Friday, November 8, 2024

How digital misogyny helped Trump win

Your definitive guide to women, politics and power.
Nov 08, 2024 View in browser
 
POLITICO Women Rule Logo

By Emma Cordover

Hands hold a cellphone showing an image of Kamala Harris on CNN.

Illustration by Claudine Hellmuth/POLITICO (source images AP and iStock)

Morning, Rulers! What a week. The country decided against electing its first woman president, instead sending Donald Trump back to the White House. Today, we’ll dive into one of the potential forces driving voters’ decisions on Tuesday: the internet. 

Let’s get into it. 

The far-right weaponized racist and sexist memes, online posts and satirical deepfakes about Vice President Kamala Harris in an attempt to derail her presidential campaign, from “Comrade Kamala” tweets, to insinuations that she used sex to advance her career to AI-generated images of her dressed like a sex worker.

In many ways, it worked.

Harris’ loss on Tuesday may be partly attributable to today’s social media environment, which is exceptionally vulnerable to misogynistic disinformation from the far-right, according to researchers studying digital harm targeting women leaders.

“I have never seen this fierce of an ecosystem organized to carry far-right tropes, stereotypes and narratives than this election,” #ShePersisted co-founder Kristina Wilfore says in an interview with Women Rule.

“In the United States, electoral behavior has really been impacted by the social media environment,” and the “weaponizing of misogyny for political gain,” Wilfore’s co-founder Lucina Di Meco adds.

#ShePersisted is an organization researching digital threats against women in politics. Wilfore and Di Meco call for increased regulation of social media platforms’ political content to protect voters from false narratives and ensure women have an equal chance at holding office.

As they see it, the unregulated proliferation of political content on social media and AI could become a threat to the American electoral process — as well as American political gender parity.

Trump’s success with young men at the polls, Wilfore says, could be because the demographic is particularly easy to target online.

“Men are the most vulnerable to disinformation because they don't operate with guardrails on the internet. There's no unsafe spaces for them,” Wilfore says. “Young men have the highest trust of social media … as well as the false belief that they can't be manipulated online.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s appeal to the “bro” demographic was apparent in his appearances alongside podcasters hyper popular with young, Gen Z men, like Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Theo Von.

The harms of social media against young women, by contrast, have been more widely spotlighted. They may exercise more caution online than a man.

That’s how, Di Meco says, “a young man looking online for the exercise routine or how to find a date” will be “slowly primed … into a type of bubble where all of a sudden they have the impression everyone around you is believing this.”

Trump during his campaign promoted a voter registration drive on dating apps and advertised on highly-listened to, male-friendly podcasts like “Kill Tony,” “MrBallen,” and “BS w/ Jake Paul.”

The most fierce attacks that affected voting behavior toward Harris tapped “into implicit bias around people's perception of women's capacity to compete equally,” Wilfore says.

For example, she says, the “conversations around, ‘Oh, I don't really know what [Harris] stands for,’” were really attacks on her leadership qualifications, Wilfore says.

In another example, Trump in August reposted a post by another user on Truth Social with an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton that read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”

The remark was a reference to former President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and a far-right narrative that Harris’ romantic relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, whom she dated in the 1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, was behind her political ascent.

Other examples include, Dylan Dupree, a far-right influencer posted videos like these including AI deepfakes of Harris that aim to vulgarly satirize her.

Two women presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton and now Harris — have lost to Trump. But Wilfore doesn’t think that proves America is not ready to elect a female president.

“There are still ways in which women's leadership is desired and normalized in other parts of our system,” Wilfore says. For instance, “Women represented 26.8 percent of the house races and 23.4 percent of Senate races” this year, a slight decrease from 2022, she adds. The Democratic Party nominated “38 percent women” at the House level, a slight increase from 2022, and 33 percent at the Senate level.

Also, “the number of women registered to vote in the U.S. has typically been around 10 million higher than men.”

“It's not that they hate women, it's not that people don't care about women,” Wilfore says. “It’s the dark arts of information manipulation that has always benefited fascist, violent leaning movements throughout history.”

Despite Harris losing both the popular vote and the election, seven states on Tuesday passed ballot measures to protect abortion access — an issue she hoped to rest her campaign on — including in conservative strongholds like Missouri and Montana that Trump won by a landslide.

The popularity of abortion as an issue, Wilfore argues, paints a picture of Americans voting against the woman candidate but, voting for women.

“It's not a surprise, but it is still a gut punch,” Wilfore says of Tuesday’s election results. “Sometimes you have to lose everything before you rebuild in a different way. … We have power. Women have power in this moment.”

