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Desperation time? The front page of Thursday’s New York Times bluntly blamed sexism for Kamala Harris’s campaign woes. Reporters Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck bitterly lamented “The Quiet, Stubborn Aversion To Putting a Woman in Power.”

With less than two weeks left before Election Day, a big question is looming over the campaign for the White House, and it has nothing to do with the economy or the barrage of attacks between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris over judgment, character and mental fitness.

It is gender.

The paper will go where Harris herself has not really tread, claiming opposition to Harris isn’t based on her wandering way of speaking, her lack of policy detail, or her obsession with abortion. It’s because she’s a woman!

Never mind that Democratic Party presidential prospects rose when she unilaterally replaced Joe Biden on the top of the 2024 ticket. The fact that her numbers returned to earth after voters got to know her somehow speaks of a sexist American society that just can’t handle a woman leader.

The issue is rarely directly addressed by either of the candidates. Yet the matter of Ms. Harris’s gender — and her potential to make history as the country’s first female president — is defining the campaign, creating a contest that is, in ways overt and subtle, a referendum on the role of women in American life.

Pro-Harris stickers plastered on bathroom stalls offer reminders, “woman to woman,” that their vote is private. Trump aides use sexualized epithets to deride liberal men as weak and effeminate. In poll after poll, a difference in voting patterns based on gender pervades every demographic group.

And in quiet conversations, some female Harris supporters can’t shake the uneasy feeling that men in their lives are struggling to support a woman – especially a Black and South Asian woman – even if they don’t want to admit it.

….

Those who have studied voting patterns for decades say they have never before seen a presidential race where gender is so central to the electoral prospects of each candidate — even in 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to capture a major party nomination. They cite a series of factors: Mr. Trump’s well-documented denigration of women, Ms. Harris’s barrier-breaking potential, longstanding sexist views about women in power and, perhaps most centrally, the Supreme Court’s overturning of a constitutional right to abortion two years ago.

If your candidate is behind, don’t blame her verbal incoherence or lack of a plan – just cry “sexism.”

Democrats believe Ms. Harris is facing a deep-rooted strain of sexism that looks different from the attacks of the past, when female leaders were openly questioned on the basis of their gender and described in classic tropes of being either too aggressive or too emotional — and sometimes both.

The country has shifted since 2016, with more women rising to win positions of political power including Ms. Harris, who is the first female vice president. But in contrast to 2016, when liberals reveled in the prospect of the first female president, anxious Democrats now have little doubt about the persistent power of sexism in the minds of some voters.

Aside: The sort of statement in bold below — which suggests that one can reliably identify a female adult by sight, and not be what their perceived “gender identity” is — is actually controversial at the Times and other media outlets. Sometimes it’s just more helpful not to notice.

“People can see with their own eyes — she’s a woman,” said Senator Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California and a close friend of Ms. Harris….

It wouldn’t be the Times without a liberal lecture.

Some Democrats believe that voters are reaching for euphemisms about Ms. Harris’s policies and vision to paper over their discomfort with supporting a woman — an argument former President Barack Obama recently made from the campaign trail.

Will the paper’s front-page whining about sexism serve to guilt undecided voters into pulling Harris across the finish line?