The Girlboss Industrial Complex Probably Hurts Female Candidates
Was Kamala Harris "supercompetent"?
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This week, Molly Jong-Fast of Fast Politics — which is much better name for a podcast than “Jong Politics” — commented on the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey. She noted that both Democratic candidates are female, both are centrists, both are doing fine-but-not-great in the polls, and both face questions about their “electability”. Jong-Fast thinks that “electability” is code for “is female”, sort of like how people say “urban” to mean “Black” and “life of the party” to mean “raging alcoholic”.
My guess is that female candidates typically get penalized about 1-2 points. I also can’t say for sure that the people who think that the penalty is more like 3-5 points are wrong; this is art, not science, where “art” is just a nice way of saying “we’re all pulling numbers out of our asses”.1 The more interesting question might be what, exactly, causes that penalty, and that’s where I think that some pundits have things ass-backwards.
Jong-Fast exhibits the mindset that I think is part of the problem in the course of describing the challenges faced by New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill:
