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    The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

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    Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

    I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

    The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

    I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

    I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
    Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      Racist and anti-LGBTQ+ texts target Americans across US, including teens

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      Racist text messages targeting Black people across the US just hours after Donald Trump won a second presidency have now expanded to the Hispanic communities – and homophobic versions have been aimed at LGBTQ+ people, the FBI said on Friday.Authorities say they are investigating the messages – which now include emails – and that they have not received reports of violent acts stemming from the hateful messages.The recipients of the messages include high school students being told that they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp”, the FBI said in a statement.After the 5 November US presidential election saw Trump returned to the White House, Black Americans reported receiving racist text messages telling them they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to the “nearest plantation”.Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Nevada, and in Washington DC and elsewhere, reported receiving the messages. The messages were sent to Black adults and students.Some of the texts were signed “a Trump supporter”. Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the campaign “has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) condemned the messages, saying that they “represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear”.“The unfortunate reality of electing a president who historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes,” the NAACP president and chief executive officer, Derrick Johnson, said in a statement last week.The FBI said it is contact with the US justice department and other federal authorities on the racist and homophobic messages. More

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      The Long Wave: How Juls journeyed the Black Atlantic to curate his sound

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      Hi everyone. The first thing you’ll notice about this newsletter is that I’m not Nesrine. But don’t worry, we don’t need her to have a good time. I’m Jason, the editor of The Long Wave, and I’ll be writing the newsletter this week and occasionally in the future.Last month I attended a pop-up in London for the pioneering British-Ghanaian DJ and producer Juls. If you’re a fan of African music, like me, you’ll know that when a track opens with “Juls, baby” you’re about to hear straight fire (for the uninitiated, start with Wizkid’s True Love and Wande Coal’s So Mi So). So I was very excited to meet the man himself as he celebrated 10 years shaping modern Afrobeats, and the launch of his most recent album, which takes listeners on a journey through the sounds and traditions of the global Black diaspora. First, here’s the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenRacist texts after Trump’s win | Black people across the US have reported receiving racist messages telling them they have been selected to “pick cotton” and need to report to “the nearest plantation” in the aftermath of Trump’s election win. The president-elect’s campaign has denied any association with them.Big oil payouts in Guyana | Hundreds of thousands of Guyanese citizens at home and abroad will receive a payout of GY$100,000, as the country attempts to redistribute its oil wealth, Natricia Duncan reports. Since Guyana began crude oil extraction in late 2019, its economy has enjoyed incredible growth.Buz Stop Boys sweep Ghana’s streets | A group of young professionals and tradespeople are “driving a new wave of civic responsibility in Ghana” cleaning and sweeping away rubbish in Greater Accra, as well as clearing gutters and cutting overgrown grass. The collective hopes to inspire environmental consciousness and investment in proper methods of waste disposal.A toast to Abidjan cocktail week | Ivory Coast’s drinks festival, founded by the doctor turned mixologist Alexandre Quest Bede and “Afrofoodie” blogger Yasmine Fofana, is encouraging Africans to embrace their roots. Eromo Egbejule reports that “due in part to colonial-era stigmatisation and bans, local gins and other alcoholic drinks have long been seen as unsafe [and] inferior”.London Rastafarian HQ revived | A new exhibition will tell the story of the temple at St Agnes Place in London, which became a focal point for Rastafarian religion after a takeover in 1972. As Lanre Bakare reports, Echoes Within These Walls hopes to “dispel myths about the religion, which continues to be a big influence in popular culture”.In depth: A cultural odysseyView image in fullscreenWhen Juls conceptualised the album Peace & Love, he envisioned a cultural odyssey that drew on Black traditions, sounds and instruments around the world. Much of the album was made in Jamaica and Ghana, where he would create beats on his mother’s balcony in Esiama, or rent a beach house in Kokrobite so he could hear the ocean. But to finish it off sonically, Juls headed to Brazil in the summer of 2023, where he added further details to his tracks. “On the album we’ve got a song called Saint Tropez, which has elements of amapiano and highlife, but then there’s some triangle sounds that I got from Brazil. There’s a mix of different sounds I’m hearing as I’m going on these trips.”These trips were also an opportunity for Juls to enrich himself culturally. In Jamaica, he visited Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studio in Kingston, where he made beats. “I was just connecting with a lot of people who are deep in reggae music history. We spoke a lot to the Marley family, and we spoke to Bob Marley’s engineer. It was a real music journey. I got to meet Augustus Pablo’s son – we went to his record store and bought some vinyls as well.”In Salvador, home to Brazil’s largest Black community, he was reminded of Yoruba culture – “they still practise a lot of rituals over there”. He made similar observations in Jamaica: “When you go to the Accompong [Maroon] village, they practise a lot of the Ashanti rituals from Ghana. So there’s a lot of similarities between parts of the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa that I found interesting.”Juls was also struck by the use of instruments in the places he visited and how similar percussive sounds were transformed in new contexts. A staple of Afro-Brazilian music is the agogô, a bell with origins in Yoruba and Edo traditions. “But we don’t call it that in Ghana, we call it Gan Gan,” Juls says. Where Ghanaians use the kpanlogo drum, Brazilians may use the atabaque.For Juls, the Black diaspora’s use of drums gave him an opportunity to “play with all of these sounds” and provide a deeper layer of meaning to his music. On the opening track of his album, Leap of Faith, featuring the British artist Wretch 32, Nyabinghi drums are played, “these drums are used by Jamaicans and Ghanaians as a form of communication, celebrating their ancestors and showing praise. And they were also used to communicate in the village back in the day. In the beginning of the song there’s a guy from my father’s home town, Jamestown, who says: ‘Everybody gather around and listen’.”‘I like to bring people together’View image in fullscreenJuls is considered a maestro of Afrobeats, evidenced by the long list of artists who bring him on as a collaborator, but his curiosity stretches far beyond whatever limited perception people have of the genre, as he explores the interconnectedness of the diaspora. He loves mixing African and Brazilian music in his sets. He recounts performing in São Paulo, where the Brazilians were pleasantly surprised by his extensive knowledge of their genres.That passionate embrace of similarities and differences is something he literally wears around his neck. He shows me his chain, which he tells me is “an Adinkra symbol called Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu, which means unity and diversity. And that’s just something that I live by – I just like to bring everybody together from different tribes.” But in African music, there has at times been backlash over incorporations of different genres into a broader Afrobeats sound – there have especially been concerns around Nigerian artists “appropriating” amapiano music, which is native to South Africa.But for Juls, this melting pot of African genres can be embraced so long as what is produced is always in dialogue with its originators. “I’ve tapped into amapiano quite a few times but I always make sure I’m doing it with a South African artist or producer,” he says. “There’s a song on my album called Muntuwam, which has an element of amapiano, and on there I have Nkosazana’s Daughter. She listened to the song and loved it, which made me feel great because that’s coming from a South African who’s deep into that sound. It means you’re on the right path.”Juls also sees this as something that charts the progression of Afrobeats from its birth in the early 2000s DJ sets – “data, internet, structure”. There’s an ability to authentically tap into genres around the world, from fújì to highlife and kwaito to soukous, because you’re able to readily access information about this music. Afrobeats is thus less a coherent genre and more a label used for convenience. “If you really want to tap into the proper sound, you have to travel to these countries specifically, and do even deeper research.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis curiosity is evidently booming for Black artists. He cites Asake’s collaboration with the Afro-Brazilian singer-songwriter Ludmilla – Whine (one of my most played tracks from Lungu Boy) and even Tyler, the Creator’s sampling of the Zamrock band Ngozi Family on NOID from his latest album, Chromakopia, as some of his favourite recent Black Atlantic link-ups.It’s clear Juls is ready for his sound to enter a new chapter, bringing the Black diaspora with him. “The first 10 years have been about putting people in a good mood; the next 10 years, I’m trying to make people dance.”What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

