The danger of a narrative

The problem with the "Harris lost because she's a woman" narrative is that people might believe it

There are a number of narratives already floating around about Why Kamala Lost. That’s a pretty common development shortly after a presidential election, and those narratives can be useful, especially for a losing party trying to plot a path forward. But not all narratives are equally correct, and some can actually be damaging. I want to specifically address the narrative that Harris lost because she’s a woman. I get into this to some extent in a recent episode of Andrea Jones-Rooy’s podcast “Behind the Data” (I really recommend this episode), but want to expand on this a bit here.

A key thing about narratives is that they’re generally impossible to prove or disprove. We don’t get to re-run the 2016 election with Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, for example, to see if Hillary Clinton was really the only Democrat who could have lost to Trump that year. We don’t know whether Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg would have beaten Trump in 2024, but some are willing to make that claim based on their impressions of how the election went. These are counterfactual arguments, making assumptions about how reality would be today if some other set of things had happened.

What does the evidence actually tell us about 2024?

• 2024 actually provided us with something resembling counterfactual evidence: there were two presumptive Democratic nominees. Lest we forget, Kamala Harris jumped in the race on a rescue mission, replacing a Joe Biden who was flailing after his June debate performance against Trump and appeared on track to lose by several points. Harris immediately improved the prospects for the Democratic ticket, turning a very likely loss into a competitive race. That is, a woman of color subbed in for a white man and was doing better. Now, if your response is, “Sure, but Biden was old and was bad on inflation/abortion/Gaza/etc.,” fine, but you’re conceding that sex and race were not the most important features of this contest.

• Additionally, while there are plenty of examples of sexism running rampant in the American political system (just look at the composition of the Senate!), women getting fewer votes just because they’re women is not really one of them. As research by Jennifer Lawless, Kelly Dittmar, Kris Kanthak and Jonathan Woon, and others has shown, women candidates tend to run about as strongly as men candidates. But there are nonetheless important differences. Women tend to be more qualified and have longer résumés when they run for office than men do. (Another way of saying that is that even the least qualified guy thinks he should run for office.) Also, women may be more averse to actually putting their names on the ballot. Additionally, party leaders tend to prefer women candidates on balance, but lean away from nominating them because they’re convinced, evidence notwithstanding, that voters won’t like them.

• Finally, there were the political science fundamentals-based forecast models of the election, which overall predicted a very close race, but one with Trump having a slight advantage in the Electoral College. The state-based forecast models predicted this election result precisely. Again, these are models that don’t include any information about the identity of the candidates — they’re just based on the state of the economy, wars, party registration, etc. All that suggests that Harris did about what any Democratic nominee would have done.

Now, you can ignore the thousands of races for governor, Senate, House, state legislature and more, and simply assert that it’s different at the presidential level, and Americans clearly aren’t ready for a woman president, as made clear by 2016 and 2024. Well, that’s throwing out a lot of evidence in favor of two data points. But also, those years were notably anti-incumbent years, with both Clinton and Harris taking on the mantle of defending the incumbent party during times of either meager economic growth (2016) or with recent memories of high inflation (2024).

Nevertheless, the idea that Harris lost because she’s a woman has come up a lot, along with other narratives about Democrats having messaging that didn’t connect on the economic message, Democrats being too woke, Harris failing to distance herself from Biden, Democrats not speaking directly to the concerns of the working class, etc. And, fine, but making these arguments actually has consequences.

As I found in my book Learning From Loss and in related research with Pavielle Haines, election narratives can change the way people think about their party and the sorts of candidates they should pick in the next election. When we exposed Democrats to the argument that Hillary Clinton lost because of her focus on “identity politics” (i.e.: prioritizing under-represented groups), it changed the sorts of candidate they wanted to nominate in 2020. Particularly for white women and Black men, it made them more likely to want to see a moderate white man nominated.

Also in my book, I looked at the Democratic activists who tended to believe that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she was a woman. While men were more likely to believe things like Clinton’s messaging and candidate skills being off, women overwhelmingly felt that she lost because of her sex. 22% of the men I spoked to said she lost because of her sex, 77% of the women I spoke to held that view.

Now, that wasn’t necessarily a deterrent for these Democratic activists. The bulk of those who felt that Clinton lost due to her sex were also backing Elizabeth Warren in 2019.

Nonetheless, it suggests that we need to be cautious about making these arguments. It’s one thing to say that Democrats lost because they ran poor ads or gave bad speeches; ads and speeches can be improved in the future without really harming anyone.

But the sexism narrative is different. Unless we’re really 100% sure Kamala Harris lost because she was a woman — and that, by extension, the Democratic Party should be wary of ever nominating a woman for president again — we should be extremely reticent to push this argument publicly. Not because it’s politically incorrect or un-woke or anything, but because it can have consequences. It tells women that they shouldn’t run, and it tells party leaders that they shouldn’t nominate women. It affects what the pool of candidates in 2026 and 2028 will look like and which of them can best get party support. It’s not just idle chatter.