‘DEI hire?’ WA GOP’s attempt at injury is self-inflicted
In the last presidential election, 192,000 more women than men cast ballots in Washington. It amounted to a turnout gap, favoring women, of about 5%.
That’s larger than the national gender voter gap, which in 2020 was 3.4%, but is also persistent and expanding.
“Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election,” reports the Center for American Women and Politics.
So politics is kind of like the book business. Women are the dominant customers.
It was a poor choice, then, for local Republicans to greet the news of the likely Democratic nominee, a woman who is Black and South Asian, by dismissing her as a “DEI hire.”
“Antimeritocratic DEI is not building back better, it’s setting us further back,” the Washington state Republican Party said in a statement on social media this past week, calling Vice President Kamala Harris “unqualified to lead.”
DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. It refers to practices designed to support women and minority workers. Here the state GOP is using it as a pejorative.
Some Republicans immediately sensed this might be dicey ground. Women or people of color might take offense the GOP was suggesting that Harris — who has won multiple elections at the municipal, state and federal levels — hasn’t earned it.
“This election will be about policies and not personalities,” the U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson scolded his own party. “Her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
He was quoted in an article titled “Republican leaders urge colleagues to steer clear of racist and sexist attacks on Harris.”
Needing to be reminded not be racist or sexist kind of says it all. Still, the local GOP couldn’t restrain itself. Two days later, on Thursday, the local party straight up declared that Harris was a “DEI hire” who will “say & do anything for power.” They followed that up by claiming her background hadn’t been vetted because “Dems don’t vet; they check off DEI boxes.”
“So if you’re not a man, and if you’re not white, are you automatically considered a DEI hire?” Rep. Marilyn Strickland, the first Black member of Congress from the Pacific Northwest, wondered on KUOW. “It’s ridiculous. … If DEI is the only thing you can say about her, it’s saying that your argument is weak.”
There are plenty of other arguments against Harris, all of which are fairer game. There’s her record as a prosecutor and her work on the southern border issue, among other things. They keep going back to the sexism or racism well anyway.
In a state where the blue party doesn’t need help to win, this is a huge gift for Democrats — and an own-goal for Republicans.
In the WA Poll, conducted by Survey USA for the Seattle Times and others earlier this month, Harris enjoyed an enormous 26-point lead against Donald Trump among Washington women. That poll was conducted before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race – and before the sexist backlash.
In a Public Policy Polling survey of Washington state voters released Friday by the Northwest Progressive Institute, Harris has a similar 57% to 34% lead with women voters. That contributes to a 14-point lead overall.
“You can’t win in this state with numbers like that for the GOP,” said Andrew Villeneuve, the institute’s director.
Like reptiles, other candidates know to bask in the sun when it starts shining. Within an hour of Biden dropping out of the race, the Democratic contender for governor, Bob Ferguson, started posting selfies of himself with Harris. There’s Harris with Bob, here’s Harris with Bob’s daughter. One Republican groused: “At this point I’m not sure if Bob likes campaigning more for himself or Kamala Harris.”
What Ferguson likes is the math. The WA Poll showed Ferguson ahead of the GOP’s leading candidate Dave Reichert by 22 percentage points among women. Ferguson though is behind Reichert by 2 points with men. Anything that energizes more women to vote — such as Republicans pigeonholing a female candidate as a DEI hire, say, or fussing that she and others are “childless cat ladies” — is only going to help Democrats here down the ballot.
New York Times polling vividly illustrates this. Putting Harris in instead of Biden boosted Democrats by six points with women voters nationally, and by 18 points with voters aged 18 to 29. In the West, which includes Washington, she is up by 17 points, while Biden led the region by only 3 a month ago.
Reichert has got to be cursing his own party organization. First, they refuse to endorse him because he dissed Trump a time or two. Then, heading into the state’s primary on Aug. 6, they actively alienate some of the main customers he needs to reach.
Washington isn’t said to matter in the presidential election. Women nationally may not matter as much as the larger-than-life white Midwestern male voter, 50,000 of whom in the Rust Belt supposedly dictate all. Harris may flub the campaign, and then nothing will matter.
But something different could also be happening. Women just had a constitutional right stripped from them, the first such rollback of a civil liberty for any group going back generations. This “group” is no monolith, obviously, but it is huge, making up a majority of voters as noted above.
Having one or maybe two of them on the ticket, instead of an 81-year-old man, might mean more than just symbolism. It might galvanize the group, on balance, to finally shake up America’s stale electoral hierarchies.
Is that DEI? If so, it is long, long overdue.
Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.