      I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played Tyla’s Push 2 Start music video – that song! That choreography! Her performance at the MTV EMAs on Sunday was electrifying. Jason

      One of the advantages of living on the African continent is all the African content on streaming platforms. This week, the most watched movie on Netflix is the South African Umjolo – the Gone Girl. It is tagged as “Steamy. Quirky. Dramedy”. I’ve heard enough. Nesrine

      I’m obsessed with Toyo Tastes, a British-Nigerian food blogger and cook who makes everything from plantain and efo riro croquettes to gizdodo vol-au-vents. Jason

      I am a tragic cyclist, in that I love it but am not gifted at it. (And all the kit puts me off.) There may also be a cultural element – which is why I’m excited to dig into my copy of New Black Cyclones – Racism, Representation and Revolutions of Power in Cycling by Marlon Lee Moncrieffe. What a title. Nesrine
      Black catalogueView image in fullscreenAbi Morocco Photos, the Lagos photography studio operated by husband-and-wife John and Funmilayo Abe, captured portraits of Nigerians from the 1970s to 2006. A new exhibition at Autograph in London focuses on the studio’s formative decade in the 1970s, showcasing Lagos street-style and the characters who made up the every day hustle and bustle of the city.Signal boostLast week we wrote about how Nigerians have responded to Kemi Badenoch’s rise to the top of the Conservative party in the UK. Here, a reader offers their response:“I’ve always maintained that people who expect Kemi Badenoch to be different don’t understand anything about her background. Her education and exposure would also have imbued her with a certain amount of intellectual superiority.“As a fellow Nigerian who also spent her formative years in an upper middle class family steeped in academia, nothing about her surprises me. I just wish we would all stop identifying with people simply because they are black/African/Nigerian etc. She is her own person and this so-called achievement has no bearing whatsoever on the issues faced by black and brown people in the UK.” Kan Frances-Benedict in Kent, UKTap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      Will the American project survive the anger of white men? | Carol Anderson

