As a phone bank volunteer, I hoped to counter the Republican attacks and half-truths, but people really believed them, says journalist and podcaster Oliver Hall

Summary

Gender bias played a significant role in Kamala Harris’s defeat, with many voters—often women—expressing doubts about whether “America is ready for a female president.”

Some said they “couldn’t see her in the chair,” or questioned if a woman could lead, with one even remarking, “you don’t see women building skyscrapers.” Though some voters were open to persuasion, this often became a red line.

Oliver Hall, a Harris campaign volunteer, found that economic concerns, particularly inflation, also drove voters to Donald Trump, despite low unemployment and wage growth touted by Democrats.

Harris was viewed in conflicting ways, seen as both too tough and too lenient on crime, as well as ineffective yet overly tied to Biden’s administration.

Ultimately, Hall believes that Trump’s unique appeal and influence overshadowed Harris’s campaign efforts.

  • @[email protected]
    -25•1 month ago

    I haven’t heard of any republican threat to raise and kill everyone, but a lot are unhinged and I’m sure it happens. But it’s not a central platform of the Republicans, while being condescending of working class men is a central campaign point of the democrats, in fact it was so bad that black and Hispanic men showed up in record numbers to vote for Trump

    • @gAlienLifeform
      18•1 month ago

      I mean, no offense but the fact that you haven’t heard this just might mean you’re deep inside an echo chamber. It’s hard to have an exact measure of these thing, but Republican threats and celebrations of violence and sexual assault are at least as central to their party’s platform as being opposed to bigotry is to the Democrats party’s from where I’m sitting.

      And I’m not sure why you think being opposed to bigotry is an attack on working class men. Like, if we want to talk about the working class and poor people, let’s talk about the fact that transgender people are more likely than the average American to be living in poverty because of the discrimination they fave.

      I will say that’s an easy to miss fact because society in general doesn’t like to platform working class people because they’re not as eloquent or pretty and the Dems tend to behave the same way, so we hear more about wealthy celebrity members of queer communities and other marginalized groups. At the end of the day, tho, if you do really care about the working class you need to care about transphobic discrimination (among all the other kinds of discrimination) too, because it is absolutely a tool the capitalist class wields to keep us divided and oppressed.