African American women walk during national elections in Tampa, Florida, US, November 2, 2024.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Washington: From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop.
Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?
The painful answer arrived this week.
It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.
Many Democrats saw the brutal political environment for the party, peppered with anger about President Joe Biden’s leadership, as more to blame for Harris’ crushing loss than the double-edged sword of racism and sexism. But others, reflecting on a campaign devoid of controversy or obvious missteps by a qualified candidate who almost never held out her race or gender as reasons to vote for her, found it difficult to ignore suspicions about why Trump won with such ease.
“This isn’t a loss for Black women, it’s a loss for the country,” said Waikinya Clanton, the founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala. “America has revealed to us her true self,” she added, “and we have to decide what we do with her from here.”
It was the moment that Black female political leaders and organizers had feared most and worked hardest to avoid. Across battleground states, the Democrats organizing fundraisers, door-knocking and other get-out-the-vote efforts were often Black women, motivated to campaign for a presidential candidate who was not just a member of their party but one of their own.
The tens of millions of voters who supported Harris saw her candidacy as a chance to usher in a new generation of leadership. (In one small bright spot for the party, two Black women will be in the next Senate for the first time ever.) But for Black women, the Democratic Party’s most active and loyal voting bloc, it was something bigger: a hard-fought recognition of the work they had done for a party that often failed to support them.
“The party has always wanted our output, not necessarily our input,” Marcia Fudge, a former housing and urban development secretary under Biden, said in an interview this year. “We have for a very long time been the people who did the work, but never been asked to sit at the table.”
‘It is not over, because we never go away.’
From the start of her first presidential campaign, Harris’ supporters saw her as the redemption for their party and vindication for the Black women who had come before her.
During her 2019 bid, she modeled much of her political persona after Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and the first Black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination, in 1972. Many of Chisholm’s acolytes became Harris’ advisers and closest confidants during her second presidential campaign.
But even Chisholm predicted a slow walk to progress. That was, in part, because of the intense sexism that she faced from men of all races, who believed that her campaign was too tailored to issues favoring women, people of color and the poor.
“This ‘woman thing’ is so deep,” she said of her presidential run. “I’ve found it out in this campaign, if I never knew it before.”
“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, Black and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Unbought and Unbossed.”
Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said there was deep anger about the license that Trump’s victory had given to continue to undercut Black women in politics, down to the derogatory ways he and his allies have described female leaders.
“Not only have we always been on the menu, but they have been eating us, and it’s been happening for generations,” Wiley said. “And what this represents for Black women right now is it has deepened and been given significantly more permission.”
Still, she added, “it is not over, because we never go away.”
The underappreciated heart of a party
Trump’s overwhelming victory leaves Democrats with a lot of work to do.
Nearly the entire country shifted sharply to the right as it returned him to power. Democrats watched as he won alarmingly high shares of the vote in blue states: 47% in Virginia and New Jersey; 44% in New York; 43% in Connecticut.
The night represented a striking rebuke of a Democratic Party that has grown more aligned with college-educated, wealthier Americans, and struggled to maintain support from working-class voters and people of color.
As the party picks up the pieces, preparing to oppose a second Trump administration and looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, Black women are likely to again play a central role. Long hailed as the backbone of the Democratic Party, they have supported liberal candidates in overwhelming numbers, organized political operations on the ground and fueled victory after victory.
Yet Black women running for office have often said that the party is not investing adequately in their campaigns, particularly those for higher positions like Senate and governor (there has still never been a Black female governor). Some candidates have argued that this dearth in support has been the difference between winning and losing in close races.
Harris had plenty of investment, hauling in more than $1 billion, but the circumstances of her candidacy were far from ideal.
Overnight, she had to resuscitate a dying campaign and reenergize a despairing Democratic base that had fallen into despondency over Biden’s poor debate performance and sinking political standing.
She stayed fiercely loyal to a boss who had grown widely disliked, and who at times privately doubted her chances. She stayed a cheerleader for the administration even though some of its leaders spent the first half of her term undermining her to the point of rendering her invisible and ineffective. And she fired up a party whose leaders had only in July talked quietly about bypassing her to put a white man at the top of the ticket.
Harris worked feverishly to introduce herself and sell her political vision to an angry and exhausted American public — even as she struggled to separate herself from Biden. She built a multiracial, bipartisan coalition of supporters and allies.
And it wasn’t enough.
“She ran a damn good race, and we voted for white nationalism,” said Melanie L. Campbell, the chair of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund, an advocacy group focused on policies for Black Americans, who served on a committee of women who advised Biden in choosing Harris as his running mate.
“This level of vote was not because they were worried about grocery prices,” she said of American voters. “They were worried about white privilege, white status, and sent the message that a multiracial democracy is fine as long as they’re at the top.”
As Harris conceded, she tacitly acknowledged the challenge she had faced.
“Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before,” she said.
Smaller progress on a disappointing night
There were some signs on Tuesday of political momentum for Black women down the ballot.
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive in Maryland, both won their races for Senate, giving the chamber two Black women for the first time — a long-sought goal for Black Democrats.
But for Black women in the party, the defeat of Harris will sting for a long time.
“The vice president said from the very beginning that she was going to be running this race as an underdog, when you have 107 days versus somebody who’s been running for nine years,” Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, a close adviser to Harris, said Tuesday night as the vice president’s prospects dimmed.
Citing the hundreds of Black women who were running in races across the country, Butler said that even if Harris lost, she would have proved to the Democratic Party and to the country that not only were Black women the beating heart of the party, “but we are ready to take our seat at the table.”
“The country better be ready for the future of Black women who are going to continue to show up and demand their seat,” she said.