POLITICO Special Report

Women hold signs to show their support for Donald Trump at a campaign rally.

Evan Vucci/AP

Democratic women see a country that is ‘not ready for a woman president’ by Elena Schneider for POLITICO: “In interviews with POLITICO, nearly a dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists argued that Harris faced headwinds including an ornery electorate and her connection to an unpopular incumbent. But to them, it was also more than that.

‘I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president,’ said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. …

‘We don’t want to say it publicly, a woman can’t get elected,’ [Angie] Kuefler [who worked on several abortion rights initiatives in recent years] said. ‘But what else are we supposed to take away from this moment? I hope this is unique to women running against Trump.’”

Anti-abortion forces broke the left’s post-Roe winning streak, but 7 more states enacted protections by Alice Miranda Ollstein for POLITICO: “Abortion opponents clinched their first victories in ballot measure fights since the fall of Roe on Tuesday night, with Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota upholding bans on the procedure.

The results end a two-year winning streak for abortion-rights groups that had successfully defended reproductive health rights or overturned prohibitions in several purple and red states, including many that voted overwhelmingly for President-elect Donald Trump.

Yet seven states voted Tuesday to restore, preserve or expand the right to terminate a pregnancy, including in conservative strongholds like Missouri and Montana.”

Kamala Harris concedes the election but not the fight by Eugene Daniels and Myah Ward for POLITICO: “Less than 24 hours from when she was expected to address a waiting jubilant crowd, Harris stood in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall at her alma mater. Gone were the throngs of Howard students hoping to see one of their own lead the country. Instead, forlorn and crying staffers were front and center, hoping to hear their boss help them process the loss.

‘While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. The fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and for the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation. The ideals that reflect an America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up,’ the vice president said.”

Number of the Week

54 percent of women in the U.S. voted for Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. 55 percent of men in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump.

Read more here.

MUST READS

Chioma Tait, a PhD student at Howard University, sits after Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election on the campus of Howard University.

Ben Curtis/AP

For Black Women, ‘America Has Revealed to Us Her True Self’ by Erica L. Green and Maya King for the New York Times: “From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop. … Underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?

The painful answer arrived this week.

It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.

How Trump Neutralized His Abortion Problem by Elaine Godfrey for The Atlantic: “Ballot measures to expand abortion access passed in seven states, including Missouri, Arizona, and Montana, three places that Trump won. Previous polling and election outcomes had shown that most Americans support abortion rights. Less clear was how they’d behave with Trump on the ballot. The issue of abortion may have shed its partisan salience — just not in a way that helped Kamala Harris and other Democrats. Abortion access ‘is becoming less partisan, ironically, in the sense that Republicans and independents are more likely to support abortion rights,’ Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and an Atlantic contributor, told me, ‘while not translating that into support for Democratic candidates.’

For Democrats and abortion-rights activists, last night’s referenda were glittering pinpricks of light in an otherwise long, dark night of defeats.”

How America Embraced Gender War by Jia Tolentino for the New Yorker: “The big two genders are said to be at war. The results of the Presidential election can hardly be read otherwise: in preliminary exit-poll data out of Pennsylvania, women aged eighteen to twenty-nine swung forty points for Kamala Harris , while their male counterparts swung twenty-four points for Donald Trump . The conflict — the dark, snarling, many-headed beast of indifference and contempt that emerges from these numbers — has been building for decades. Women in America, as in nearly all industrialized democracies, used to be more conservative than men; in the nineteen-seventies, they began to shift leftward, then closed the partisan gap by the eighties, and during the nineties became firmly more liberal than American men. The simplest explanation for this is the most plausible one: women, acquiring education and workplace power and economic independence, drew closer to a party that valorized equality and away from a party that valorized hierarchy. With birth control, with safe and legal abortion, the story went, women gained control over their lives.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

A quote from Kamala Harris reads, I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations. Where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do.

Read more here.

on the move

Tricia Duffy has joined Holland & Knight as a partner in the financial services practice. She was most recently at Latham & Watkins. (h/t POLITICO Influence)

Caitlin Harder has been named director of public affairs at the Beer Institute. She previously was director of public affairs at Clyde. (h/t POLITICO Playbook)

Stacey Sutton and Amanda Jesteadt have joined Wiley as partners in the telecom, media and technology practice. They both come from Carlton Fields, where Sutton was chair of the telecom practice and Jesteadt was a shareholder. (h/t POLITICO Influence)

 

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