Dr. Amy Tatum
Lecturer in Communication and Media at Bournemouth University. Her research includes responses to women in political leadership and political psychology. She is a regular media commentator and has been featured in the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. Her teaching explores media, persuasion and communication and is Co-Investigator & Ethics Lead for the 50 States or Bust! project.
Email: atatum@bournemouth.ac.uk
U.S. Election 2024
36. The tilted playing field, and a bygone conclusion (Dr David Karpf)
37. Looking forwards and looking back: Competing visions of America in the 2024 presidential campaign (Prof John Rennie Short)
38. Brat went splat: Or the emotional sticky brand won again (Prof Ken Cosgrove)
39. Election 2024: Does money matter anymore? (Prof Cayce Myers)
40. Advertising trends in the 2024 presidential race (Prof Travis N. Ridout, Prof Michael M. Franz, Prof Erika Franklin Fowler)
41. Who won the ground wars? Trump and Harris field office strategies in 2024 (Sean Whyard, Dr Joshua P. Darr)
42. Kamala Harris: Idealisation and persecution (Dr Amy Tatum)
43. Kamala Harris campaign failed to keep Democratic social coalition together (Prof Anup Kumar)
44. Revisiting Indian-American identity in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Madhavi Reddi)
45. Harris missed an opportunity to sway swing voters by not morally reframing her message (Prof John H. Parmelee)
46. In pursuit of the true populist at the dawn of America’s golden age (Dr Carl Senior)
47. Language and the floor in the 2024 Harris vs Trump televised presidential debate (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
48. Nullifying the noise of a racialized claim: Nonverbal communication and the 2024 Harris-Trump debate (Prof Erik P. Bucy)
49. A pseudo-scientific revolution? The puzzling relationship between science deference and denial (Dr Matt Motta)
50. Amidst recent lows for women congressional candidates, women at the state level thrive (Dr Jordan Butcher)
Kamala Harris has become the second woman to run in a presidential election for one of the major political parties in the United States, and she is the first woman of colour. She entered this election as the first woman Vice President and began a historic but ultimately unsuccessful campaign.
Political leadership at the executive level remains a battleground for women. Gender stereotypes are entrenched and resistant to change and this impacts the way in which women not only run for office, but how they are evaluated once they gain office. Harris as Vice President was subjected to harsh criticism both from her supporters and the opposition. She was often seen as ineffective and absent from the main thrust of political discourse. At the same time, she has become an iconic figure in popular culture in terms of her embracing Charlie XCX’s brat summer, appearing on Saturday Night Live with her counterpart Maya Rudolph, and being joined on stage by icons such as Beyonce, J-Lo, and Bruce Springsteen, not to mention a glowing endorsement from Taylor Swift.
From a psychosocial perspective the polarising responses to Harris are fascinating and speak to the wider pressures placed on women in the public sphere. By employing Melanie Klein’s object relations theory, I will explore the drivers behind these responses and the potential hazards of them.
Klein wrote of idealisation in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. She argues idealisation starts with the first object, the breast, which takes the shape of the “good” object and leads to idealisation of said object. Klein argues that in times of heightened anxiety this idealisation can become excessive and used as a means to escape perceived persecution. In The Origins of Transference Klein writes,
“The infant’s relative security is based on turning the good object into an ideal one as protection against the dangerous and persecuting object.”
Applying Klein’s idealisation theory in a psychosocial reading of the responses to Harris, it could be argued that she has come to represent the “good” object for many of her supporters. Harris is seen as an antidote to President Trump’s toxic masculinity and the voice for women across American fighting for reproductive rights. She has framed herself as a pioneer for women’s rights, promising to turn the tide on restrictions on reproductive rights, and positioning herself as an empathetic, transformational leader. Her campaign has leaned heavily into her as a frank and honest leader who is unafraid of challenging patriarchal discourse.
Klein argues that, when in the paranoid schizoid position, the splitting of objects occurs as a defence mechanism. Objects are only “good” and “bad”, integration is not possible. Klein argues that the alternative position to this is the depressive position, in which objects are integrated as a mix of both the “good” and the “bad”. Within the polarising environment that is the United States in 2024 it could be argued that splitting, in the paranoid schizoid position, is at an all-time high. For many followers of Harris, she is a representation of the “good” and an antidote to the “bad” that is the right-wing, patriarchal politics of the MAGA movement. She is also the “good” in terms of women’s equality and an answer to the patriarchal dominance. So too can she be seen as an embodiment of the “bad” for her detractors.