What about gender? This is two female nominees Trump has bested, but he lost to Joe Biden. A clear sexism story, open and shut case, right? Here, again, the voting data beg to differ: https://t.co/43IrPfeVUK Gender polarization in the electorate was down since 2016. Harris' voteshare among men was consistent with typical Democrat performance (an outcome driven heavily by white men moving Democrat over the last decade, even non-white men across the board went the other direction). Trump's margins with men were not historic. The reason Harris lost is because she performed abysmally with women. She got the lowest share of the female vote of any Democrat of the last 30 years other than John Kerry. And it wasn't white women: they actually shifted towards the Democrats this cycle. It was Hispanic and Asian women who shifted most towards the GOP -- although Harris also significantly underperformed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with black women too. Since 2016, men shifted 2 percentage points towards the GOP. Meanwhile, women shifted five percentage points towards the GOP (i.e. more than twice as much!). But rather than analyzing this latter trend -- rather than exploring how women exercise their agency, the focus is intensely on men. Even though they are objectively less important: they are a smaller share of the overall adult population, they are registered to vote at lower levels, among registered voters they turn out at lower levels. Put simply, if we want to understand how any race went the way it did, we need to look at women and how they exercise their agency. But this isn't done. Not even by feminist scholars -- perhaps especially not by feminist scholars in this case -- because the actual data pattern is super inconvenient for the preferred narrative.
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