For women, 2016 was bad. 2024 hurts even more

The women didn’t win it.

Despite high hopes that women, particularly college-educated women and young women, would turn out in numbers big enough to win the election for Kamala Harris, America has passed on its second historic opportunity to elect a female president.

For the second time, the US electorate has turned its back on a female presidential candidate.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

If we thought the desolation in 2016 was bad, when a fresher Donald Trump trounced the highly qualified Hillary Clinton, it is worse now.

The dire consequences of abortion bans for women’s health are now evident and will continue under a Trump presidency.

The Trump campaign amounted to an open-carry licence to misogyny and contempt for femininity.

It gave social permission for the worst kind of sexism and nastiness towards women.

It didn’t matter.

Trump’s closest advisers are mostly men.

The cabinet appointees he is likely to make will be mostly men.

He has talked about giving former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer, dominion over “women’s health”.

Apart from being a convicted felon, Trump has been accused by about 27 women of sexual misconduct.

The fact that this barely rated a mention on the election trail is deeply dispiriting.

But it seems perfectly apposite – because it’s clear that the critical mass of American voters didn’t care.

The Republican campaign was soaked with misogyny, from the speaker at the Madison Square Gardens rally who spoke of Harris’ “pimp handlers” to Trump’s own remarks about Republican-turned-Harris supporter Liz Cheney being gunned down by a firing squad.

At a rally this week, Trump stopped just shy of calling former Democrat House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “bitch”.

The baying crowd supplied the word for him.

Other common epithets he uses for women include “crazy”, “unhinged”, and “nasty”.

His running mate, J.D. Vance, has shown a long and creepy preoccupation with female fertility.

JD Vance seemed obsessed with female fertility, but will nevertheless be vice president.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a stake in the future of the country were widely reported and deemed disastrous for the Trump campaign.

They didn’t make a dent in it.

In a 2020 podcast interview, during a discussion about the benefits of grandparents helping to raise kids, Vance appeared to agree with the host when he said, “that’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female”.

Not only did the Trump campaign not seek to hide its rank masculinity, it revelled in it.

It was the secret sauce special ingredient that was deployed to lure Trump-leaning men out to vote.

It is too early to conduct a post-mortem, and too early to parse the electoral results county by county.

But it seems clear that the pro-Trump result is reasonably uniform, a red sweep across the United States, uninterrupted by issues affecting women.

Harris needed white women to turn and turn out for her – they account for about 59 million voters, the biggest bloc in America, according to The New York Times.

In the 2016 election, only 45 per cent of white women voted for Hillary Clinton.

Most white women voted for Trump in that election, and it seems the pattern was repeated in 2024.

Donald Trump might get to add to his Supreme Court appointments. Credit: AP

Abortion was consistently rated in polls as one of the top three issues of concern to voters, behind the economy and immigration.

Since the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, abortion restrictions or outright bans have been enacted in 21 states.

That Supreme Court decision was made possible by Trump’s conservative judicial appointments, which fulfilled a promise he made before taking office.

This time, if Republicans control the Senate, he could possibly appoint the majority of the court, paving the way for further fertility rights restrictions, not to mention incursions on the rights of LGBTQI people.

The abortion restrictions have resulted in disruptions in pregnancy care generally, the consequences of which have been widely reported.

Doctors report holding off giving life-saving medical care to pregnant women for fear they may be jailed. Women have been forced to carry untenable pregnancies. Women have died unnecessary deaths after being refused emergency obstetric care.

The election result is probably widely attributable to voters’ anxieties about the economy and abortion.

Misogynistic rhetoric and women’s rights probably don’t matter too much to many people struggling to pay bills and battling to keep a foothold in an inflationary economy.

But then there is the inkling that is so difficult to ignore.

It cannot be proven by any poll, but we all suspect it – America was not going to elect a female president and not a female president of colour.

Not only did the women not win it for Harris, the woman didn’t win.

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