I never said that skin colour or gender prevents someone from winning. What I am saying is that it is a disadvantage compared to running a white male candidate with the same views. Obama did not win because he was black, he won in spite of him being black (and given the Republican reaction to his campaign I think this is broadly agreeable). He won because he had a great platform, was inspiring, and the Republicans had just crashed the economy.
Nobody will refuse to vote for a white male candidate because of their gender or race. If he has good policy positions then he will receive support. White candidates get judged on policy, non-white candidates get judged on both policy and their skin colour. It’s less pronounced on the left because there are fewer racists and sexists here, but it still exists. We need to acknowledge and confront the fact that discriminatory attitudes force minority and female candidates to be better than comparable white male candidates in order to garner the same level of support.
I don’t make excuses for Kamala Harris’s positions. She was a bad candidate. But being a bad candidate doesn’t automatically cause you to lose, as Biden and Trump have proven. It is the combination of being both a bad candidate and a minority and a woman that is lethal to a presidential campaign in America.
Your comment espouses something that is fun to say and makes you feel righteous and correct when saying it but ignores reality. In particular, I point to Hispanic and Asian populations, which make up a large portion of the Democratic voting bloc, and of which a very large number are openly sexist. I am the son of Chinese immigrants, all of whom either vote Democratic or not at all. While my generation is notably far less sexist than my parents’ generation, my parents and grandparents still think that whether a woman is “biologically suited” to be president is worth discussing. It’s not just my family being an outlier either, since this way of thinking is actually pretty pervasive in the Chinese community where I live (Portland, Oregon).
Allow me to add some more nuance to this point:
I never said that skin colour or gender prevents someone from winning. What I am saying is that it is a disadvantage compared to running a white male candidate with the same views. Obama did not win because he was black, he won in spite of him being black (and given the Republican reaction to his campaign I think this is broadly agreeable). He won because he had a great platform, was inspiring, and the Republicans had just crashed the economy.
Nobody will refuse to vote for a white male candidate because of their gender or race. If he has good policy positions then he will receive support. White candidates get judged on policy, non-white candidates get judged on both policy and their skin colour. It’s less pronounced on the left because there are fewer racists and sexists here, but it still exists. We need to acknowledge and confront the fact that discriminatory attitudes force minority and female candidates to be better than comparable white male candidates in order to garner the same level of support.
I don’t make excuses for Kamala Harris’s positions. She was a bad candidate. But being a bad candidate doesn’t automatically cause you to lose, as Biden and Trump have proven. It is the combination of being both a bad candidate and a minority and a woman that is lethal to a presidential campaign in America.
Your comment espouses something that is fun to say and makes you feel righteous and correct when saying it but ignores reality. In particular, I point to Hispanic and Asian populations, which make up a large portion of the Democratic voting bloc, and of which a very large number are openly sexist. I am the son of Chinese immigrants, all of whom either vote Democratic or not at all. While my generation is notably far less sexist than my parents’ generation, my parents and grandparents still think that whether a woman is “biologically suited” to be president is worth discussing. It’s not just my family being an outlier either, since this way of thinking is actually pretty pervasive in the Chinese community where I live (Portland, Oregon).