close
close

Association-anemone

Bite-sized brilliance in every update

    • Kamala Harris is responding for the sake of her campaign — and women everywhere
    asane

    Kamala Harris is responding for the sake of her campaign — and women everywhere

    Online Niel Posted on

    In recent days, Vice President Harris has done so flooded the wavesappearing on a long list of high-profile and non-traditional media platforms to spread their message to voters across the country. In every occurrence of Fox News to the syndicated radio host Charlamagne God, she intelligently and purposefully hit back, directly and indirectly, at former President Trump and the attacks and smears that have been relentlessly hurled at him from the right.

    It is both the right time and the right strategy. As the first black woman to be nominated for the presidency, Harris has already faced a massive double standard in expectations and an absurdly high bar compared to her opponent. But history and research show that the only way to overturn the double standard women candidates face is to fearlessly fight back.

    Renowned scholar of gender and politics Celinda Lake analyzed this question in depthas they have other researchers working to support women’s political participation here and all around the world. They found that, in most cases, directly, calmly and loudly applauding the perpetrators of sexist attacks changes the public’s perception of women running for office in positive ways. It makes them look strong and fearless. And more importantly, research has found that not responding can make women look weak.

    Conformable a Barbara Lee Foundation study“there is a long-standing misperception that silence is a powerful response when women experience sexism – this research suggests otherwise. Ignoring or being perceived as turning a blind eye to serious incidents of sexism can lead to a backlash against female candidates as voters want to see strength and backbone.” Going high, as Michelle Obama once urged, is not an option.

    For good reason. Since President Biden withdrew as the Democratic nominee, all together the national nonpartisan women’s civic and political education organization that I founded pursued cases of racist and sexist attacks against Harris. Since the beginning of 2024, and especially since the launch of the candidacy, they have exploded online.

    There were 170,000 unique individual public posts (not including replies and shares) on Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok containing racist and/or sexist attacks against her, creating 8.86 billion impressions. There have also been hundreds of deepfake attacks generated by AI. The sheer volume of these horrific attacks will certainly help shape and warp the public’s perception of her as they affected perceptions of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    While attacks come from various sources including foreign actors working to disrupt the election, former President Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, contributed significantly to it. The most pernicious in the line of attack are the claims that he is not a serious person, that he is mentally deficient and that he used sex to advance his career. A few days ago, Trump called it “retarded”. A slander that is deeply offensive for a long list of reasons.

    Of course, such smears against women candidates are not unique to Harris; they have become an all too common campaign tactic everywhere. Studies show that globally, incidents of gender misinformation and attacks against women running for elected office have exploded in scale and impact, particularly led by autocratic leaders who often rise by marginalizing women’s political power. As a result, many women in the US and all around the world they have chosen to leave their races or politics rather than face attacks that can be violent, frightening and dangerous in nature.

    Over the past decade, as I’ve worked to bring more women into the political process and served in local elected office myself, I’ve seen how such attacks can have a profoundly negative effect on public perceptions of women leaders.

    At one point during my elected term, the threats on social media against me and my children were so bad that I had police outside my house. Women who could have been great candidates saw what I went through and chose not to run. It may be one of the reasons why in 2024, after years of progress, fewer women run for the office.

    But Harris benefits from the lessons learned by others and, frankly, the mistakes made by the Hillary Clinton campaign. In 2016, social media was flooded with sexist slurs and misinformation about Clinton — much of it fueled, we now know, by Russian sponsored troll farms who sought to sow division. They succeeded largely because the campaign was not prepared to fight back. It was too new for them to fully appreciate the damage being done in real time or to effectively counter the destructive narrative.

    This time it’s different.

    All In Together discovered that Harris was winning Infowars online for weeks. Since August, positive responses and pushback to her racist and sexist slurs online have been double the volume of negative attacks. This “Battle Report”, fueled by an extraordinary army of online supporters, formal and informal, may be one of the reasons why Harris’ favor in most surveys they rose steadily all summer despite the volume of smears.

    And now Harris herself is fighting back, reminding voters that she is strong, prepared and undaunted. In her groundbreaking interview with radio superstar Charlamagne Tha God, she responded directly to some of the most common attacks. When asked about repeating the talking point too often, Harris replied smartly and in a subtle dig at her opponent’s meandering blabber — “it’s called discipline.” And she didn’t hold back on Trump saying, “The man is really pretty weak. He is weak. It is a sign of weakness that you want to please the dictators and seek their flattery and favor.”

    The vice president and her team are now making all the right moves to play offense and defense simultaneously. Its win on substance and strategy is urgent, not just for this election, but for the sake of women’s political participation now and in the future.

    Lauren Leader is the co-founder and CEO of All In Together, a non-profit women’s civic leadership organization and host of MAJORITY RULES on www.2WAY.TV

    Online Niel
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like