Women could be about to save Kamala Harris. They may come to regret it

There’s an irony in the Vice President winning over female voters, when her party struggles to define one

History shows that US elections are usually a marathon, not a sprint – especially when they are as closely fought as Trump vs Harris.
Yet the initial exit polls suggesting that female turnout might be a little higher than usual adds an interesting dimension to an election that is being fought by two candidates who have made very different offers to the women who make up 50.4 per cent of America’s population – especially when it comes to trans men competing in women’s sport.
Very early data showing women accounting for some 53 per cent of the vote, six points ahead of men, and one point up on the last election – could swing the White House in Harris’ favour. But the assumption that women will automatically benefit from the election of the first female President of the United States is as misleading as it is naive.
With his penchant for porn stars and grabbing women “by the p—y”, Trump has long had a “women problem” that saw the majority of female voters back Hillary Clinton in 2016 (54 per cent to 39 per cent) and Biden in 2020 (55 per cent to 44 per cent).
During this campaign, the former President has continued to struggle to win over female voters, despite declaring himself to be “the father of IVF” in one interview, and backing the expansion of child tax credits.
Trump may be far more relaxed about abortion than some of his devoutly Christian followers, arguing that states should decide their own laws for their own people, but he is blamed by many women for the overturning of Roe vs Wade – a move that might be partly responsible for any increase in female voter turnout in 2024. According to the Edison Research poll, 53 per cent of voters say either democracy or abortion is the most important issue, versus 45 per cent who say they care most about the economy and immigration – suggesting Harris’s campaign has cut through more than Trump’s.
However, there is arguably an irony in the Vice President seemingly being more popular with American women, not least because she appears unwilling to define one.
Far from offering a promised land for anyone with XX chromosomes, a future Harris administration could well further embolden the kind of gender extremists who want men to participate in female sports or children to have easier access to puberty blockers – without their mothers knowing. In her failed 2020 presidential run, she backed taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for prison inmates and illegal immigrants. And in California, where she served as San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general, legal protections for gender self-identification have effectively ended the rights of women to have protected single-sex spaces.
It goes without saying that these are distinctly female unfriendly policies.
Women voting for Harris on the basis of “my body, my choice” appear to have overlooked the fact that her real agenda on issues like trans may end up doing significant damage to her sisterhood of fan girls.