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.

  • raoul
    9•1 month ago

    I think that the problem is that the metric used for measuring the wages growth is an average:

    In a society where most of the wealth goes to a few, an average is not necessarily a good measure:

    I like this image from this article from the fed

    showing the part of the population having raises above the CPI

    They have the following remark below this graph:

    For example, about 57 percent of the WGT sample had positive real wage gains during 2019, whereas during 2022, only 45 percent of people had positive real wage growth. Put another way, despite higher median nominal wage growth, the share of people with positive real wage growth between 2019 and 2022 due to higher inflation fell by 12 percentage points.

    Edit, from the bottom of the article:

    Your own wage growth experience might not look like that of your neighbors or your colleagues, and it might not resemble that of the person with median wage growth either.

    • @gAlienLifeform
      7•1 month ago

      Wanna bet the places and sectors that are doing worse than median wage growth and inflation are rural and manual labor things? That second one especially I think could explain why some gen z men voted the way they did.

      • raoul
        2•1 month ago

        If I interpret the first figure of this article correctly, the 25% poorest of the population have always been ‘shafted no lube’ (pardon my economists jargon), but were about to have a wages growth above inflation; before the fight against inflation was finally won (well done, joe) and the slaves slaved again.