Don’t be over-confident, you say? OK. I just know what I see. The legit data for Harris looks very good for her and bad for Trump.
But this diary isn’t about the What so much as the How. Or, how what is clearly a key decision that someone (or a bunch of people) made from the start and it has helped her campaign all the way up to this point.
She has never, ever has brought up the fact that, if elected, she will be the first female president.
Now, I could be factually wrong here. She might have directly mentioned at some point that I missed.
But from the Democratic convention to the only debate with Trump, to her major speeches, she has not brought attention to this fact. Her campaign has not brought attention to it. They are treating it like her eye color- a relatively minor detail.
This also extends to her being potentially being the second person of color elected: something simply self-evident that need not be brought up.
Give credit to Hillary Clinton here. She broke the proverbial glass ceiling here, and it was a part of her campaign. (Remember the slogan “It’s Her Time”?) Now, I’m not saying what Clinton did was bad or good, or right or wrong. It’s absolutely a fact that a big reason that the field was cleared for her in 2016 was that a large part of the Democratic coalition is women. Women that had been waiting for a female presidential nominee. That was a big thrust of her 2016 campaign, both from within the campaign and from outside of it.
In 2016 Clinton decided to run, in part, carrying that weight as the first major party female nominee. Which, of course, made it doubly insulting to lose to the likes of Trump (in the Electoral College).
How many women have said in the wake of 2016 that America “isn’t ready” for a female president? Enough- some of you may be among them
Harris decided to ditch the entire issue from the get-go. She’s never brought it up. She has- rightly, I think- treated it as a non-issue in the election. She’s simply the candidate going against Trump. Oh, she’s also a non-white woman? Not important. Not relevant. Let’s talk about the issues and talk about Trump.
She and her team have gathered that history will be made when she wins. Then, and only then, will they (presumably) remark on what everyone will see- America’s first female president and second non-white one.
Until then….it doesn’t matter.
I’ve mentioned this before- the fact of that history happening has actually been looming over the campaign from the first moment, but it’s never really mentioned. It casts a (figurative) shadow over everything but no one discusses it. The media doesn’t because she, her campaign, and even her voters don’t mention it. Trump has attacked on Harris on how Black she is, but not for being female.
In 2008 the fact that Barack Obama was seeking to be the first non-white man to win the presidency was a notion his campaign addressed head-on with its slogans of “Yes We Can” and simply “Hope.” A major part of his campaign was subtly (and not so subtly) convincing people that it was possible, let alone that it should be him.
Sixteen years later Harris is not having to face being the first non-white person elected or the first woman to win a major party nomination. That is helping run a campaign that can ignore both factors.
On Tuesday Kamala Harris will make history, and Donald Trump will be history*.
*Oh he’ll still be with us for a while. I just like saying it.
