There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation.

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There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation.

Watching Kamala Harris run for president against Donald Trump felt like watching the world’s most difficult game of Frogger: His dogged commitment to irrationality and ugliness—and the loyalty it inspired in his followers—was the incessant traffic of cars and river logs that the Harris campaign had to duck and dodge to avoid. We knew that it would take strategy, organization, and financial support to make it to the other side intact. Harris had all those things, despite the fact that she entered the race at the eleventh hour, as if she were (proverbially) starting the game on her last life. Still, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, news broke that Harris had become froggy roadkill. And the loss was so stunning, it felt like Game Over for the long-held dream of so many. The sad truth is: It feels pretty clear that we just lost our only chance at ever having a ****** woman as president.

Forget competent and qualified (our electorate certainly has); no woman was ever as primed to win the big prize as the sitting vice president. It’s not just that she is comparatively more sane than her opponent, not to mention less offensive and willing to charm voters by going on podcasts like Call Her Daddy. It’s not just that she lacked the 1990s political baggage that plagued Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It’s not just that she was running against an unhinged demagogue who infamously already presided over this nation during a uniquely chaotic time in ********* history that ended with a devastating pandemic—which he completely mishandled, becoming

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of dangerous health-related misinformation. I could go on, but it wouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. When faced with the options of chaos, greed, and anger or relative common sense—the kind wielded by a competent, qualified ****** woman—voters overwhelmingly chose the former. It wasn’t the fascism-loving guy who spurred an insurrection whom they couldn’t trust. It was the ****** woman.

One of Harris’ biggest weapons in this race was her membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority she pledged as a student at historically ****** college Howard University, a particularly tenacious ****** community that moves mountains, breaks barriers, and looks good doing it. It’s sage ****** wisdom that the ****** works hard, but AKAs work *******. Harris’ experience and political savvy, formed by one of the most influential of the “Divine Nine” ****** sororities and fraternities governed by the National Pan-Hellenic Council, is a large part of why many ****** constituents felt confident that Harris could be the one to pull this off.

The ladies of Alpha Kappa Alpha have a different ethos than the rest of the Divine Nine. More than any other historically ****** sorority, AKAs are focused on increasing and preserving ****** “social stature” (as it is worded in their

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). There’s a lot under the tip of that iceberg: Most historically ****** Greek organizations have purpose statements that include a focus on “economic growth.” But AKA’s reference to “social stature” is slightly different. It’s not just about leadership, status, wealth, or power. It is also about appearance, politeness, and respectability. And historically, for ****** people, that involves making oneself or one’s presence adjacent to whiteness.

Etiquette and presentability are a performance for anyone, but they are concepts created and defined by white people in this country. For many upwardly mobile ****** Americans, getting white approval is still necessary for success. Thus, it’s unsurprising that AKAs have a long-standing reputation for having predominantly lighter-skinned women in their ranks, for showcasing silk-pressed hairstyles over natural curls. The double-edged sword of achieving powerful social status as a marginalized person in ********* society is the assimilation necessary to accomplish it. Rest assured, no one fit that bill more than Kamala Harris.

To put it bluntly: If Harris was considered too ****** to be our first ****** female president, then, welp! I suppose there goes that dream. She looked the part, in pantsuits and pearls (a signature AKA sorority accessory). She acted the part: Even in college, she was known as C3, for being

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. She refused to make her identity as a ******, South ****** ********* central to the campaign, after seeing what running on identity had done for Clinton just eight years earlier. And while maintaining an extremely controlled image, Harris was also wildly qualified, having served as a vice president, U.S. senator, and attorney general of California.

And if

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and ****** capital was the only thing Harris needed for this campaign, she would have achieved it in a business day. Within 24 hours of her endorsement as the Democratic presidential candidate, ****** women fundraised an

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number of campaign dollars and broke Zoom capacity records and began to push

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. Much of this was led by sorority and fraternity members of the Divine Nine, and to call the Divine Nine “organized” is an understatement. Organizing is not only what they are best at, it is what they trade in.

But taking a page from the white collegiates and utilizing our own secret societies wasn’t enough to convince the rest of the populace in just 107 short days. Harris—backed not just by powerful ****** institutions with money and status and the will to get ***** done, but by celebrities, party leaders, Democrats, lapsed Republicans, and an ungodly amount of campaign cash—fell short.

There has already been much infighting over what lost Harris the election, about demographics and trust in the system, about running an uninspiring platform against a fascist one, about the economy and inflation resentment. But the deepest truth cannot get lost in all of that: Unfortunately, this country will always default to its original tenets of racism and misogyny in the face of *****, frustration, or just plain dissatisfaction. It has never been more unclear what unified Democratic opposition to Trumpism should look like, but there is one very clear reality looking at us straight in the face. If Harris, the closest woman we had to a bridge between the ****** and white vote, couldn’t win in 2024, maybe no ****** woman can.

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#Lot #Fighting #Harris #Lost #Avoid #Explanation

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