Kamala's giant bag of Doritos and the coming gender gap election

Last week the Harris campaign sent out a fundraising email titled, "A giant bag of Doritos." The message harkened back to election night 2016, when, although California voters had elected Harris to the United States Senate, Donald Trump won the presidency. After publicly vowing to fight Trump, Harris reveals, she sat on the couch and stress-ate her way through a very large bag of Doritos. Didn't even share with Doug.

"We can’t go back," the email read. "We can’t go back to the way we all felt on that harrowing day in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected. Or how we felt throughout his chaotic and corrupt administration."

I have never felt so seen by a political campaign, was the tenor of many of the reactions in my social media feed. Every single person expressing that reaction in my timeline was a woman. Kamala gets us. Trump? Blech. Vance? Shudder.

Let's ready our childless cat lady and postmenopausal female memes. Because we also can have some fun with this shitshow.

That's what the punditocracy and the national press isn't getting about Harris's campaign.

The same national press that could not stop chin-stroking about Joe Biden's age has a new obsession: Harris's supposed lack of gravitas. Not Trump's age or infirmity, or the fascist threat he poses. See the lead story in the New York Times today: "Harris's Early Campaign: Heavy on Buzz, Light on Policy."

The major theme of Harris's campaign is "freedom" and "we're not going back." Political reporters and newspaper editors might think voters want a policy briefing, but protecting peoples' rights and freedoms is policy, one that is central to their bodies, their families, their daily lives. It's a policy of democracy versus autocracy. Of rights versus oppression. Of freedom versus theocracy.

The reason why Harris has created buzz is because people like having their freedoms, and react positively to powerful and even fun ways of conveying the urgency of protecting them from a dour old man leading a movement of white Christian nationalists and weird conspiracy theorists.

A CBS/YouGov poll this weekend drilled down into the gender gap, and found Harris winning women over Trump, 56 to 44 percent. Not a huge surprise, given how many women have faced being wrongly labeled a lightweight compared to an incompetent man.

As much as many pundits have minimized it, this election will be about abortion. The CBS poll found 60 percent of respondents want abortion legal in all or most cases, versus 40 percent who want it illegal in all or most cases. Seventy one percent of respondents believe Harris would protect abortion rights nationwide, which is in line with what she has promised on the campaign trail.

But Trump, once again, has gotten a mulligan despite being responsible for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Trump, a known liar, has successfully muddied the waters on abortion in the two years since Dobbs rocked the country, gaslighting the public on his abortion position and tight relationship with Project 2025. Now, according to this CBS poll, 52 percent of the public believes his position is "leave abortion laws to the states," which is most definitely not the position of either Project 2025 or the anti-abortion right.

The abortion pill mifepristone, targeted by antiabortion activists and by Project 2025, is widely popular with everyone else, according to the CBS poll. "Three-quarters of voters want mifepristone available," the poll found. "Nine in 10 believe Harris would make or keep it so, while seven in 10 say Trump will try to restrict access to it." (During a ramble at his recent press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump signaled openness to banning mifepristone.) That is not, of course, "leaving it to the states." A national ban or restriction on mifepristone, either through a Republican revival of the Comstock Act to prosecute its distribution as a crime, or by withdrawing FDA approval of it, would be a national ban on a method that accounts for more than 60 percent of abortions in the U.S.

Never in American politics has someone gotten so many passes and mulligans, and not just for gaffes or slip-ups, but for crimes and robbing people of their rights and freedoms, for racism, misogyny, and corruption. All of Trump's recent public appearances show a babbling, angry old man who can barely string a coherent sentence together. Would a woman, and especially a woman of color, get even one of those passes? (Ask Hillary Clinton.)

Kamala's email was far more than an advertisement for her favorite snack food. A bigger message was packed into that bag of Doritos—and women know exactly what it was.