• BigBenis@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I hear this take all the time and frankly I think it’s lazy and rooted in the same misogyny that you claim lost both Hilary and Kamala the presidency. 48% of American voters turned out for both Clinton and Harris compared to the 51% turnout for Biden.

    Of the three, Biden was the only one who ran during a Republican administration and he had the additional advantage of running against Trump’s catastrophic handling of the 2020 COVID pandemic and despite all that he only took an extra 3% of the vote over Clinton and Harris.

    On the flip side, both Clinton and Harris ran on maintaining the deeply unpopular status quo under their own party’s administration and attempting to appeal to the center-right whilst alienating their own base and taking their vote for granted. Despite that, 48% of American voters still turned out for them and they lost to Trump’s 46% in 2016 and <50% in 2024, a less than 2% margin in both cases.

    To reduce that nuance to, “they lost because they’re women” completely ignores the fact that they ran flawed campaigns in a time of deep dissatisfaction with the status quo that they ran in support of all so you can pin their failure on their gender and perpetuate the idea that women can’t be elected to be president, something that at least 75 million American voters disagree with.