The Wild Reed: Touré F. Reed: “Kamala Harris Didn’t Lose Because of Racism”

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Touré F. Reed: “Kamala Harris Didn’t Lose Because of Racism”

Many Democrats continue to believe that the racism of average Americans — many of whom voted for Barack Obama twice — explains why Donald Trump won. This moralism suits party elites who would rather demonize the public than address growing inequality.

In mid-May of this year, former New York Times columnist and public intellectual Charles Blow declared on one of his social media accounts that those attributing President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection primarily to former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline are obscuring “the racist, misogynist, nativist, risk-it-all, devil-may-care doom lust among the year’s electorate.” Blow went on to say that “rather than accept Harris, America chose the flame.” Within the liberal pundit class, the tendency to attribute Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss principally to racism or misogynoir (hatred of black women) runs deep.

. . . [Kamala] Harris’s not terribly surprising loss was owed to many factors, not just the electorate’s racism or sexism. . . . [W]hile racist rhetoric and theatrics unquestionably animate Trumpism and inform the sometimes devastating human toll of many of his policies, the notion that antiblack racism or, more narrowly, misogynoir, is the sole or even the principal reason Vice President Kamala Harris lost is difficult to defend – at least if we have the strength of conviction to remove the moralistic blinders from our eyes and look at the evidence available to us.

Just compare the share of the so-called white vote captured by VP Harris with white turnout for the three most recent Democratic presidents. When compared with Joe Biden, Harris underperformed with white voters – 44 percent of whom turned out for Biden while just 42 percent cast ballots for Harris. White male Joe Biden performed as well with white voters as white male Bill Clinton in 1996 (44 percent) while performing slightly better with whites than black male Barack Obama in 2008 (43 percent). The matter that has garnered little attention, however, is that Harris seems to have performed better with white voters than Clinton and Obama had in 1992 and 2012, respectively – when each captured less than 40 percent of the “white vote.”

If Harris connected better with white voters than two other successful Democratic presidential candidates, then that means she didn’t lose because she underperformed with whites. The real problem is that Harris underperformed with voters of color. Indeed, Harris not only lost substantial ground with Hispanic and black men (-12 and -7 percent, respectively), but she failed to generate enthusiasm among women – underperforming with Latinas and Asian Pacific Islanders while performing no better with black women than Biden did.
Once more, if one places Harris’s performance with whites and non-whites in the context of previous Democratic campaigns, it is difficult to imagine how either anti-black racism or misogynoir are the key to understanding her loss.