The phenomenon had been anticipated for months. Yet it wasn't until Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, that it became a reality: American women largely favored Kamala Harris, but not enough to cement her victory. The various exit polls published that evening by the American media showed the expected differentiation effect: A 10-point advantage for the Democratic candidate among women (around 54% vs. 44%), but also exactly the same ratio in the opposite direction, in favor of Donald Trump, among men.
Harris had bet on extending the Democratic party's streak of results since the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision to end the federal right to abortion for all women. This decision, which shook up the parameters of American politics, became a poisonous issue for Republicans among voters, as several referendums and local elections showed, as did the November 2022 mid-term elections, which only gave Republicans a narrow majority. Harris therefore logically chose to make abortion into a major focus of her campaign.
Taking away a right that has existed for half a century is anything but trivial. All the more so as this decision led, in its wake, to repressive legislation being implemented in many states, with 14 totally banning the procedure, with very rare exceptions. This legislative wave has not led to a drop in the number of abortions performed in the US, but it has made women, as well as clinic staff and doctors, less safe. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which is a key reference on this issue, in 2023, more than 168,000 women crossed state lines to have an abortion in another state. Such bans and restrictions primarily affect those women who are the most vulnerable, such as women with the fewest resources, particularly Black and Latina women.
It was in this context that Harris angled her campaign, running under the banner of "Freedom." It was no longer a matter of describing herself as being "pro-choice," but of defending women's reproductive rights and health, in the name of equality and dignity. "Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body?" This sentence, which the vice president could have said, comes from Melania Trump, the Republican candidate's wife, in a book she published a month before the election. This was clearly a calculated statement, made by a woman who has steered clear of all political debate, and it implicitly spoke volumes about the awkward position the billionaire, who had long identified his vulnerability on this issue, was in.
You have 58.6% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.