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Outside In

Traveling aboard during election time in America has been a great learning experience for me. People have strong opinions about the outcome of the election and why the results were what they are. This line of reasoning from what I could tell has no support atleast judging from the random assortment of folks who chatted with us about US elections. Infact, they believe that making this (and just about everything else) about race and gender is exactly what got us in this situation in the first place.

Outside looking in, people see that the losing party has gotten completely, irremediably out of touch with the concerns of the voters no matter how you slice the population and count their votes. The items on the agenda (or atleast how the voters perceive them to be) are all the wrong and irrelevant ones. So they demonstrated their eagerness for something to be shook up and for the statis to end. The rest is noise. Plus no one trusts the media to be treating the challenger to incumbency fairly - so most of the bad press was likely written off as lies and fabrication (does not matter the reality). When all these factors are combined the outcome was a foregone conclusion for these folks sitting thousands of miles away from the action. 

It is bitter pill to swallow that the dubious credentials of the winner did not pose any impediment given how disappointed people were with the incumbents but this is likely the truth - as seen by foreigners. To write off all Black women in one fell swoop seems a little pre-mature given the conditions in which this came to pass:

Unfortunately, this country will always default to its original tenets of racism and misogyny in the face of fear, frustration, or just plain dissatisfaction. It has never been more unclear what unified Democratic opposition to Trumpism should look like, but there is one very clear reality looking at us straight in the face. If Harris, the closest woman we had to a bridge between the Black and white vote, couldn’t win in 2024, maybe no Black woman can

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