Kamala Harris Didn't Lose Because of Sexism, And Democrats Hurt Themselves When They Say She Did

This is a face-saving lie that absolves both Harris and Joe Biden of responsibility for their mistakes. If Democrats believe it, they'll make nominating mistakes in the future.

Dear readers,

Joe Biden, for some reason, is back on television. This morning, he told the hosts of The View he still thinks he would have beaten Donald Trump if he’d stayed on the ballot last year. He also says he “wasn’t surprised” Kamala Harris lost to Trump — Harris was well-qualified to be president, he says, but she was no match for the powerful weapon of sexism that Trump levied against her.

Biden’s analysis raises several questions, but probably the most obvious one is: If it’s unsurprising that simple sexism would cost Democrats the election if they nominated a woman, why did he endorse a woman to succeed him? Unfortunately, that question went unasked on The View.

When you’re talking to an audience of liberals, blaming any problem on misogyny is the easiest, cheapest applause line available. It’s also a trump card — if you put liberals in a position where, if they want to disagree with you, they have to argue that a specific woman’s failure wasn’t the result of sexism, they’re going to feel extremely uncomfortable making the argument. Better to just nod along, even if they disagree.

The truth is that there is no apparent gender penalty in general elections — women perform at least as well as men when they’re on the ballot. To the extent there is a gender penalty in primaries, it’s because primary voters incorrectly assume women are likely to underperform in a general election and vote accordingly. Political scientists at Stanford have found this problem can be fixed with education: if you show voters the data proving that women don’t face a penalty once nominated, they become more inclined to support women.

Then-Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, alleged white-guy whisperer and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, greeted supporters at the conclusion of a campaign rally on October 28, 2024 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images).

Unfortunately, national Democrats have been doing their best to mislead voters about gender and electability, and they’ve been doing it for the most trivial and self-serving of reasons: citing sexism as the reason women lose general elections protects the specific reputations of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. After all, without the sexism scapegoat, we might have to ascribe their failures to choices that were within their control. And as Biden is showing, the sexism excuse can even be used to protect the reputations of men, if those men make errors that ultimately cause a woman to lose an election, as Biden sure did.

Besides insulating the powerful from criticism, Democrats have another reason to use the sexism excuse: they are still trying to avoid acknowledging the real reasons why Harris lost, which would (and should) force the party to change some of its issue positions.

The biggest reason Harris lost is that she was the representative of an unpopular, incumbent administration that failed to control inflation or illegal immigration and was seen as out of touch with voters’ concerns about crime. As pollster David Shor noted on Ezra Klein’s podcast last month, Biden’s job approval was 20 points underwater by the time he left office — he was a huge liability for the party and for his vice president.¹ The second-biggest reason she lost is that she was seen as too liberal. This is also a topic Shor covers in his presentation: 49% of voters saw Harris as more liberal than themselves, while only 39% of voters saw Trump as more conservative. That too-liberal image was driven in large part by unwise choices she made during the campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, endorsing positions favored by left-wing pressure groups, like decriminalizing illegal entry and providing taxpayer-funded sex changes to imprisoned criminals and detained migrants.

The solution for Democrats next time is to be responsive to the public’s demands: They need to advocate for policies that are more popular, and they need to implement policies that produce popular results, and they need to nominate candidates who do both.² There are productive conversations about that happening in the party, but there are also very unproductive conversations happening, like whispers about nominating a white man next time specifically to avoid the sexism penalty.

These conversations are bad because they’ll cause the party to look away from women who might be strong candidates, and they’re also bad because they may cause the party to look toward men who don’t actually address the too-unpopular, too-liberal problem, like “code talker” Tim Walz.

As we’ve seen over the last eight years, Democrats’ over-obsession with the demographic factors of potential candidates can lead to multiple kinds of mistakes. Kamala Harris was chosen over stronger possible candidates for vice president because she was a black woman. Then, four years later, the underwhelming Walz got the VP nod because liberal Democrats had gotten the idea that swing voters were looking for a specific type of white guy. In both cases, they would have done much better to look toward past electoral performance instead of demographics — if Biden had put Amy Klobuchar on the ticket, she’d probably be president right now, and maybe we wouldn’t be hearing so much about sexism.

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Speaking of the future of the Democratic Party, I moderated a panel about that future earlier this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. The panel — which included Neera Tanden, a top policy official in the Biden administration who now runs the Center for American Progress — was an interesting, lively, and sometimes confrontational conversation about how Democrats should reposition ahead of 2028. I also hosted a panel on the long-run budget outlook with Paul Ryan and Steven Mnuchin, and another one about the economic prospects for GLP-1 drugs, featuring MIT professor Simon Johnson, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.³ They’re all available at the links for your viewing pleasure.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. It’s important to note that despite all of that, Harris was clearly more popular than Biden by the time the 2024 election came around. Polls showed that the electorate that was supposedly too sexist to support her was even less inclined to vote for the man they’d elected to the presidency four years earlier. As such, on a personal level, I think it’s quite galling for Biden to go on national television and claim he could have succeeded where Harris failed, especially given the incredible (and politically damaging) deference she showed to him during the presidential campaign in order to shield his ego.

2. It’s important to remember that “policy polls well” and “policy will cause you to poll well if you implement it” are distinct ideas. I wrote last year about polling that found voters’ favorite inflation fighting policies are lower interest rates and lower taxes — these ideas poll very well. But if you cut interest rates or cut taxes in an inflationary environment, you will get more inflation, not less. Voters will get mad at you about the inflation even if they thought they wanted lower interest rates. This is a mistake the Biden administration made repeatedly: they did fiscal expansions that might poll decently well in isolation (green subsidies! debt forgiveness!) but that ultimately led to unpopular inflation. The next administration ought to be more careful.

3. Technically, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.