How Will White Women Vote? Its a Question With a Fraught History.

With a closely contested election just days away, much attention has been paid in recent weeks to whether enough Black men are willing to vote for a Black woman for president.The argument goes that Black men may be the obstacle to Kamala Harris’s defeating Donald Trump — and becoming the first female president.

In a video that went viral, former President Barack Obama chided Black men for maybe not wanting to support Harris because she’s a woman; some polling shows her Black-male support slipping.News networks devoted numerous segments to pundits’ raising the alarm about the ambivalence of some Black men to a Harris presidency.

Harris, responding to the concern in the final stretch of the campaign, released her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.”But this framing has obscured a significant truth: Polling shows that a clear majority of Black men, some 69 percent according to an October 2024 Times/Siena Poll, support Harris.The only group supporting Harris at a higher rate than Black men is Black women, at 81 percent.

There is one group, however, that deserves more attention as they could very well determine this election: white women.At about 59 million voters, white women constitute this nation’s single largest voting bloc, and also its most divided.About 53 percent of white female voters identify as or lean Republican, compared with 43 percent who identify as or lean Democrat, according to the Pew Research Center.

(White women without college degrees are much more likely to lean Republican, while a majority of those with college degrees align with the Democratic Party; education levels among Black and Latino women do not have a significant impact on their party affiliation.) While a majority of all American women have voted for a Democrat for president since 1996, white women have not.In fact, a majority of white women have cast their ballots for the Democrat running for president just once since 1968 — and that one time was not for Hillary Clin...