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      A friend recently asked: “Do you think the United States will survive the anger of white men?” As blunt as the question is, the core element is not so far-fetched. In fact, the majority of white men (and women) who voted in the presidential election in 2024 have rallied around a man who has called for the “termination of the constitution”, vowed to be a “dictator”, and threatened to deploy the US military against Americans. They support a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven liar, who has been fined nearly half a billion dollars for fraud, who incited an insurrection that injured 140 police officers, and who mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.The fact that Donald Trump’s candidacy was even viable, given that horrific track record, was because of the support of white men. White men, whose anger was on full display at Madison Square Garden as they spewed racist, misogynistic venom. White men who attacked poll workers and also voters of Kamala Harris. White men who chafed at the thought that their wives and girlfriends would not vote for the man who thought it was “a beautiful thing” that reproductive rights had been destroyed. And, as the New York Times reported, the downwardly mobile, frustrated “white men without a degree, [who] have been surpassed in income by college-educated women”.And let’s be clear. Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else. The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort. The planned enormous tariffs, the rollback on workplace, food and environmental safety regulations, the dismantling of labor protections, the planned deportation of tens of millions of undocumented people and naturalized citizens, the assault on reproductive rights and alignment with dictators – all of this will destroy the economy, explode the deficit and leave the United States severely isolated and weakened.This is nothing new. White male anger, especially at the nation’s inclusion of African Americans, has repeatedly privileged white supremacy over the viability of the United States. During the war of independence, when the nation was fighting to become the United States, South Carolina’s government fumed at Congress’s request to arm the enslaved and give them their freedom in exchange for fending off a British force that was more than 10 times the size of what those in Charleston could muster. Government officials flat out refused and barked that they weren’t sure that the US “was a nation worth fighting for” and would rather take their chances with the king of England. In short, enslaving those of African descent was infinitely more important than the United States.Later on, during the subsequent battles over drafting the constitution, far too many white slaveholding men were willing to hold the United States hostage unless they got their way. That meant reinforcing slavery and the power of slaveholders, despite the document’s language about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. They threatened. They raged. They schemed. And they succeeded.The three-fifths clause, which partially counted each enslaved human being by that fraction, gave the slaveholding south disproportionate and unearned power in the US House of Representatives. The Fugitive Slave Clause allowed them to hunt down beyond their state borders those seeking that elusive freedom from bondage. The additional 20 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade meant they could secure more human cargo directly from Africa to engorge the coffers of those placing racialized slavery above democracy.The disastrous contradictions embedded in the founding of the United States could not help but erupt into civil war. Once again, a group of white men were angry. Angry that the country had elected a man who did not want to see slavery spread beyond the South. Angry that Abraham Lincoln’s position meant a diminution of the south’s national political power. Angry that Lincoln was a Republican, a party founded on anti-slavery. So, in cold, calculated anger they attacked the United States of America. They set out to destroy it.They did not succeed. But that war sowed the dragon’s teeth that undermined the promise of a true multi-racial democracy and led to the horrors of Jim Crow. When the need for correcting the US’s decidedly unequal democracy ran headlong into the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war, the choice should have been obvious. But, once again, white men’s anger put the United States in jeopardy.In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a satellite, which proved that the USSR unexpectedly had the capabilities to launch its nuclear arsenal across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The US was no longer safe. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proposing the National Defense Education Act, which would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into universities so the US would have the “brainpower to fight the cold war”.The bill was shepherded through Congress by two Alabama legislators, the representative Carl Elliott and the senator J Lister Hill. Both wanted the money but neither wanted what came with it. In other words, they wanted to continue to deny admission to African Americans to their racially exclusive universities, such as Ole Miss, LSU, the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama. If this was about educating those who could give the US an edge in the cold war, then limiting that access by race was folly.Yet Elliott and Hill, both signatories to the virtually insurrectionist Southern Manifesto, which vowed to use every weapon at the congressional membership’s disposal to stop Brown v Board of Education from darkening their states’ doorsteps, refused to move the bill forward. They demanded, instead, that Eisenhower provide assurances that those hundreds of millions of dollars would be as whites-only as their universities. Faced with the dilemma of Jim Crow or possible nuclear annihilation, the angry white men chose to protect Jim Crow, not the United States.Similarly, today, despite the warnings from generals who served with Trump, police officers who endured the attacks on January 6, and a God-fearing then vice-president Mike Pence who was targeted for a hanging with gallows constructed during the insurrection, the angry white men who propped up Trump’s return to the White House ignored everything they say they valued – the military, law enforcement and God – to give into the rage of white grievance, the “pastiche of sweaty anger” that the Trump-Vance campaign peddled, and to the fear and violence embedded in the “great replacement” theory.Once again, unfortunately, the anger about a multi-racial democracy has put the viability of the United States in jeopardy.

