Most white women did not vote for the white woman running against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Most white women did not vote for a white man running against Trump in the 2020 presidential race.
So now we have to ask: Will white women vote for a Black woman?
One big key to the fall election is whether Democrats can break through with white female voters, the largest single group of voters at 40 percent of the electorate.
Every night at next week’s 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago might as well be “Ladies’ Night.”
Every big dance at the convention will feature women taking the lead, beginning with Vice President Harris.
She is the star of historic impact as the first woman of color to be nominated as a major party’s candidate for the presidency.
It is no accident that Harris’s campaign theme song is by a woman — “Freedom,” by Beyoncé.
Trump’s theme song at the GOP convention was “It’s A Man’s World.”
As Harris and Trump compete for the white women’s vote, it is worth remembering that Trump has quite a history with women. Twice divorced, he is on tape bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. Also, Trump has recently been found liable for sexual assault of a woman by a jury of six men and three women.
While in the White House, Trump also nominated three Supreme Court justices who voted to end federal abortion rights.
And the man he selected to be his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has a history of denigrating women, joking about “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives …and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
He also suggests that these “cat ladies” should have less political power than people with biological children.
According to Statista, in 2020, 46.8 percent of women in the United States did not have biological children. Harris is one of them.
Also of political note is that Taylor Swift, the highly influential pop music star, fits into this category.
Harris is only the second woman in U.S. history to be nominated by a major party. The first, Hillary Clinton, was nominated by the Democrats in 2016 at their convention in Philadelphia.
In the race between Trump and Clinton, exit polls showed women as a whole went for Clinton, 54 percent to 41 percent. Women of color voted for Clinton, 82 percent to 16 percent. But white women supported Trump over Clinton, 52 percent to 43 percent. A later analysis by Pew showed a narrower race, with white women giving a plurality of their vote to Trump, 47 percent to 45 percent.
In comparison, Black women gave Clinton 94 percent of their vote, and Latino women gave her 69 percent of their vote.
Harris is far less known to American women than Clinton was as a candidate for president. She served only four years in the Senate before being selected as Biden’s running mate. By the time she ran, Clinton, the former first lady, had been a target for almost three decades of relentless and sexist demonization by Republicans and right-wing media.
They mocked her for standing by her husband during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and his impeachment proceedings.
Even after she was elected in her own right as a senator and later as President Obama’s secretary of State, Clinton could never overcome the caricature of her as an arrogant Ivy Leaguer, an elitist lawyer who they said failed to identify with most Americans.
In 2020, the Biden-Harris ticket lost the white women’s vote to Trump, 53 percent to 46 percent, according to Pew. That 7-point gap was larger by 2 percentage points than the 2016 gap between Trump and Clinton.
It was the 95 percent of Black women voters and 61 percent of Hispanic women voters who gave the Biden-Harris ticket its margin of victory. With women of color leading the way, the Democrats won among women of all races, 55 percent to 44 percent.
Only four women have been nominated as either president or vice president by one of the two major parties: Harris, Clinton, 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro.
Clinton selected a white man as her running mate. Harris is going down the same road. After Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, a swing state, took her name out of contention, there were no other women given consideration.
The idea of two women on the same ticket is apparently still in a far galaxy for American voters, at least in the opinion of political strategists.
But with a male presence by her side, Harris is looking for women of all colors, including white women, to deliver once again for the Democrats.
Thirty-six years ago, then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards delivered the keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.
The most memorable applause line of that memorable speech was that women “can perform [in national politics]. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, she just did it backwards and in high heels.”
Places, please. The dance is about to begin.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.