Politics

Peter Suderman | From the February 2025 issue

Leading up to the 2024 election, pundits, pollsters, and political operatives discussed the electorate as a bundle of distinct race and gender categories, sometimes with even narrower subcategorizations attached. How would black women vote? What about Latino men? Suburban, college-educated women?

Some of this was useful for analyzing electoral subgroups. But the assumption, especially in left-friendly outlets, was that the best way to win over specific demographic categories was to target them with direct race- and gender-based appeals. Democrats seemed to engage in this practice reflexively, dividing themselves into semi-ironic groups such as White Dudes for Harris.

The Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, a woman with black and Indian ancestry, rarely emphasized her own race or gender. But she didn't distance herself from this approach either. When she seemed to be losing potential votes from black men, her campaign rolled out a series of initiatives billed as targeting black male voters specifically: loans for business creation, a plan to protect cryptocurrency assets, and federal legalization of........

© Reason.com