility.

I am not saying that this was the only reason. Things are never that simple and there are many other factors would likely have contributed and there does need to be an analysis to see to what extent the Democratic party has alienated itself from the aspirations of the general population, though this having such a major effect in just four years would be hard to explain. The AP’s VoteCast survey says that people who said the economy was their main concern broke hard for Trump.

The importance of gender is purely an untested hypothesis on my part. I am sure that it will have struck many other people too but it is going to be hard to test it because it will require interrogating people who voted for Biden and did not vote for Harris. Finding non-voters is not easy. And even if they are found, they are unlikely to come right out and say that gender was the reason. They would likely find some alternative, more acceptable, reason to give, such as they felt that she would not be good at dealing with foreign leaders or the economy or some such thing. Such people may have rationalized this for themselves because most people don’t like to think of themselves as sexist.

If this hypothesis happens to have some validity, the wrong conclusion to draw would be that Democrats should only run male candidates. At times like this, I take comfort in the words of legendary journalist I. F. Stone, who said:

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” 

This is how earlier struggles by people to get civil rights played out. Those early people lost and lost before they broke through. It will be the same with getting a woman president in the US. We have to face the fact that the US is particularly backward when compared to pretty much the rest of the world in regard to their willingness to accept a woman leader.

It was the unfortunate lot of Clinton and Harris to go up against a particularly vile piece of humanity, so their losses particularly sting. We need to look on the two of them as a kind of vanguard for women’s advancement, whose defeats pave the way for a woman to win in the future. If the Trump presidency turns out to be as terrible for the country and the world as I fully expect it to be, maybe those who voted for him or abstained from voting for Harris because of her gender will experience a reckoning and reconsider their gender prejudices.

As Harris said in her concession speech:

To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win.

But here’s the thing – sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win, that doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power. And don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.

You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world.

And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.

One hopes that the third woman who attempts this will be successful.