Politics | Voter.org

The Myth of Female Unelectability

August 11, 2024 female, myth, Unelectability0 comment

Perhaps nothing has been more damaging to women running for office than the idea that voters simply won’t pick female candidates. There’s just one problem: It isn’t true. After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, many people, including some of her top staffers and the unsuccessful Democratic nominee herself, concluded that she had been penalized for her gender. Even two years after the election, Jennifer Palmieri, her former communications director, argued that “I think that a man would have survived” the barriers Clinton faced, such as the scandal over…

The Walz-Vance Inversion

August 7, 2024 WalzVance, Inversion0 comment

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have now selected vice-presidential nominees who hail from the Midwest, have humble backgrounds, and bear the expectation of appealing to white working-class voters. But the choices also serve as wagers on two very different theories of electoral politics. The case for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is that the progressive base will like his policy agenda and swing voters will like his style. For Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, it’s the inverse:…

Kamala Harris’s Lucky Break

August 3, 2024 Break, lucky, Kamala, Harris’s0 comment

Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on August 2, 2024 Until two weeks ago, to observe Vice President Kamala Harris was to be entertained and a little bewildered. “I love Venn diagrams!” she once told an interviewer, giggling. “It’s just somethin’ about those three circles!” She likes yellow school buses too, and her mother’s old saying about the coconut tree. She has often reached for lofty rhetoric only to come away with elegant platitudes: “What can be, unburdened by what has been”; “It’s time for us to do what we have…

The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally

July 30, 2024 Most, Moment, Trump, rally, revealing0 comment

A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.” “With every passing day,” the minister said, “we slip farther and farther into George Orwell’s tyrannical dystopia.” But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was…

Kamala Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Momala’ to the Whole Country

July 26, 2024 country, Doesn't, Kamala, whole, ‘Momala’0 comment

What makes someone a parent? It’s not the most pressing question facing the country. But in the days since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, Republicans have lobbed a personal and notably misogynistic attack against the vice president: that she’s unfit to be president because she doesn’t have biological children. “The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her,” Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer, posted on X on Sunday. Blake Masters, a venture capitalist running to represent…

The Harris Gamble

July 22, 2024 Harris, gamble0 comment

The documentarian Matt Ornstein interviewed two young Latino men in Long Beach, California, at the midpoint of the Trump presidency. They were both strong Donald Trump supporters. Why? One answered, “Trump’s smart. He knows right from wrong.” The other one scoffed, “No. No he doesn’t. He’s dumb as shit. But he’s got balls.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among male voters by 11 points. In 2020, Joe Biden ran about even with Trump among men. Clinton lost. Biden won. Now Democrats are preparing again to nominate a woman…