Policy is more important perhaps — but that’s not what will make history
As Democrats gather in Chicago, the most remarkable of the storylines is going strangely unremarked: America in 2024 might finally elect a woman president. The personal differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — gender being just one of them — is so stark that they will overwhelm the issues. So she needs to use this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago to win hearts far more than minds.
One could argue, of course, that politics should be identity-blind, and that only policy and competence should matter to the voters. Generally, that’s how I personally tend to prefer things. But that kind of thinking gets hard to sustain considering the specific fact that no woman has ever been elected to the highest US office. And, realistically, it would also require having never met the voters.
Human beings are not so gender blind. No women anywhere could even vote before about a century ago—meaning there were no true democracies. The first country to extend the vote to women was New Zealand in 1893 (and even there they were barred from running for office until 1919). In the US, women were only were awarded the vote in 1920, sadly lagging after key countries in Europe.
Moreover, many countries are way ahead of America in electing women leaders as well.The US lags behind Britain (leading the pack with three, all from the Conservative party), Germany (Angela Merkel served as chancellor for 16 years, until 2021), India (Indira Gandhi actually governed twice), Italy, Israel, Argentina, Brazil and now Mexico.
I am the father of two daughters, and I recall their joy at the prospect of the US finally catching up in 2016; it felt like a breakthrough moment, whatever one thought of the candidates otherwise (we forgot about the Electoral College, which rendered Hilary Clinton’s 3-million-vote margin irrelevant).
This time around, the election is personal even beyond the gender issue—because of the singularity of Trump. The importance of the particular candidate is evident in the swing that followed Biden’s (predicted) departure (perhaps 5 percent nationally in an average of the polls).
How could this be, in a supposedly deliberative democracy? Are the people simpletons, simply swayed by shiny things? Some yes, but far from most. Rather, it’s that on the matter of the issues, people’s positions are mostly set, and there is no clear advantage to either side.
This is not merely because we have taken many steps in the direction of idiocracy (the below clip from the movie, intended as parody, inches ever closer to documentary, at least if Trump rallies are any sign).
Before we fully degenerate, then, let’s take a moment to examine these issues.
The Democratic side is far more closely aligned with public opinion on several major ones, to be sure: Health care (Pew finds most Americans favor some version of Medicare for all), gun policy (Gallup says most Americans favor stricter gun control and understand the connection between laxness and America’s insane gun death rates), and abortion (by 2-to-1 Americans want abortion to be legal in all or most cases). Most Americans also do not approve of the authoritarian direction Trump wants to drag the country toward (less than a third say they want “a strong leader”).
But the Republicans have certain advantages of their own. At least as regards public perceptions, the Republicans are aligned with a national impatience with the perceived tolerance of illegal immigration—in the U.S. exactly as in Western Europe (see our story from Britain). They also find a willing audience for their claim that the inflation of recent years was fueled by public spending, especially the Covid stimulus package of 2021. Their tough talk on crime also resonates with many (perhaps the one issue where Harris, a former prosecutor, might offer a measure of surprise).
And although most Americans approve of DEI programs, the Republicans’ cultural wars don’t fall on deaf ears in the critical political middle, and even across broader population there is unease with the Woke movement (Pew finds 57 percent of Americans agreeing that people today are too easily offended by what others say).
Other issues also break even. On the question of free trade versus tariffs, Americans still lean slightly toward the former, which might help the Democrats—but not necessarily so in the swing states where elections are won. America’s allies are terrified of a Trump return, but on foreign policy voters are quite ambivalent. On truly huge questions like what to do about artificial intelligence upending the labor market, or about Big Tech gaining too much power, all is confusion on all sides of politics.
In short, the issues are confounding and largely balance out. It is a wash.
What is not a wash is that Americans seem to understand quite well the fundamentally warped nature of Trump. Less than a third believe his lies about the supposed theft of the 2020 election (shockingly high, but a clear minority nonetheless) and according to Pew, 64 percent consider him mean-spirited and few see him as honest in any way (PolitiFact locates three-quarters of his public statements on the range from “mostly false” to “pants on fire”).
Twice impeached and now a convicted felon, the increasingly incoherent and genuinely preposterous Trump is simply implausible for governing the world’s indispensable country. Biden’s advantage in 2020 was not much more than that he was not implausible. That’s his 7-million vote advantage right there (which sufficed only barely, again due to the Electoral College).
As if to prove his utter absurdity, Trump claimed victory nonetheless — a first in American history.
But this year, Biden was revealed to have an implausibility of his own—the product of an additional four years of superannuation. Most voters concluded he was simply way too old—a less reprehensible implausibility than Trump’s, but a more devastating one nonetheless. His advantage was wiped out, and so he had to go.
Harris has turned that around merely by not being implausible.
But what about her gender? Have we not too many sexists for this to actually work? After all, for all the progress made toward gender equality, huge gaps and problems remain. As of 2023, women in the US earn about 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, and they hold less wealth, with their retirement savings averaging only 70% of men’s. Women hold few CEO positions in large companies and bear a disproportionate share of unpaid labor. Domestic violence remains a problem, and now the US is going in the direction of endangering abortion rights, alone among developed nations.
Still, just over half the voters are women, and the men are coming around. This may finally be the moment when being a woman is advantageous in politics. Pew finds that 53 percent of American adults and almost two-thirds of women want more women in public office. That, at a time when the issues offer no real advantage to either side, may be the crucial tipping point. Policy and in turn practice would surely follow. Better late than never.
So what about the Democratic Convention? After all, there is more talk about pro-Palestinian protesters there than women suffragettes.
Well, for all the talk of Democratic euphoria in recent weeks, Harris is not widely loved. She is somehow reminiscent of the last Democratic nominee to come out of a Chicago convention, Hubert Humphrey: a former local official, senator and veep who was still something of an enigma.
That is Harris’ real challenge at the convention: It’s a tremendous spotlight under which to win over hearts much more than minds.
If she succeeds, that will leave France as one of the few major Western powers to have never been governed by a woman: We love its chic, but liberty and equality still bow before fraternity over there. If the US finally parts ways with that tradition, the cry will resound across the globe: Vive l’Amerique!