      Carol Anderson is the Robert W Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide More

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      Black women on what Harris’s loss says about the US: ‘Voters failed to show up for her’

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      In the hours after Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid and endorse Kamala Harris as the democratic nominee for president, 40,000 Black women – leaders in politics, business and entertainment – met on a Zoom call to rally around the vice-president.“We went from that call to organizing our house, our block, our church, our sorority, and our unions,” said Glynda C Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to help Black women get elected to political office. “That is what we did for the 107 days that she ran for office. Black women used our organizing power around a woman that we knew was qualified, that had a lived experience.”View image in fullscreenFor many, Harris seemed to be the one woman to break the glass ceiling of reaching the highest office in the US. Harris, a graduate of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC and a member of the country’s oldest Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc (AKA), who had become the first Black female vice-president after spending a career as a prosecutor, California’s attorney general and senator, had reached a point where voters would welcome a woman – many deemed to be beyond qualified – versus Donald Trump, an embattled former president then awaiting sentencing on more than three dozen felony convictions.“Here is a woman that has had access to be able to build upon legacies and blueprints,” Carr said. Harris’s candidacy was so exciting because “she literally embodies Black excellence for Black women.”Harris’s 107-day campaign to become president began in a year of recognizing the anniversaries of pivotal advancements for Black people during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights movement – 70 years after Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and the NAACP dismantle school segregation; 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the 1964 Democratic national convention; and 52 years since Shirley Chisholm became the first woman and first Black to run for president.“It gave so much hope,” said Christian F Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women and part of generation X, who never thought she’d see a Black president – let alone a Black woman president. “It was like the opportunity and manifestation of our ancestors’ wildest dreams. That’s what I thought to myself like, if she is elected, this is what our ancestors have dreamt about, and women, and Black women have dreamt about our entire lives.”It was that hope that fueled a wide-range of support from Democratic leadership, including former president Jimmy Carter who cast his ballot for Harris weeks after turning 100. Republicans such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, who served as vice-president in the George W Bush administration. Bipartisan support, an aggressive and energized campaign with a huge funding arm from several groups supporting Harris wasn’t enough to overcome the second election of Trump, who saw growth in his voting base among Black and Latino voters. Trump garnered more than 75m votes as of Sunday evening, and won the popular vote for the first since he began his ascension to the White House.“Harris’s candidacy was working for unity and democracy and protecting freedom,” Nunes, 46, said. “Then we had another candidate who basically ran on a campaign to take away freedoms. I felt that this loss was not a reflection of her ability to lead. I felt like it was a reflection of voters who said that they would show up for her, but failed to show up for her. And also, people’s inability to trust women and stand up for women – particularly, especially a Black woman. And I feel like this continuously resonates and shows up in so many spaces and I think that’s the part that was hurtful.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory came from voters who were so put off by the US’s trajectory that they welcomed his brash and disruptive approach. About three in 10 voters said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Even if they weren’t looking for something that dramatic, more than half of voters overall said they wanted to see substantial change.Both nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump won over voters who were alarmed about the economy and prioritized more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Those issues largely overshadowed many voters’ focus on the future of democracy and abortion protections – key priorities for Harris’s voters, but not enough to turn the election in her favor.Rarely has ethnicity, race or gender been mentioned in many after-election interviews, as reasons for not supporting Harris’s bid for president or why they preferred Trump, but some Harris supporters believe they were an underlying reason many will not admit to.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) said Harris’s campaign of inclusion and strong support from the Democrats’ most loyal voting block – Black women – could not withstand “the wall of white nationalism and racism and classism and sexism and misogyny”.“It could not withstand the wall of an electorate that used class, race and gender to block the opportunity for an all-inclusive society that our country is so-called built on,” she said. “This idea of womanhood in leadership still becomes unfathomable for many.”New Orleans resident Laureé Akinola-Massaquoi is the mother of a two -year-old daughter, and said that Harris being the Democratic nominee for president, meant a more equal, progressive future for all of America, not just for Black people, but for everybody.But when Akinola-Massaquoi, 36, woke up on 6 November and saw that Trump had won the election, she was “disgusted, disappointed, just annoyed, really annoyed”.“Nowhere else can other people do the things he does or say the things he does, or have the record he has and become president of the United States. I just don’t even know how he even got this far,” she said. More

