Voters had the chance this election to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics by electing Kamala Harris the nation’s first female president. Instead, they returned Donald Trump to the White House, a comeback that relied on significant — even somewhat improved – support among women.
Some female voters on Wednesday mourned the missed opportunity to send a woman to the Oval Office and wondered when, if ever, it might happen.
“I am just aghast,” said Precious Brady-Davis, a Black transgender woman who’d just won a two-year term on a Chicago-area water management board — but her joy in that was tempered. “I am disappointed in my fellow Americans that, once again, we did not elect a qualified woman to the presidency.”
Those who supported Trump — like Katherine Mickelson, a 20-year-old college student from Sioux Falls, South Dakota — said the race came down to values and to issues like the economy, not gender. Even Harris herself sought her place in history without dwelling on her gender.
“While I think a lot of women would like to see a female president, myself included,” Mickelson said, “we aren’t just going to blindly vote for a woman.”
Despite the history-making potential of Harris’ campaign, she wasn’t able to expand on President Joe Biden’s 2020 support among women to cement a win, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Fifty-three percent of women supported Harris, compared with 46% for Trump — slightly narrower than Biden’s advantage among them in 2020.
