The 2024 elections made US history in numerous ways. Vice President Kamala Harris became the first Black and South Asian woman to be nominated by a major party for the presidency. Former president Donald Trump made history by becoming the oldest person and the first convicted felon to become president. 2024 marked the first presidential election following the historic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022.
We asked leading experts in the field to reflect on the gender and racial dynamics of the 2024 election cycle and consider which aspects of the election are illuminated by gender scholarship. We asked what theories help explain the dynamics of the campaigns, voting behavior, and the outcome, as well as which election aspects were unanticipated. We asked about the larger lessons and challenges for the study of gender, LGBTQ+ identities, race/ethnicity, elections, and politics. As Politics & Gender celebrates its 20th anniversary, we wanted to know what new questions should be addressed and whether new theories about gender and US elections are needed.
The essay by Christine M. Slaughter, entitled “Lessons Learned from Black Women’s Resilience and the 2024 Election,” considers Harris’s campaign from the vantage point of Black women. Using an intersectional framework, Slaughter explores the resilience of Black women before, during, and after Harris’s nomination — concluding that “at the margins of race and gender identities, Black women have to persistently demonstrate resilience to remain relevant and steer Americans to democratic politics.”
Catherine N. Wineinger’s essay, “Women Are Not a Voting Bloc: Why Democratic Appeals to White Republican Women Didn’t Widen the Gender Gap,” points to the importance of considering partisanship alongside gender. Despite much anticipation of a voter gender chasm in the face of a “uniquely gendered political environment,” Republican women remained loyal to Trump. Wineinger’s analysis draws on party politics and political behavior scholarship to explore the reasons that “Democratic efforts to appeal to Republican women often fall short.”
In “Cisheteropatriarchal Institutions and the Representation of LGBTQ+ Legislators,” Hannah K. Brant centers queer women in the candidate numbers from 2024. She argues that legislatures are not only raced-gendered institutions, but also cisheteropatriarchal. Despite the electoral gains made by the LGBTQ+ community, “their ability to substantively represent women’s, trans, and other queer interests hinges on the extent to which they will be required to operate in a hostile environment.”
Turning to the world stage, Danielle Lemi imagines what a Harris presidency would have meant from the perspective of American empire. In “From Descriptive to Identity Representation: What if a Woman of Color Led the American Empire,” she employs critiques of imperial feminism and studies of gender and the US military in order to explore the tension between “the politics of difference and the politics of the American empire.” Lemi argues for the concept of an “identity representative” who “explicitly politicizes their identity and acts in solidarity with oppressed groups to end oppression.”
Together, the essays demonstrate the manifold contributions to date of gender and elections scholarship. They also underscore the necessity of intersectional theorizing and the imperative of a gender analysis that incorporates complexity and nuance. The authors unite gender analysis with theories of race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, partisanship, and settler colonialism. They connect the underpinnings and consequences of elections to representation — both in terms of institutional life and the public’s understandings of their representatives. These unique perspectives offer a rich array of directions for further research, highlighting new avenues for theorizing and empirically analyzing the gendered dynamics of US elections.
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The 2024 elections made US history in numerous ways. Vice President Kamala Harris became the first Black and South Asian woman to be nominated by a major party for the presidency. Former president Donald Trump made history by becoming the oldest person and the first convicted felon to become president. 2024 marked the first presidential election following the historic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022.
We asked leading experts in the field to reflect on the gender and racial dynamics of the 2024 election cycle and consider which aspects of the election are illuminated by gender scholarship. We asked what theories help explain the dynamics of the campaigns, voting behavior, and the outcome, as well as which election aspects were unanticipated. We asked about the larger lessons and challenges for the study of gender, LGBTQ+ identities, race/ethnicity, elections, and politics. As Politics & Gender celebrates its 20th anniversary, we wanted to know what new questions should be addressed and whether new theories about gender and US elections are needed.
The essay by Christine M. Slaughter, entitled “Lessons Learned from Black Women’s Resilience and the 2024 Election,” considers Harris’s campaign from the vantage point of Black women. Using an intersectional framework, Slaughter explores the resilience of Black women before, during, and after Harris’s nomination — concluding that “at the margins of race and gender identities, Black women have to persistently demonstrate resilience to remain relevant and steer Americans to democratic politics.”
Catherine N. Wineinger’s essay, “Women Are Not a Voting Bloc: Why Democratic Appeals to White Republican Women Didn’t Widen the Gender Gap,” points to the importance of considering partisanship alongside gender. Despite much anticipation of a voter gender chasm in the face of a “uniquely gendered political environment,” Republican women remained loyal to Trump. Wineinger’s analysis draws on party politics and political behavior scholarship to explore the reasons that “Democratic efforts to appeal to Republican women often fall short.”
In “Cisheteropatriarchal Institutions and the Representation of LGBTQ+ Legislators,” Hannah K. Brant centers queer women in the candidate numbers from 2024. She argues that legislatures are not only raced-gendered institutions, but also cisheteropatriarchal. Despite the electoral gains made by the LGBTQ+ community, “their ability to substantively represent women’s, trans, and other queer interests hinges on the extent to which they will be required to operate in a hostile environment.”
Turning to the world stage, Danielle Lemi imagines what a Harris presidency would have meant from the perspective of American empire. In “From Descriptive to Identity Representation: What if a Woman of Color Led the American Empire,” she employs critiques of imperial feminism and studies of gender and the US military in order to explore the tension between “the politics of difference and the politics of the American empire.” Lemi argues for the concept of an “identity representative” who “explicitly politicizes their identity and acts in solidarity with oppressed groups to end oppression.”
Together, the essays demonstrate the manifold contributions to date of gender and elections scholarship. They also underscore the necessity of intersectional theorizing and the imperative of a gender analysis that incorporates complexity and nuance. The authors unite gender analysis with theories of race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, partisanship, and settler colonialism. They connect the underpinnings and consequences of elections to representation — both in terms of institutional life and the public’s understandings of their representatives. These unique perspectives offer a rich array of directions for further research, highlighting new avenues for theorizing and empirically analyzing the gendered dynamics of US elections.