Did Harris lose because of gender + race?
No. Low economic vibes would have defeated any Democratic nominee.
Source: Hillary Clinton page on facebook.com
Hot takes (circumstantial evidence, not statistical proof)
Some analysts concluded that Harris lost because she is a black woman.
Most presidential elections are decided by voters’ feelings about the economy.
Voters’ bad vibes about the economy were Harris’ biggest problem.
No party has ever retained the White House with consumer sentiment as low as it was before the 2024 election.
Obama was re-elected in 2012 and Harris lost in 2024. Obama’s advantages over Harris were being an elected president running for re-election and better consumer sentiment. Gender may have been less of a factor.
Obama was re-elected in 2012 and Clinton lost even though consumer sentiment was higher in 2016. But, Obama’s 2012 success may show the power of incumbency more than the superior appeal of a male candidate.
Barack Obama’s success and the losses by Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton can be explained by consumer sentiment and incumbency.
The case that Harris lost to racism and misogny
Nadira Goffe stated her case in slate.com:
“When faced with the options of chaos, greed, and anger or relative common sense … wielded by a competent, qualified Black woman—voters overwhelmingly chose the former. It wasn’t the fascism-loving guy who spurred an insurrection whom they couldn’t trust. It was the Black woman…this country will always default to its original tenets of racism and misogyny in the face of fear, frustration, or just plain dissatisfaction…If Harris … couldn’t win in 2024, maybe no Black woman can.”
On PBS, Errin Haines of 19thnews.org identified gender as the key factor:
“what do we know about who we are as a country this year? That America is still not yet ready to elect a woman to lead our country… And when you think about American voters really prioritizing the economy, immigration, maybe not seeing a woman as the person that embodied the characteristics of strength or power around those issues, I think that this was absolutely an election that was gendered.”
My take: Harris lost to feelings about the economy
Could Trump have been defeated if the Democrats had replaced President Biden as nominee with another white man – e.g., Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro? Or, let’s suppose Democrats had foreseen their sliding support with Hispanic men and nominated Ruben Gallego, who has just been elected Senator from Arizona. Could Gallego have defeated Trump as handily as he beat Trump’s disciple Kari Lake?
We will never know. However, I don’t see compelling evidence that even a perfect white man or perfect Hispanic male candidate could have won for the Democrats.
Presidential elections are largely decided by voters’ “feelings about the economy, stupid!” The Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) for October just before the presidential election tells us how voters are feeling about the economy and how they judge the White House party’s management of the economy.
There have been 19 presidential elections since the University of Michigan began reporting ICS in 1952. Look at the 9 elections when voter economic vibes as measured by ICS were lowest. The candidate for the party holding the White House lost 8 of those 9 low-vibe elections. With October 2024 consumer sentiment at the 4th-worst level before a presidential election, there’s no surprise that Vice President Harris lost.
Sources: ICS (= Index of Consumer Sentiment) in October just before each November election. October 2024 reading is based on this author’s calculation of the adjustment necessary to render ICS comparable to readings before the April 2024 change in survey methodology. 1952, 1976 = November. No October readings those years.
Note: Incumbent party shares of the 2-party vote – a better measure than shares of total votes including minor parties.
In fact, Harris did rather well to finish just 1.5 percentage points behind Trump in the national popular vote at a time when voters’ pre-election economic vibes were so low.
Did Clinton do better than Harris because Hillary is white?
Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump was a nightmarish sequel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. However, Harris did even worse than Hillary. While both lost the state-by-state Electoral College, at least Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote in 2016.
Can we conclude that Clinton did better than Harris because Hillary is white?
NO. Hillary Clinton did better than Kamala Harris at least partly because underlying conditions gave Democrats a better chance to defend the White House in 2016.
Americans were feeling much better about the economy before the 2016 election than in 2024. ICS at 87.2 just before the 2016 election was just above the long-term average level of 86.2. 2024 consumer sentiment was closer to the depressed level of 1980 when President Carter lost by more than 10 percentage points. Yet, Harris’ share of the 2-party vote was far better than Carter’s in 1980 and not far behind Hillary’s 2016 share.
Did Obama do better than Hillary because Barack is male?
Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election sticks out as the one winner when vibes were relatively low. Obama did better in 2012 in both the national popular vote and Electoral College than Clinton in 2016 even though consumer sentiment was weaker before Obama’s re-election.
Is Errin Haines right that gender is a decisive factor? Did Barack Obama as a black man face less voter mistrust than Hillary Clinton as a white woman?
Obama’s advantage in 2012 relative to Clinton in 2016 was that he was an incumbent president running for re-election. Professor John Kane argues that:
“many citizens generally believe that … presidents should be afforded two terms… incumbency status possesses an inherent effect”
My back-of-the-spreadsheet estimate is that, after allowing for voters’ feelings about the economy as measured by ICS, elected Presidents running for re-election finish over 3.5 percentage points higher than new candidates trying to extend a governing party’s hold on the White House. (In 2024, President Biden lost his incumbency advantage as his diminished abilities became apparent.)
