Don’t reinforce bogus pseudo-statistical arguments about how “the American people” won’t elect a woman president
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There’s a comment subthread in Rob’s post about potential 2028 presidential candidates, regarding the argument that American voters won’t elect a woman president so stop nominating them.
This is a bad argument, both in the sense that it has no actual statistical support, and in that it inadvertently reinforces sexist beliefs by parroting them.
As for the statistical support, an N = 2 is obviously very close to meaningless, but in addition to that:
(1) Hillary Clinton’s vote margin over Donald Trump in 2016 was larger than Trump’s margin over Harris is going to end up being in 2024. Clinton lost because of the perversities of the Electoral College plus 12 million but her emails stories.
(2) Harris actually did better, as the candidate of the incumbent party, than the incumbent party did in any other developed nation that had a national election this year.
(3) The implied counterfactual that Joe Biden would have done better in 2024 than Harris because he’s a man seems wildly implausible. Biden’s polling performance was consistently far worse than Harris’s; to assume he would have done better in the election itself simply because he’s not a woman is straight-up question begging.
(4) Women candidates in general do not appear to suffer any electoral penalty for being women. You can argue that the presidency is different, but the evidence for that assertion consists of two trials that in and of themselves don’t really provide any evidence for that belief. It’s like asserting that flipping a coin twice and having it land on heads both times means that the coin will never come up tails ever again no matter what.
(5) It’s striking that I don’t recall a single comment on LGM prior to the election itself that Harris was going to lose, or even was likely to lose, because “the American people” (this mythical creature doesn’t exist but that’s a topic for another post) won’t elect a woman president. But now this is apparently so obvious that it doesn’t need any actual argument to support it.
(6) Repeating sexist arguments reinforces their supposed validity. Don’t do that.