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      ‘They blew it’: Democrats lost 22,000 votes in Michigan’s heavily Arab American cities

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      Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.Support for Democrats also fell in seven precincts around the country with significant Arab American or Muslim populations, according to data compiled by the Arab American Institute. It found a combined drop in the seven precincts, from about 4,900 votes in 2020 to just 3,400 this election.Another analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      The number of votes Harris lost in Michigan over the White House’s Israel policy is almost certainly higher. The analysis only looked at the three population centers, not the large Arab American population scattered throughout the region. Some estimated before the election that Harris could lose as many as 90,000 votes in the state.In Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that is nearly 60% Arab American, Biden received about 31,000 votes in 2020, while Harris received just over 15,000. Trump, who campaigned in Dearborn in the election’s waning days, received about 18,000 votes, up from 13,000 last election. Meanwhile, Stein picked up about 7,600 Dearborn votes this year.Stein and Cornell West, third-party candidates who made inroads with voters frustrated with Harris but unwilling to vote for Trump, combined for about 50,000 votes statewide.Michigan is virtually a must-win swing state, and frustration here with the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was viewed as a major Harris liability. Though the issue accounts for a significant portion of Harris’s loss in the state, she also underperformed with Michigan voters across multiple demographics, and inflation was a top issue for many.But Arab American and Muslim voters who defected from the Democratic party made a “key difference” across upper midwest swing states, said the Muslims for Trump founder Rabiul Chowdhury. He said Trump and his surrogates worked in heavily Arab American areas to make amends for his past anti-Muslim record, and promised peace in Gaza and the Middle East. Harris did not, he said.“Everyone’s ultimate goal was to punish Harris and the best way to do this was to vote for Trump,” Chowdhury said.Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American and Congress’s most vocal critic of US-Israel policy, received more than 24,000 votes in Dearborn, doubling Harris’s total. However, she only slightly outran Harris in neighboring Dearborn Heights.In Hamtramck, a city neighboring Detroit that is about 60% Muslim or Arab American, Biden received about 6,500 votes in 2020, while Harris dropped to 3,200. Meanwhile, Trump’s vote total in the city increased by about 2,000, while Stein received just over 600 votes.Trump increasing his votes in Hamtramck but not Dearborn may reflect that Yemeni and Bangladeshi American immigrants in Hamtramck are broadly considered to be more conservative than Dearborn’s largely Lebanese population, observers say. Dearborn heavily backed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, was once among the most progressive representatives in the statehouse.Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, is deeply socially conservative. He endorsed Trump for the presidential election, and on Monday spoke at Trump’s final campaign rally in the state.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Dearborn Heights, a city that is about half Arab American, Biden won with more than 12,000 votes in 2020; this election, Trump won the city with 11,000 votes, and Harris received 9,000.Meanwhile, in a Houston precinct with a significant Arab American population, Democratic support fell from 520 votes to 300 votes. Democratic support in a Minneapolis precinct where Muslim or Arab Americans comprise a majority of voters fell from about 2,100 votes to 1,100 votes.Arab American pollster and Democratic National Committee member James Zogby noted the Harris campaign was repeatedly warned of the votes she would lose if she did not change course on Gaza or meet with key community leaders.“They blew it,” Zogby said. “We gave [the Harris campaign] multiple opportunities and ideas as to how to do this, and they finally started with three days out, but it was way too late in the game.”Mohamed Gula, director of Emgage, a Muslim political advocacy group, said “a lot has to change and there’s a lot Democrats would have to do” to win back Arab and Muslim voters.“There wasn’t a full belief that Trump was better than Harris – it was that the situation was not acceptable and there needs to be change, and we will take whatever comes from that and do what we need to,” he said.Chowdury said Muslim voters in 2028 will support the party that most promotes peace.“We don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “Today it’s a matter of ending the war and supporting the guy who is giving us the assurance of ending the war.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Today is a day of despair for America. We are plunged into an anticipatory grief | Moira Donegan

