I don’t follow Democratic politics closely, but those who do suggest that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer would have been a strong possibility to be the nominee if there were an open primary. She’s a popular governor in a part of the country that will determine the election.
[Conditional forecast: If Harris wins Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, she wins the election. If Trump wins even one of those 3 states (as I expect), Trump wins the election.]
But after Harris was picked. Whitmer completely dropped off the list as a possible VP candidate. Why is that?
I was recently chatting with someone about Harris’s upcoming VP pick. In my conversation, I specifically suggested “the Michigan Governor” would be the obvious choice, without mentioning her gender. When I said this ideal candidate wasn’t being considered, the person responded “What’s wrong with him?” I said, “That’s exactly the problem, the presumption that the pick will be a him.”
Here’s Wikipedia:
The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. . . .
Beauvoir asks, “What is woman?” She argues that man is considered the default, while woman is considered the “Other”: “Thus, humanity is male, and man defines woman not herself, but as relative to him.”
A lot has changed since 1949. Today, affirmative action programs favor women and minorities for certain positions. Harris herself was chosen by Biden partly because she was a woman. At the same time, I suspect that Beauvoir was on to something. A man is viewed as a human being, whereas a woman is viewed as a non-male human being. I don’t recall people being surprised that Trump picked another male to serve as his VP. People objected to Vance, but not because a presidential ticket was unbalanced if both candidates were male. There’s little doubt that Harris is not considering Whitmer precisely because she fears the electorate would view a ticket with two women as being “weird”. But why?
PS. Lots of people think in moralistic terms, and as a result their their thinking on issues of race and gender lacks nuance. For example, it can be true that blacks are favored over whites for some jobs, and also be true that whites are favored over blacks for some jobs.
It can even be true that some blacks are discriminated against because of the way that civil rights laws have been interpreted by the courts, which has led some employers to fear that they’d be unable to fire a poorly performing black employee. So they refrain from hiring people with black sounding names. You rarely hear of this problem, because it doesn’t fit well with either left or right wing moralizing. Among both the left and the right, our intuition about what’s fair doesn’t always conform to the way that the world actually works.
PPS. Studies of bias for or against female candidates have been in the news. These studies have zero bearing on the question of bias toward female candidates running for president.
PPPS. As Trump has demonstrated, a man can be nasty and rude and still be an effective candidate. A woman must come across as more appealing. Whitmer looks like the sort of woman that men would vote for:
