After days of handwringing and sheetcaking by Democratic women about their failure to resoundingly repudiate President Trump and gain seats in Congress, the week ended with a breathtaking realization: A woman is headed to the White House for the first time.
Though Kamala Harris won’t occupy the Oval Office as she’d originally hoped, her victory as the nation’s first female vice president delivers a historic and symbolic wallop. Four years after rejecting the first female major-party nominee for president, Americans sent a Black woman to the White House.
“We have a vice president that looks like me!” said Janyce Murray, a letter carrier, cheering and dancing for joy outside her US Postal Service truck in downtown Boston after hearing the news Saturday.
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Dana McKinzie, a 50-year-old Black woman from Pittsburgh, joined the spontaneous celebrations on Boylston Street Saturday with her daughter, Angela, whom she’d brought to Boston for college visits.
“I don’t think I actually have processed the magnitude of what we’ve done,” she said.
Angela McKinzie, who is 18, was thrilled she got to cast her first vote in such a meaningful election.
“It was amazing,” she said.
On CNN, political commentator Abby Phillip, who is Black, pointed to the “historical poetry” of the moment, as Harris was elevated in large part by Black female voters, whose unrivaled reliability and organizational might proved pivotal to Democrats in battleground states.
“For Black women, this has been really a proving moment for their political strength in carrying Joe Biden to the Democratic nomination through the primary,” Phillip said on Friday. “Black women did that."
For many Democratic women, the long-awaited election results sweetened a disappointing 2020 election season. Antipathy toward Trump did not deliver Democrats another pink wave or the Senate majority of their dreams. Women set new records for representation in Congress, but some of the female Democrats who dominated the 2018 midterms lost. First-termers like Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa and Rep. Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico were toppled by female challengers who put their districts back in the red.
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This year, it was the Republicans who gained ground for women.
“Because they were on the ballot in these record numbers, they were able to capitalize on what was ultimately a better-than-expected year for Republicans in the House,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
In the House, 13 non-incumbent Republicans won seats — up from just one in 2018, when 35 newly elected Democratic women dominated the discourse.
That was more than enough to make up for Republican women’s attrition of recent years and to boost women’s representation on the GOP side of the aisle. And it set another record for women, who will now represent at least 25 percent of Congress, Dittmar noted.
In the presidential election that marked the 100-year anniversary of women gaining the right to vote, polls before Election Day showed that white women who had helped Trump secure the election four years ago were abandoning him. Trump made repeated pitches to “suburban housewives,” veritably begging them to “please like me," and claiming he had saved their neighborhoods from low-income (read: Black and brown) invaders.
Aimee Allison, who founded She the People, a national network formed after the 2016 election to elevate the voice and power of women of color, was rankled by the focus on “suburban women." She noted white women traditionally vote Republican for president, while Black women reliably show up for the Democratic nominee.
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“There were so many stories that were trying to give white women as a coup de grace, this false narrative this election is going to be won and lost based on what white women do,” she said. “It just isn’t true. White women are reliably Republican.”
It’s unclear exactly how white women voted — exit polls are causing even more consternation than the pre-election polls did — but white women did not decisively turn on Trump. Instead, one preliminary exit poll cited by both CNN and the New York Times suggested white women backed Trump by an even higher margin than they had in 2016.
“I am absolutely disgusted by white women who doubled down for Trump,” Allison Tweeted and told the Globe in an interview.
Suburban voters — women in particular — may have moved away from Trump, a New York Times analysis of exit polls found. Another survey found college-educated white women overwhelmingly backed Biden, which would have made them the only white subgroup to do so.
But while white women were clearly divided by subgroup, Black women united around the Democratic ticket — and not for the first time. Previously credited with solidifying Biden’s nomination and with steering the 2017 defeat of Republican Roy Moore in an Alabama special Senate election, Black women are now being credited for boosting the margins for Biden and Harris. Crucially, Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia legislator and gubernatorial nominee, is being lauded for putting Georgia in play with her campaign to promote fair voting and end voter suppression.
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And of course, Kamala Harris, the next vice president of the United States, gave Black women a standard-bearer like they’ve never had and another reason to show up at the polls.
“That’s one of the reasons why I voted, was for her,' said Christina Perry, 28, a Black woman from Weymouth who came into the city for the celebration with her fiance and his daughter on Saturday. "It’s a great way for us to be represented in the White House. This is huge.”
Allison called Harris “a game changer.”
“She’s the reason we had high turnout,” she said. "It wasn’t enough to hate Trump.”
Globe staffer Craig Walker contributed.
“What She Said” is an occasional column on gender issues.
Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @StephanieEbbert.
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A woman in the White House, after all - The Boston Globe
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