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      Today is a day of despair, and it would be futile to tell those who fear and grieve for what is to come in America that they will be OK. It would also be dishonest: many of us, in truth, will not be OK.Donald Trump appears to have decisively won the American election. He and his Republican allies have promised mass deportations that will ruin lives and sunder families; they have threatened to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and appoint the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to a position of authority on public health. They have pledged vast cuts to social security and Medicare, the persecution of dissidents and violent suppression of Trump’s political enemies. There will almost certainly be a nationwide abortion ban and this will further degrade women’s citizenship, rob them of their dignity, steal their dreams and ruin their health.For those of us aware of what Trump is capable of, this morning has plunged us into a cold kind of anticipatory grief. There are people in America who are reading the news with worry, who are bracing themselves for crackdowns and unrest, and who will, inevitably, be confirmed in their anxiety; who will discover that they have even more to fear from the coming administration than they now know. I’m thinking of all the ordinary Americans who are alive now, thriving or struggling in this declining country, who will have their lives destroyed or cut short by what is coming.For many, Trump’s victory will remind them of nothing so much as his 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton. Once again, his vulgarity, corruption, pettiness, narcissism and bigotry have been rewarded, at our expense; once again, the nation will be plunged into chaos as his vanity, greed, incompetence and anger take precedence over the national interest; once again, a violently and grossly misogynist man has been elevated to a position of superlative power over a flawed but competent, hardworking woman.But 2024 is not 2016. It is worse. In his first term, Trump’s incompetence was often an impediment to the worst of his agenda; no longer. Institutions, both in the government and in civil society, worked to slow or resist his program; now, many of them seem all too willing to participate, with universities and NGOs eager to launder Trumpism into respectability and the billionaire-controlled media eager to cut deals, suppress unfavorable coverage and minimize his misdeeds. And if in his first term Trump’s impulses were sometimes mitigated by moderates and institutionalists in his administration, by now those people have all been purged. He is surrounded by incels, bigots, conspiracists and sadists, and they are much better prepared to use the organs of the state to pursue their hateful aims. Trump himself even has the promise of broad criminal immunity, a recent gift from the supreme court that will enable his authoritarianisms in ways we cannot yet anticipate.But Trump’s victory, and his return to the White House, will not only be a catastrophe because of what they will mean for America’s future. They are also a horror for what they will do to our past. The last eight years, four under Trump’s governance and four under what American politics has become due to his influence, have prompted tremendous struggle and suffering. The groups he disparages – from immigrants, to women, to disabled people, to those from “shithole countries” – will be humiliated again by his return and betrayed by the countrymen who refused to vindicate their dignity with a vote against him. The people who have been harassed and threatened and attacked by his supporters have now seen their countrymen treat the violence that has been done to them with what they will read as indifference at best, and approval at worst.The historically marginalized among us – those who are Black, or trans, or female – have struggled to make their worthiness and citizenship meaningful in spite of the hatred and hierarchy that Trump has championed. This was the aim of the Women’s Marches, of #MeToo, of Black Lives Matter, which were in part rebukes to Trumpism, and symptoms of the desire for a different America, one that is less cruel to its citizens and more worthy of its stated ideals of liberty and justice for all. They dreamed of turning this country into a free nation of equals; instead, they must now settle for the smaller dream of keeping themselves safe from the worst of what is to come. Trump’s return to the presidency makes these bygone years of activism seem, in retrospect, like a humiliating exercise in futility.Does America deserve Trump? In the years since he rose to power, one theory posits that he is merely the manifestation of the nation’s unexorcised demons – a vestige of the racism that allowed this country to build its economy off the backs of the enslaved, of the casual relationship to violence that allowed it to build its territory and its global hegemony through violent conquest and coercion, of the grubby love of money and shameless disregard for principle that have always motivated our rapacious economy. In this version of the story, Trump is not merely a morbid symptom, but something like America’s comeuppance, a punishment for our sins. Living under his rule takes on the grim appropriateness of one of those ironic punishments in the underworlds of classical mythology, or in the hell of Dante’s Inferno. It is a feature of this horror that those who suffer most under his rule are usually those who are least culpable for these trespasses. Because we never really atoned – not for slavery, not for empire, not for the slaughter and dispossession of Indigenous Americans or the war and exploitation of foreign countries – this is what we now must endure: a figure who brings these cruelties home and who mocks our self-flattering delusion that we ever were, ever could have been, anything else.And yet there remain so many Americans who hope for this country to be something else, if only because they will not survive it otherwise. In the coming days, those who tried to prevent this outcome will turn on one another. Liberals and leftists will point fingers; various Harris campaign staffers will be named responsible for failed strategies in this or that state; someone will make a racist bid to scapegoat Arab Americans and the Uncommitted movement; and many people, smug and insulated from the worst of what is to come, will say that the Democratic party spent too much time campaigning on abortion rights issues.There is plenty of blame to go around. But for the most part, this finger-pointing will be a distraction, a way of putting off the confrontation with what is coming. Instead, I hope that we can turn our attention to the most vulnerable among us: those Trump has antagonized and ridiculed, those who are less safe today than they hoped they might be yesterday. It is those targeted groups who need us, our solidarity and careful attention. In turning to them, we can keep alive in ourselves some small part of the America that Donald Trump seeks to destroy.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Black voters gather at DC hotspots to await results: ‘It’s a historic moment’

