Market Watch:
President Trump will likely insult and demean Kamala Harris, angering women voters, who already overwhelmingly support Democrats
After months of speculation, Kamala Harris, the 55-year-old junior senator from California, is Joe Biden’s pick for vice president.
She’s the first black woman to be on the ticket of a major U.S. political party, and if current polls — notably in key swing states — hold up, she will soon become the 49th vice president of the United States.
This is the moment the Trump campaign has been waiting for. In recent months, it has compiled dossiers on everyone Biden was considering. Now get ready for a ton of opposition research (“oppo”) to be dropped onto the media in an effort to undermine Harris.
Which, in turn, is exactly what the Biden camp has not only been expecting, but hoping for. You know why? Because most American women detest Donald Trump, and most women of color really, really detest him. The more Trump and his minions unload on a woman, and a black one at that, the more it plays into Biden’s hands. In fact, it took only an hour for Trump to do just that, calling Harris “nasty” and “dishonest” during a briefing with reporters.
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They are 54% of the electorate, an eight-point advantage. Second, in proportional terms, a bigger percentage of that 54% turns out to vote than the smaller 46% of men. So in both absolute and relative terms, this is a double advantage for Democrats.
In 1994, notes Pew Research, more women identified with Democrats than Republicans by a six-point margin (48% to 42%). By 2017, that margin had tripled: 56% to 37%.
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Much to the detriment of Republicans, this gap is accelerating. Women preferred Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 11 percentage points (55% to 44%) in 2012. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 13 points (54% to 41%), and in the 2018 midterms, women voted for Democratic congressional candidates by a stunning 19 percentage points (59% to 40%). That’s why Nancy Pelosi, and not California Republican Kevin McCarthy, is speaker of the house, and it’s why Trump was impeached earlier this year.
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This is all the more important given that Biden, if victorious, would become president at age 78, the oldest first-term president in American history. If you believe, as I do, that he would serve just one term in office, the ascension of Kamala Harris puts her in a prime position to become the first female president in American history four years from now.
