In the hours surrounding Joe Biden’s convincing Michigan win, adding to his Mississippi and Missouri shutouts of Sen. Bernie Sanders, analysts and pundits, as we are wont to do, deluged the airwaves and social media with assessments and predictions about the state of the 2020 race.
Sometimes these are based on good data, solid reporting, exit polls or even firsthand knowledge. Other times they’re purely speculative hunches, offered with little evidence other than sneaking suspicion and a string of well-couched probablys.
Which is how to describe almost all analysis about supposed sexism in elections.
To wit, Joe Biden’s success in 2020 means Hillary Clinton’s failures in 2016 are proof of sexism in electoral politics.
Dismantling a specious argument many people likely just take for fact begins with stating the painfully obvious, which is that Hillary Clinton very handily beat Bernie Sanders (and three other male candidates) in 2016. Despite losing the Electoral College to Donald Trump in the general election, her supporters are also keen on pointing out she won the popular vote. You’d think this alone would be cause for some hesitation when advancing the theory that Democratic primary voters in particular are hung up on gender.
If voters are biased against women candidates, they sure have a funny way of showing it. In 2018, women won seats in Congress in record numbers. The latest research shows that women win elections at the same rate as men when they’re actually on the ballot.
Michigan, where Biden just did better against Sanders than Hillary Clinton did four years ago, happens to have a female governor.
But it’s easy to discount all this when you really, really want something to be true, in this case, that Hillary Clinton lost because she was a woman and not because she was a terrible candidate with the highest unfavorables of any presidential candidate in 30 years, along with her opponent, Donald Trump.
Clinton came with considerable baggage, including a problematic trust deficit that put her behind even Trump among voters.
But even if you believe her bad reputation was the result of sexist smears against her, there are other plausible explanations for Clinton’s general election loss and Biden’s recent wins.
In Michigan, for starters, Biden was likely helped by the fact that he bothered to campaign there; Clinton largely did not.
Biden has benefited, like Trump did in the 2016 Republican primary, from an overly crowded field where Clinton basically ran a two-person race against Sanders.
Biden is running after four tumultuous years of Trump, with higher stakes and different priorities for Democratic voters. In 2016, Clinton was running to carry on Obama’s legacy.
But mostly, the argument against the Biden/ Clinton comparison is real simple: Each election year is different, and each candidate is different, with intangibles that are hard to measure.