The phenomenon had been anticipated for months. But we had to wait until election day, Tuesday, November 5, for it to materialize: American women largely favored Kamala Harris, but not enough to ensure her victory. The various exit polls published in the evening by the American media presented an expected jaws effect: an advantage of 10 points for the Democrat among women (around 54 against 44), but exactly the opposite ratio in favor of Donald Trump in men.
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Kamala Harris’s bet was to extend the Democratic results since the Supreme Court’s decision, in June 2022, to end abortion as a federal right for all women. This decision, which shook up the parameters of American politics, became a hemlock for Republicans at the polls, as shown by the referendums and local elections, as well as the mid-term vote in November 2022, which offered only a narrow majority to the Republicans. Kamala Harris therefore chose, logically, to make abortion a major focus of her campaign.
Removing a right that has existed for half a century is anything but trivial. Especially since this act led, in the process, to the implementation of repressive legislation in numerous States, 14 completely prohibiting the procedure, with very rare exceptions. This wave did not cause a drop in the number of abortions performed, but it made women, as well as clinic staff and doctors, feel unsafe. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reference on this issue, more than 168,000 women crossed the borders of their state of residence in 2023 to end their pregnancy in another state. Bans and restrictions first affect the most vulnerable women, with few resources, and in particular Black and Latina women.
Revenge of the “angry American man”
It is in this context that Kamala Harris placed her campaign under a banner, « Freedom »freedom. It was no longer a question of calling ourselves “pro-choice”, but of defending women’s reproductive rights and health, in the name of equality and dignity. “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to decide what she does with her own body? » This sentence could have been said by the vice-president. It is by Melania Trump, the wife of the Republican candidate, in her book published a month before the election. Obviously calculated, in this wife keeping away from any political debate, she clearly expresses, implicitly, the embarrassment of the billionaire, who had long identified his own vulnerability in this matter.
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