Had Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2008, she would have defeated Senator McCain in the midst of the financial crash presided over by the Republican administration. As incumbent president in 2012, Hillary might have had a fighting chance to defeat Mitt Romney even with consumer sentiment at 82.6.
Suppose Barack Obama had then won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. As a non-incumbent with voters feeling just average about the economy, Obama might have lost narrowly to Trump just as Clinton did.
The actual results – Obama won in 2008 and 2012 and Clinton lost in 2016 – can be explained by consumer sentiment and incumbency without looking at gender.
Did Obama do better than Harris because Barack is male?
Obama won a relatively close re-election race, while Harris lost narrowly. Is the gap between ICS at 82.6 for Obama in 2012 and 79 for Harris in 2024 really enough to explain the difference in outcomes?
YES. The other back-of-the-spreadsheet estimate in my “2 keys to the White House” EconomyStupid Model (ESM) is that one more ICS point is worth 0.8 percentage points as a share of the 2-major-parties vote to the candidate for the party trying to keep the White House. Obama’s 3.6-ICS-point advantage over Harris amounts to a 2.9 percentage point boost in vote share – enough to convert a narrow loss (Harris in 2024) into a narrow win (Obama 2012). In other words, if consumer sentiment had rebounded to 82.6 by October 2024, Harris might well have won.
Plus, Obama benefited from being the incumbent president running for re-election.
Thus, it’s perfectly plausible to explain Obama’s success and Harris’ failure based on consumer sentiment and incumbency without regard to gender.
Yes, I know that I can’t prove my take
You can’t prove that Harris lost because she was a woman just because Trump defeated Kamala in 2024 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
We can’t run the experiments needed to estimate the role of gender and race in presidential elections – Josh Shapiro or Ruben Gallego or Gavin Newsom vs. Donald Trump. Or, even better Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom vs. Nikki Haley.
More than 155 million Americans voted. No doubt some are misogynists and/or racists. However, some members of this group would vote for any Republican Party candidate against any Democrat in every election. The questions are:
How many of Trump’s 77.3 million voters turned out to vote against Harris instead of staying home or voting for Robert Kennedy Jr. or some other fringe candidate, if the Democratic candidate had been a non-black man?
How many of Trump’s 77.3 million voters would have voted Democratic if the nominee had been a non-black man?
How many Democratic-leaning voters stayed home or voted for a fringe party because Harris is a black woman instead of voting Democratic if the candidate had been a man or not black?
Of Kamala Harris’ 75 million voters, how many supported her solely because she was a black woman either from turn-out or vote-switching?
I do recognize that my “2 keys to the White House” framework focusing on only consumer sentiment and incumbency is not strong enough to offer conclusive proof that gender or race did not play a role. After all, my EconomyStupid Model (ESM) backcasts the wrong candidate winning the national popular vote in 4 of the past 19 presidential elections – 1960, 1968, 2012, 2016. I certainly can’t answer the above questions with ESM.
Nonetheless, I take some comfort using consumer sentiment to place Kamala Harris’ loss in another context. Vice President Harris’ loss in 2024 with economic vibes at a low ebb was similar to Trump losing in 2020, Bush the elder losing in 1992 and Carter losing in 1980. In fact, Harris did better than expected based just on low vibes.
In a free and fair election Americans chose a man like Donald Trump. The Donald won because voters were feeling glum about the economy and blamed the Democratic Party – not because Trump was a white man running against a black woman. I’m not sure that thought can sustain me through the troubles to come, but that’s all the cold comfort I have to offer.
Was consumer sentiment low because of Harris?
(The following section is for consumer sentiment nerds only.)
Was consumer sentiment low before the 2024 election because Americans lost confidence in the future of the economy after female Harris replaced male Biden as Democratic candidate?
NO. Consumer sentiment declined sharply during the 2021-22 vibecession first identified by Kyla Scanlon. The subsequent vibecovery in consumer sentiment was relatively weak. Low economic vibes were already in place this summer when Americans believed Joe Biden’s insistence that he would run for re-election. In fact, with Harris as Democratic nominee, ICS actually rose from 74 in July when Biden withdrew to 79 in October.
In the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey for November 2024, ICS rose 1.8% in one month to 80.4.
However, this rise in ICS does not reflect Americans having more confidence in President Trump’s economic management because he is a man. Professor Robert Gordon and his colleagues point out that ICS is likely subject to a “honeymoon effect” after a new president is elected – the same phenomenon that inflates an incoming president’s approval rating. For example, ICS jumped 16% in November 1992 after male Bill Clinton defeated male George H.W. Bush.
ICS rose 2.3% in August 2024 after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as Democratic candidate. Just as the August 2024 ICS increase is NOT evidence that Americans were more confident because a woman might be president, the latest ICS increase is NOT a sign that Americans are now more confident because Trump the man will be president and Harris the woman will not.