People are resistant to accepting that sexism played a significant if not decisive role, because there's no easy path to fixing this problem, besides simply running only white male candidates - ThreadSky

christosilvia.bsky.social • 2 days ago

People are resistant to accepting that sexism played a significant if not decisive role, because there's no easy path to fixing this problem, besides simply running only white male candidates

Reposted from Will Stancil

Straight-up misogyny is the explanation for 2024 that accords best with the actual vote shifts. But for some reason if you mention it a ton of people rush out of the woodwork to go “no no no! it’s inflation and Harris’s policy choices! Which for some reason only men cared about!”

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glosson.bsky.social•2 days ago

i mean arguably the other way to fix it is to run candidates who are sufficiently unconventional and inspiring with big ideas that their identity becomes less salient than their disruptor brand to vaguely-bigoted swingy voters (e.g., Obama - young, rousing orator, perceived as non-establishment)

k8g98.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yes there is. It’s ranked choice voting.

lenoxus.bsky.social•2 days ago

The long-term solution is to run enough such candidates that they're normalized. It almost feels like a direct lag from popular culture — mere decades ago it was far, far more expected that every TV show and movie had *at most* a token woman and a token PoC, which inherently shoehorned those actors.

mkorhonen12345.bsky.social•2 days ago

”is to run enough such candidates that they're normalized.”

Isnt that little bit risky? After decades of republican rule, do you still have Fair elections?

lenoxus.bsky.social•2 days ago

Well we do need to do a ton of electoral (and more importantly judicial) reform, yes

smallmighty.bsky.social•2 days ago

It seems incredible that Democrats dont understand the country they live in

djhoch.bsky.social•2 days ago

Two straight elections with insanely qualified women candidates with popular policy positions and enough voters to swing the election saying “I would totally vote for a woman… just not *her*”

adamsson.ca•2 days ago

I'm only following this from a distance and don't fully understand the nuances of your electoral system, but the number of women elected to Congress remains 151 in 2025, the same as in 2023 and 2024. Wouldn't sexism also appear in congressional elections? Or were those races closer than in the past?

curlyangw.bsky.social•2 days ago

This effect is entirely confined to presidential elections due to different cultural expectations between congress and the presidency. See Ono 2018 (which ended up underestimating the effect compared to Catalist real results) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-018-9464-6

adamsson.ca•2 days ago

Thank you!

adamsson.ca•2 days ago

I don't doubt that sexism and likely racism played a role, perhaps even a deciding one. I'm asking out of curiosity only.

buster10.bsky.social•2 days ago

I know a few Republican dudes in the south I talked to when Haley was running in the primary. I asked them if they would vote for her and they said there is a 0% chance a woman will ever be the Republican candidate and they would never ever vote for one.

trippypea.bsky.social•2 days ago

Men will wipe themselves out eventually.

clhoffman.bsky.social•2 days ago

Lots of women I know will only vote for straight white men. We don’t trust the public anymore.

npostorino.bsky.social•2 days ago

I remember reading somewhere a female Dem presidential candidate loses 1-3% due to sexism alone. Sadly I can believe that.

rollah42.bsky.social•2 days ago

How about running anti-genocide candidates, regardless of gender or race?

camasonian.bsky.social•2 days ago

If you think Gaza had anything at all to do with the 2024 election results then you are paying zero attention to any of this. Latino men didn’t swing to Trump because of Gaza.

rollah42.bsky.social•2 days ago

not allocating percentages or assigning blame/fault, I don’t have access to data like that. It did have some sway in MI for example so it wasn’t 0. Too much to discuss, ad nauseum, but nothing solves the problem as initially posed above.

camasonian.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yes, we don’t know. But I would suggest that Trump’s anti-LGBT and anti-trans advertising blitz in MI probably swayed more conservative Muslims to his side than any sense that Trump was the better choice than Harris on Gaza.

camasonian.bsky.social•2 days ago

It was Muslim families, for example, that sued Arlington schools simply because there were LGBT characters in some of the school curriculum and they saw that as a violation of their religious rights.

kgsbca.bsky.social•2 days ago

Harris' loss was 80% misogyny 20% racism. She lost the same states as Clinton in 2016, except by slightly larger margins. That being said, that Biden just barely won in 2020, during an economy+people-killing pandemic, means there are still an awful lot of awful people out there.

peakraider.bsky.social•2 days ago

Then run white male candidates (although a black male candidate did pretty fucking well)

Winning is all that matters. Fuck the identity politics. Just win.

Probably excludes Pete too because he's gay, but again, WINNING IS ALL THAT FUCKING MATTERS

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