Kamala Harris’s failure in election could have been avoided

A perfect one-word summation of what is unfolding before us. It is not often that I find myself at a loss for words, but yesterday was long and sore.

I haven’t been much involved in the US election. Unlike me, someone who is usually so invested in and fascinated by political events across the pond.

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But none of this has sat right with me from the beginning.

I wish I could have put the full weight of my hope and ambition behind the potential first woman in the White House, but I just couldn’t. I could not bear to hold my nose and choke on the genocide of an entire nation that she had failed to assert herself against.

A woman in the White House would be revolutionary and life-changing for women and girls everywhere – if, and only if, that woman is a friend to all women.

I couldn’t pretend that Kamala Harris was. I was of the opinion that the Democrats could have aimed much higher and more radically, the world is crying out for a change that they had the power to orchestrate, and they chose not to.

However, it was also true that the alternative to her would be far, far worse. A dangerous man and a threat to the entire world – a threat perhaps even more uniquely, to women and girls.

No matter which way the vote went, despair was to be found. Picking the lesser of two evils when both of those evils are funding the indiscriminate mass murder of an entire population isn’t joyous.

It’s an indictment of global politics, and where we are all at as a society. And I won’t apologise for not being excited by the idea of her presidency.

There is no one person or reason to blame for the horror of another four years of Donald Trump, but it can be pinpointed to a few key areas.

The first being the complete and utter political ineptitude of the Democratic Party. A party led down a genocidal garden path by an Israel-obsessed president, who clung on to the candidacy for his own ego at the expense of his party, and consequently his country.

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A party that failed, repeatedly, to listen to its voter base and instead capitulated to moderate conservatives as an election strategy. A party that chose to ignore Gaza as a key issue in swing states, placing their reliance instead on middle-class white women motivated by other things.

In some areas, despite Democratic arrogance, Gaza was the decider.

In Michigan for example, one of the seven key swing states, she lost heavily in all Arab and Muslim districts.

In a contrasting example, Palestinian congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who refused to endorse Harris because of her ongoing support for Israel, won her re-election by a comfortable margin in a state where the Democrats and Harris more widely were fighting for their lives. Ilhan Omar saw a similar result in her state, Minnesota.

In the most important swing state of Pennsylvania, polling suggested that 34% of respondents would have been more likely to vote for Harris had she committed to ending arms sales with Israel, as opposed to just 7% who said they would be less likely. In Arizona, that figure was 35% and in Georgia, 39%.

If Harris had possessed the nerve and moral clarity to stand up for what’s right, the result may well have looked entirely different. As the Democrats are now learning, supporting a genocide is as viciously unpopular as it deserves to be.

I won’t minimise the ugly contempt for women by pretending this was a single-issue result – it wasn’t. We have just watched as a man found in a civil court to have raped a woman, whose name is marred with multiple allegations of sexual abuse and misogyny.

A man with 34 felony convictions who incited a riot on the US Capitol and was impeached twice, win the presidency – for the second time – of the most powerful nation in the world, ahead of a woman who is quite evidently far more qualified for the job. Americans would rather have a rapist and convicted felon as president, than they would a woman.

A twisted message that is now reverberating across the entire world.

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We watched as a criminal was endorsed by almost 70 million Americans, despite advocating for a complete rollback of the rights of women and girls.

A man who said: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead … You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit,” when pressed on allegations of sexual assault.

So much of this result is rooted in a violent misogyny that will now destroy the hopes, dreams and lives of generations of women and girls. It is nothing short of a tragedy, a tragedy that could have been avoided, and that the Democrats have unnecessarily bestowed upon the entire world with their utter incompetence.

A lesson that the rest of the world should pay heed to. Namely UK Labour. Democrat failings are of the same arrogant flavour we have seen displayed by Keir Starmer and his government, especially in recent months.

Their vote share is tanking because they have failed to deliver the change the people elected them to enact, and as we have seen in the US, when people are desperate for change that you are not offering them, they will seek it somewhere else.

With Trump bolstering the likes of Nigel Farage, I think it would be naive for the UK to look at these results and not immediately begin strategising to prevent a similar fate here. Because it is headed straight in our direction, if we fail to see the warning signs, we will be left feeling in the near future how progressives in America feel today.

The Scottish Government is not exempt from that inward reflection either. John Swinney misguidedly congratulated Trump on his election not once, not twice but three separate times yesterday – without holding him to account for a single one of his crimes, indiscretions, or attacks on women, girls and minorities.

It is high time we moved past capitulating to the worst of humanity in the name of diplomacy. We are under threat in a way we have never been – what we require in this moment are leaders with the backbone to stave it off.