I was at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on election night. I was on the yard, as we like to say, a place I had not been since the late 1980s when I visited the campus for a Greek Step Show.
As polls closed around the nation, there was already a palpable fear in the air. Virginia, a state Vice President Kamala Harris was winning by 8 points a week before, was dangerously close. That was my first sign that Harris was in for a roller coaster of a night. It turned out she was in for a catastrophic night.
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The crowd at Howard stayed well into the morning hours, until a campaign cochair suggested supporters go home. The statement, brief and somber, said all we needed to know. Harris had indeed lost the race, and it was only a matter of by how much. I walked away with my head down, and, as I navigated the throngs of people, there was an stunned silence. I will never forget.
The next day, Harris graciously conceded the race. She called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him, and she promised her cooperation on a smooth transition.
Harris, a former prosecutor, attorney general and senator, and the sitting vice president, someone who is smart, savvy and qualified, she lost to a man who is a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter.
These facts are hard to swallow for those of us who believe in the rule of law and equal justice before the law. Worse, just days before his win, Trump was calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., misogynistic slurs. He called Harris, “low-IQ” and “lazy” and has implied worse about her. Vice President-Elect JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, called Harris “trash.”
How did we get here?
How did yet another uber-qualified woman with an actual plan for the country lose to Trump?
Let’s face it: of Trump’s three runs for the White House, only President Joe Biden succeeded in defeating him. Biden rebuilt the “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And he flipped Georgia and Arizona blue. A centrist Democrat, son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and legend in the U.S. Senate, Biden was a trusted steady hand and father figure to the nation. He ran on a platform of fighting for “the soul of America.” He did well with white voters and white women. And he garnered large numbers of Latino men and women of color.
Biden opted in July not to seek reelection, passing the torch to Harris. So, presented with the stark contrast between a youthful 59-year-old Harris, and an aged, mean-spirited, convicted criminal with obvious cognitive difficulties, America chose the man.
Again.
Will women ever break through that glass ceiling?
Someday. But we have a lot of work to do, not just as a nation but also as women. The election results tell a story, a troublesome one.
We once again saw a majority of white women (53%) vote for Trump, according to exit polls. Black women voted for Harris (91%), and Jewish women (87%) held the line right behind us. Latina women supported Harris at 61%, and Black men supported her at 77%. But white women only gave Harris 45% of their votes, and white men 39%. There is a clear racial component to these numbers, far too complex to unpack in one column. But the trends mimics Clinton’s 2016 performance with the same groups, though Clinton did slightly better than Harris.
Trump ran a very aggressive antiwoman, pro-man campaign based in part on fear of the other. It worked out for him. Half the nation decided his flaws — the felonies, the frauds, the sexual assault — and his promised agenda — anti-immigration, anti-equality, antiwoman, anti-education, pro-mass deportation, pro-inflationary tariffs — didn’t matter enough to make them vote for a Black woman.
But, after four more years of the Trump agenda and chaos, Americans probably will be looking for someone new in 2028. Will it be a woman then? If so, she likely will have to be an outsider, like Trump was when he began campaigning in 2015. She’ll have to tap into the American promise and the light and hope America likely will be seeking in 2028.
I hope that whoever she is, our future madam president will have the trailblazing courage of Shirley Chisholm, the fighting spirit of Hillary Clinton and the joyfulness of Kamala Harris. But, most of all, I hope she will be able to lead a movement that once and for all breaks the hardest of glass ceilings and helps move America into her truest light and greatness.
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