White women handed Trump his win. Racism and sexism defeated Harris

Column: There’s no mystery. White women handed Trump the election

A group of white women cheering at a Trump rally holding signs that say "Women for Trump"

Nov. 7, 2024 3 AM PT

So … what happened?

How is it possible that this country reelected Donald Trump after everything he’s been convicted of doing, everything he has said he plans on doing, and everything he did to that poor microphone?

Opinion Columnist

LZ Granderson

LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America.

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The answer isn’t that deep: The majority of white women in this country want a male president — preferably white. That’s not me talking; that’s nearly a century of voting data speaking.

When Barack Obama made history in 2008, he did so with less support from white women than Al Gore had.

It’s uncomfortable, I know.

The hunger to dig into the weeds of data, to make the outcome about policy and not identity, speaks to our desire to be united in these states.

However, you can’t talk about the results of the 2024 general election — specifically what Kamala Harris’ campaign or Democrats did wrong — without acknowledging the fact a Black female candidate was going to face resistance. No state in this country has even elected a Black woman to be governor.

Also: White women didn’t support Nikki Haley, Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar. The presence of Geraldine Ferraro on the 1984 Democratic ticket “made the South ours,” said Edward Rollins, President Reagan’s political director.

I keep hearing shock at the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, at Harris’ resounding defeat. I can understand being appalled, but not shocked.

We are not better than this. “This” — the racism, the sexism — has always been a major part of who we are.

Roy Wilkins, a longtime executive director of the NAACP, once wrote that Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in schools, was “a Second Emancipation Proclamation.” He also shared the country’s reaction to that decision: “I remember picking up the newspaper and reading an interview with a fourteen-year-old Dixie belle who said, ‘I’d rather grow up to be an idiot than go to a school with a n— in it.’ Anyone could see that she was well on the way to becoming that idiot.” Wilkins added: “A little integrated schooling might have saved her from her fate.”

And yet here we are, after two “proclamations,” and real emancipation still hasn’t come. Segregation is still the norm.

It’s long been said that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America, but Monday through Friday mornings aren’t much better. Over decades of federal redlining to keep Black people out of nice neighborhoods, to the construction of highways, to the white flight of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the demographics of today’s local schools reflect the ugliness of yesteryear.

During her campaign, Harris often pointed out that just 1% of all public school teachers are Black men. Black women are less than 5%. Latinos make up 7%. According to Pew Research Center, nearly 80% of white elementary and secondary public school students went to a school where at least half the students were also white. It would be easy for a white student to grow up in America’s schools without having a classmate of color or seeing a person of color in a leadership role.

This is why most of the people who made Harris’ shortlist of VP candidates were white men. In order to give voters a degree of comfort, she was expected to have someone with the “look” of leadership on the ticket. And so despite having been elected a vice president, a senator and a state attorney general, Harris still apparently needed a white man on the ticket to give it gravitas in the eyes of voters.

We all know it.

And that’s why explanations of the 2024 outcome that dwell on the economy or Gaza or other policy matters are so disingenuous. We all know the real reason Harris lost.

If a Black woman had cheated on all of her husbands and had three sets of children, I doubt she would have gotten the white evangelical vote as Trump did. And yet when given an obvious choice — between a white man who can be heard on a recording pressuring officials to help him steal the election and a Black woman whose most egregious offense was being against fracking five years ago — most white women went where they’ve always gone.

@LZGranderson

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LZ Granderson

LZ Granderson is an Opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He arrived in 2019 as The Times’ sports and culture columnist. Granderson is also a political contributor for ABC News. A fellow at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago as well as the Hechinger Institute at Columbia University, the Emmy award winner appears regularly on The Times’ Spectrum News 1’s daily news magazine program, “L.A. Times Today.” Granderson joined CNN as a political contributor and columnist in 2009 before joining ABC in 2015. He spent 17 years at ESPN in a variety of roles, including NBA editor for ESPN The Magazine, senior writer for Page 2 and co-host of TV’s “SportsNation.” In 2011, Granderson was named Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Assn., and his columns have been recognized by the National Assn. of Black Journalists as well as the Online News Assn. His podcast for ABC News, “Life Out Loud with LZ Granderson,” has won numerous honors, including a GLAAD award. His TED Talk on LGBTQ equality has more than 1.7 million views.