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      On Tuesday evening, Black voters milled about Washington DC as they awaited election results. Most voters had cast ballots for Kamala Harris and were excited that a Black woman might become president for the first time. It was a milestone that some didn’t believe that they would witness in their lifetimes.At a watch party at Busboys and Poets, a cultural hub and restaurant, the mood was similar to a New Year’s Eve celebration, with people listening to television pundits discuss the election and socializing with family and friends.View image in fullscreenFor Latoiya Bates, a 49-year-old Georgia resident, it was important to be among Black community on election night. Casting her ballot for Harris was an emotional moment for her. She voted with tears in her eyes and said she was excited due to Harris’s support of reproductive rights and democracy. “It’s a historic moment.”“There’s been so much change in the world,” Bates said, acknowledging the political power of Black women who she said had started a movement. “When she wins, part of her speech should be: ‘We did it. We made America great again.’”Others around the city said that they were concerned about the potential for political violence if Donald Trump loses the election, referencing the January 6 insurrection. “I don’t think that people are going quietly into the night and I also don’t think that it will be a smooth transition,” Dionna La’Fay said outside the White House at Lafayette Square. A 36-year-old Michigan resident who is moving to DC, La’Fay said that she went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and tried to ground herself in the knowledge of Black resilience throughout the day. While she expects violence, she didn’t see it as any different than other tribulations that Black Americans have endured throughout history: “I am not afraid.”View image in fullscreenBlack voters, who account for 14% of the electorate, are expected to vote for Harris in droves. In a survey of Black Americans in all 50 states by the thinktank Black Futures Lab, 71% of respondents said that they trusted Harris and distrusted Trump, compared with 5% who said the opposite. According to a Black Voter Project survey of more than 1,000 Black Americans, Black support for Harris is at 84%, compared with 13% for Trump.The scene outside Lafayette Square in the early evening was cacophonous, with people blasting music and making speeches. One person strummed an acoustic guitar behind pro-Harris signs, while another person biked around blaring rock music as they hauled a small trailer with Trump signs behind them. Metal fencing surrounded the square in anticipation of post-election unrest.View image in fullscreenMamadou, a 31-year-old Washington DC resident from Guinea, walked around the square with friends. He said that he didn’t vote at all because “I don’t know much about that lady and I didn’t want to vote for someone I don’t know at all”. He also didn’t want to vote for Trump for fear of his draconian immigration policies. Otherwise, Mamadou said, he was supportive of Trump while he was in office, because he believes that Trump “loves the country”.Samson Meche, a 35-year-old biotech research associate, traveled to DC from San Diego to watch the election results. He had cast a mail-in ballot for Harris several weeks ago because he believes that she’s more empathetic than Trump, whom he called a “salesman”. Meche is hopeful that Harris will fight for Palestinian liberation in the future and will soon help end Israel’s war on Gaza, he said. “She’s looking out for me,” Meche said. “Since she is one of us, she’s more of the normal social status. She went from the middle class to a more educated person and she can relate to us better than someone who thinks of himself as an elite.”View image in fullscreenLater in the evening, at the Busboys and Poets watch party, Josh Johnson, a Howard alumnus, felt confident that Harris, a fellow alumna, would win. “It’s exciting to see how far she’s come,” Johnson said. He said that he cast a ballot for Harris because “I’m standing up for my rights as an American. It’s not just about me, it’s about the people I care about.”View image in fullscreenJohnson’s partner, Jackson Burnett, also voted for Harris because he supports her policies and is excited to see what she does for the country. “She’s very much for the people, and for the American population, no matter what race, gender,” Burnett said. He also wanted to be among community on election night to celebrate with everyone, Burnett added, “whether good or bad, just making sure that we come together … and figure out next steps”.“I really hope that after this election,” Johnson said, “that we can move forward to not have the same type of [hateful] rhetoric.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      History in the making: is the US finally about to elect its first female president?

