Is Harris’ race or gender affecting her support? ‘It’s very complicated.’

Could racism or sexism be playing a role in this presidential campaign? Asked about the notion in an interview with NBC News earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris brushed it off. “I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race,” she said.

And while Harris frequently recounts her background on the campaign trail, she tends to focus more on her middle-class roots than her race or gender. It’s in contrast with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom made such aspects of their identity a bigger part of their presidential campaigns.

But voters are clearly aware that Harris is a Black and South Asian woman, and issues around race and gender have been inextricable from this election. What’s less clear is how Harris’ race and gender are influencing how Americans plan to vote, and current polling offers mixed signals.

Certainly, Harris is competing in an environment quite different from past generations. In 1937, when Gallup first asked Americans whether they would be willing to support a woman for president, just 33% said they would. When Gallup first asked about a Black candidate, in 1957, only 37% said they would vote for a Black person for president.

But by the end of the last century, a vast majority of Americans said they would support a woman or a Black candidate, and the numbers have remained steady since. This year, 93% said they would be willing to support a female candidate and 92% a Black candidate.

Still, some Democrats fear that a segment of voters may be uncomfortable supporting Harris because of her gender or race, despite what those voters may profess to pollsters. At the same time, there are voters who are enthusiastic specifically about electing a woman, a person of color, or both. Yet Harris does not appear to be doing particularly better among women or voters of color than previous Democratic nominees who ran against Donald Trump.

Harris is polling marginally better among voters of color, including Black voters, than President Joe Biden was earlier this year. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Black likely voters, 79% said they would vote for Harris, up from the 74% who had been backing Biden.

However, Biden’s support among Black voters was higher in 2020 than Harris’ appears to be now: 90% voted for Biden then, and 92% voted for Clinton in 2016, according to postelection estimates. An increasing share of Black voters, in particular Black men, have been throwing their support behind Trump, many polls have shown.

Among women, Harris has a notable lead. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll, she had a 12-point advantage over Trump among female likely voters, with 54% saying they planned to vote for her. But there had already been a widening gender gap between male and female voters over the last few election cycles, regardless of the candidates’ gender, with women favoring Democrats, and men Republicans. In 2020, Biden won among women by 15 points, and in 2016, Clinton won among women by 13 points.

Beyond these numbers, we’re unlikely to get a straight answer from preelection surveys. Identifying anything other than the most audacious sexism and racism requires careful, time-consuming survey methods.

“There’s a lot here to disentangle,” said Darren Davis, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who studies public opinion and political behavior. “It’s not just with Kamala Harris, but the same types of prejudices that influence the support for candidate Harris will also affect the support for candidate Trump.”

There are particular challenges to answering this kind of question with polls, such as gauging social desirability bias, an effect under which people provide what they think is the socially acceptable response even if their true beliefs differ.

How can we measure these effects if people aren’t always forthcoming about their racial or gender views? One option is to turn to academic social scientists. In large surveys of Americans fielded before and after elections, such as the American National Election Study and the Cooperative Election Study, researchers add in questions that they say have been shown to measure respondents’ racial or gender-based attitudes. Respondents may be asked how they feel about certain policy positions or how much they agree with statements that have been found to correlate with sexist or racist views.

Although this kind of longer-term academic research can’t speak to the specifics of Harris’ candidacy, it can provide some insight into the undercurrents that may be in play. For one, research suggests that partisanship is a stronger indicator of voter preference than views about gender, even among voters who hold sexist views.

There are similar findings for race, though it’s not as cut-and-dried. For instance, research has shown that when people’s racial views are at odds with their partisanship — if they hold racist views, for instance, but their party’s candidate is a person of color — it can make them less motivated to vote at all. And Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who studies racial identity, has shown that white Americans who said being white was “very important” to their identity were more likely to vote for the Republican candidates in 2012 and 2016.

Of course, the last four presidential campaigns provided three opportunities for researchers to study the effects of race and gender on voter choice at the highest level: in Obama’s two victories and in Clinton’s loss. Research that followed those elections showed Americans’ views on gender and race did have some correlation with vote choice.

Multiple studies have found, for example, that voters who held views characterized as sexist were more likely to vote for Trump over Clinton in 2016. Similarly, those who held views characterized as anti-Black were less likely to vote for Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

So what does it all mean? As Davis put it, “It’s very complicated.” He explained that there was simply no straightforward way to quantify how much voters’ views on Harris’ race or gender would affect their vote.

Yet, inevitably, race and gender are intimately imbued in the narrative of this race. Jardina noted that while partisanship was a major ingredient in predicting how people will vote, racial attitudes were not insignificant.

“We see it from both ends of the spectrum. It doesn’t matter if you’re really racially progressive or you’re more racially prejudiced; those attitudes tend to matter the same,” she said. “But they matter a lot.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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