Now begins the unenviable job of pundits and pollsters and other assortment of experts and non-experts to come up with what went wrong with the Harris-Walz ticket. It is very common among analysts to dig into the minutiae of this or that to explain why voters voted as they did. Often the answers are there but for the trees and getting lost in the weeds.

Harris lost, or Trump won, because of the persistent pernicious streak that runs through American presidential elections: Misogyny and racism.

First, misogyny – Harris fell like Hillary Clinton to the same lack of psychological preparedness on the part of the American electorate to be by a woman. Hillary Clinton could blame her loss on the electoral college, as she won the popular vote convincingly. Harris, on the other hand, may not be able to blame the electoral college if Trump ends up winning the win the popular vote, thus affirming that the “weaker sex” shall never preside over the republic.   

Second, racism. This is afar more complicated to analyze. There are three levels to this:

(A) The race of the candidate should not have mattered, because after all Obama proved that a “black” person can be elected president. But Harris is not Obama and Obama rose in the pre-Trump era. Perhaps the “good times” under Obama have been so distorted that his election became reason enough for some not to elect another “black” to that office.   

(B) There is the issue of whether an interracial person like Obama, with a white mother and black Kenyan father, is truly a black American. The same may be asked of Harris – if a child of an Indian woman and a black Jamaican man is truly a black American. This line of inquiry is born of the implicit bias or disdain that the darker blacks may have against the mixed-race blacks, who are usually of lighter skin tone and perhaps farther advanced in economic and educational pursuits.

(C) The issue of immigration, especially from the s-hole countries, as Trump has said, and security at the southern border has nothing to do with immigration per se and has everything to do with racism. There was a time when I thought I was “white” until one day in the late 1980’s I was standing at the urinal minding my business when Bunk, the head of the corporate department, an white American, walked in the restroom and addressed me and my colleague, Jason, who was washing his hand at the sink: “What are you darkies doing in here?” I had to ask Jason, an Italian-American, what did Bunk mean by calling us darkie. If I am a darkie then I can imagine what people a shade darker or more than me no matter where they come from are perceived by many white Americans.

Trump played the “weaker-sex” card in his put-down of Harris. He played the race card under the guise of immigration control and artfully connected the deriding of immigrants – blacks and Latinos – to the economy, by stressing that these newcomers were taking jobs of the established blacks and Latinos and of the whites. So when the polls showed the economy as a No. 1 issue in the mind of voters, the chances are that “the economy” was a convenient cover for expressing racist attitudes without saying the quiet part out loud.