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      “This is monumental,” said 19-year-old Kai Carter as she stood in line behind the White House where Kamala Harris was about to take the stage a week before the 5 November election.Carter was ecstatic at the prospect of Harris making history as the first Black female president of the United States. She attended the event with a group of fellow students from Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington DC, which is also the vice-president’s alma mater.Born in the United States of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris, the first female vice-president, is also potentially on the verge of becoming the first Asian American president, as well the country’s first female president. Yet she is not making a big deal about it.In her closing argument in Washington DC before one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history, Harris did not refer to her gender or her race or how she may be breaking a glass ceiling. It’s not something she brings up often on the campaign trail, choosing instead to focus on her middle-class upbringing and how she hopes to be a president for “all Americans”.Her central message that night was about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American. Or one ruled by chaos and division.”Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made gender a central part of her 2016 run for office, at a time of historic polarization Harris chose to focus on issues over identity. That is also how she chose to run her unusually short campaign of 13 weeks after an ageing Biden finally passed her the mantle on 21 July.Laurie Pohutsky, a Democratic state representative in Michigan, decided to run in 2018 after witnessing Trump’s misogynistic campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, she has introduced two key pieces of state legislation that lifted restrictions on abortion. In a phone interview from the swing state governed by the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, she said: “You know, we weren’t elected because we were women. And I think that when we frame it that way, we do a disservice to ourselves.”She said she agreed with Harris’s choice not to focus on gender: “While it’s historic, it’s not what would make her a good president.”“We’re long overdue for a female president,” she added. “But that’s not why I think people are voting for her. They’re voting for her because of her record and the work that she’s done and the things that she believes, versus what we know Donald Trump believes.”Identity politicsIn the face of misogyny and racism, it is Harris’s detractors who have attempted to use her identity against her. Republicans regularly mispronounce her name or call her a “DEI hire”.At the beginning of her campaign, Trump sought to steer the conversation towards race in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, questioning whether Harris is indeed Black. Many recognize these personal attacks as Trump’s hallmark. Their purpose is to undermine debate, take his opponent off script, stoke division and ultimately attract media attention.Christina Reynolds, senior vice-president for communications for Emily’s List, a political action committee that backs pro-choice Democratic female candidates, including Harris, explains that women are often the butt of personal attacks whereas men are attacked for their policies. Reynolds has witnessed this first-hand after working on five presidential campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s.This is just one example of the double standards women and particularly women of color face to get to the top. Another is the pressure on women to be both likable and competent, whereas a man can be one or the other. Research by UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business also shows that women in positions of power lose likability. This is particularly true of successful middle-aged women.In 2016, Trump accused Clinton of being a “nasty woman” while male pundits told her to “smile” more. When Harris, a former prosecutor, successfully grilled Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing for the supreme court, Trump accused her too of being “nasty”.A champion of women’s rightsDespite Harris’s attempts to detract attention from her gender and race, she has campaigned heavily on the issue of women’s rights. “She may not frame things in terms of her gender, but the first president or vice-president to invite abortion providers to the White House and to visit an abortion provider – both of those firsts were Kamala Harris,” Reynolds said.The overturning of Roe v Wade by three Trump-appointed supreme court justices in 2022 placed women’s rights at the forefront of voters’ concerns. The right to abortion was a hard-fought battle that was won in 1973. A poll from May 2024 from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center suggested that 63% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.In perhaps one of the most moving moments of the Democratic national convention, three women told their harrowing personal stories of being denied medical care in states where abortions are restricted.At the closing rally in Washington DC, Harris suggested Trump could take things even further: “He would ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control and put IVF at risk and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris has also proposed policies to appeal to people – especially women – who need to care for parents and young children at the same time, known as the sandwich generation. She talks about how she had to care for her mother before she died of cancer in 2009, and she has talked about her plan to have Medicare pay for home healthcare.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:

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      Signs of progressHarris is running for office in a divided country, with Trump threatening violence against his political opponents. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list,” she said in DC last week to a crowd of more than 75,000 people.And while in her closing argument the Democratic nominee made clear that she pledged to be a “president for all Americans” and “to always put country above party and above self”, at the same time Reynolds noted that “she has taken the communities that she has been a part of” and ensured that they “have a voice” and “that they are included in conversations”.As Americans watched Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and Harris as vice-president sitting behind Biden as he gave his first address to Congress in April 2021, they were reminded of how women are increasingly occupying positions of power. The numbers tell a similar story. According to data provided by the Center for American Women and Politics, in 2017 the US had 105 female members of Congress out of 535. Today the number has reached 150, including rising stars such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett.“We still have a long way to go,” said Reynolds. But people no longer hear the word “candidate” “with the assumption that a candidate is a man”.“And that’s progress,” she added.At Harris’s closing address in Washington DC, Elaine Callahan, a self-described independent voter, felt compelled to back Harris in 2024: “It is historic. Yes!”But as polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in many swing states, she remembers what happened to Clinton back in 2016 and is prompted to “pray to God there will be a shift”. More