Do American voters have a woman problem?

Pundits who say the United States is still not ready for a female president do Kamala Harris a disservice – but there is a definite reluctance to send a woman to the White House on the crest of a progressive wave, says Mary Dejevsky

As the polls began to close across the United States, Donald Trump put out a personal appeal to men to “get off that beautiful couch… and just go out and vote”.

The call was seen as reflecting concern in the Trump camp that a strong turnout by women could clinch victory for Kamala Harris. Polling had shown that, while Trump was more popular than Harris among men, especially younger men, this would not necessarily translate into votes. In the United States, as in many other parts of the world, women tend to be more diligent about that crucial part of elections.

Given the margin of his win, Trump’s last-minute appeal was probably not needed. That he made it at all, however, needs to be borne in mind, as the lamentations flood in – as they did within minutes of the US media calling the presidency for Trump – to the effect that the United States is still not ready for a woman president. And, by the way, especially not for a Black, Asian or other ethnic minority woman president. But is this true?

A parochial contrast can certainly be drawn with the UK, given that the Conservative Party has just elected a Black woman as leader, and that we have already had three female prime ministers, albeit some more successful than others. The latest rebuff to a female presidential candidate also makes for a continuing contrast with, especially northern, Europe, where women leaders have become so usual as barely to be remarked upon.

All that said, however, gender does not seem to have been a reason for Harris’s defeat.

It may well have been a factor in Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss to Donald Trump eight years ago, when I well recall media interviews with “ordinary” voters (male and female), who said they would not vote for a woman president, full stop. But Clinton had a lot of political and personal baggage – including the downsides of her husband’s presidency, the whiff of nepotism, and her own record as US secretary of state.

She had also made a big point of her ambition to be the first female president – to the extent of booking an exhibition centre with a glass ceiling for her intended victory rally. Her gender formed a large part of her campaign.

This was not true of the Harris campaign – perhaps as a lesson learned from Clinton’s failure. Harris steered clear of highlighting either her gender or her ethnicity. She campaigned as Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, citing her career as a prosecutor and politician, and her immigrant background, but that is where any identity claims stopped.

She made a clear pitch for women’s votes on the abortion issue – a useful weapon against Trump, who had presided over the abolition of the Constitutional right to an abortion. But there was no element of gender or ethnic tokenism about her pitch to be president, and it can be argued that her campaign was all the stronger for that.

Given the result, though, it was not strong enough, by quite a long way, which can be explained mostly, if not wholly, by a host of other liabilities: her position as deputy to an unpopular president; an electorate feeling the pinch in higher bills; and the cost of US involvement, even at one remove, in two wars.

It could, and probably now will, also be argued, that a stronger candidate might have emerged had Biden decided much earlier not to seek re-election. In this, he can be blamed for the Democrats’ defeat quite as much as Harris and her campaign.

This is not to say, however, that gender may not have played a part – it may well have done, just not in the misogynistic way it certainly did in 2016 – which takes us back to Trump’s last-minute appeal to men. A host of surveys at all stages of this campaign suggests that his “Make America Great Again” pitch enjoys far more resonance among men than among women. The same goes for America First, and for Trump’s own personal history, which is somewhat rakeish, if not worse.

Men, especially young men, it would appear, see an old-fashioned, macho quality in Trump that they find appealing – and a welcome counterweight to the pressure to advance women and ethnic minorities that many younger men feel has cast them adrift.

Something similar can be seen in the appeal of the far-right parties in Europe, which attract far more men into their ranks than women, and in the renewed attraction, to some, of traditional gender roles, with women primarily as mothers and “home-makers”.

Which is also where JD Vance can be seen as more of an asset to Trump than the stereotypical former American football coach, Tim Walz, was to Harris. Whereas Walz often seemed keen to show his “softer” side, Vance – an ex-Marine from a hardscrabble background, a Yale law school graduate and a convert to Catholicism (for its traditions and family values) – offered a foil to Trump’s chequered business and personal life, without compromising the masculinity brand.

Vance also managed, at least through the campaign, to avoid the impression of wanting to impose his values on others. On abortion, for instance, he said that the question should be decided at state level, which is what the Supreme Court had decreed. This made it a harder argument for Harris to challenge than a call to end “a woman’s right to choose” on ethical grounds.

In the end, Harris may not have been the ideal presidential candidate for the Democrats, though she did a more than passable job. But the Trump campaign, less by any specific promises than by a set of cultural assumptions, managed to harness a largely under-the-radar backlash on the part of young men against a programme of progressive values they regard as discriminatory and associate with an out-of-touch elite.

You can call it “affirmative action”, or DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion), or “woke” – and it might include all of these, but it comes from a similar place as the thinking and writing of arch-conservative Jordan Peterson and the social media outpourings and scurrilous lifestyle of Andrew Tate.

This is not to say that this is how Trump-Vance will style or run their presidency – not at all. It is but one element, although a useful element, in a social coalition that Trump has been able to build over the past four years, which also includes numbers of – again, mainly male –  Black Americans and Hispanics, for whom Trump’s brand of Republicanism seems to offer more than the levelling-down they might associate with current strands of Democratic politics.

Seen in this context, however, the time for a female US president to be seen as a breakthrough may have come – and gone.

Hillary Clinton came closest, but had too much else working against her. Kamala Harris had the opportunity thrust upon her, but times had changed. When, not if, the United States elects its first female president, she may well find herself reaching the White House not on the crest of a progressive wave, but having fought her way through the same ruthlessly Darwinian process that has returned Donald Trump to the presidency for a second term.