I appreciated Sally Jenkins’s Nov. 10 Opinion column, “Waiting for a first,” highlighting Nora Ephron’s advice to students at my alma mater, Wellesley College: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not a victim.” That said, I don’t see how Ephron’s directive supports the idea that Vice President Kamala Harris lost because she is a woman, as Jenkins implied — if anything, we should recognize that Ms. Harris was a victim not of misogyny but of her own actions.
I can speak from experience: I’m an Indian American woman, and I voted for Joe Biden and Ms. Harris in 2020. But by mid-2021, when the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan took place, I saw their failure to govern effectively, abandoning our Afghan allies and alienating the families of the 13 U.S. service members who died in the operation. To me, the administration did not prioritize the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, epitomized by its failure to control inflation. There was no way I could in good conscience vote for a person — Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris, male or female, White or minority — with this record.
The majority of American voters who, like me, had no problem electing Ms. Harris to the vice presidency in 2020 but refused to elect her this year did not suddenly become misogynists. Before he dropped out of the presidential race in July, Mr. Biden was doing miserably in the polls, and he might actually have performed worse than Ms. Harris did.
In other words, Americans voted against Ms. Harris in the 2024 election just as we very likely would have voted against Mr. Biden: on the merits of their performance, not on the basis of sex. That’s not sexism — that’s equality as expressed by democracy.