With a closely contested election just days away, much attention has been paid in recent weeks to whether enough Black men are willing to vote for a Black woman for president. The argument goes that Black men may be the obstacle to Kamala Harris’s defeating Donald Trump — and becoming the first female president. In a video that went viralatinbet, former President Barack Obama chided Black men for maybe not wanting to support Harris because she’s a woman; some polling shows her Black-male support slipping. News networks devoted numerous segments to pundits’ raising the alarm about the ambivalence of some Black men to a Harris presidency. Harris, responding to the concern in the final stretch of the campaign, released her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.”

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But this framing has obscured a significant truth: Polling shows that a clear majority of Black men, some 69 percent according to an October 2024 Times/Siena Poll, support Harris. The only group supporting Harris at a higher rate than Black men is Black women, at 81 percent. There is one group, however, that deserves more attention as they could very well determine this election: white women.

At about 59 million voters, white women constitute this nation’s single largest voting bloc, and also its most divided. About 53 percent of white female voters identify as or lean Republican, compared with 43 percent who identify as or lean Democrat, according to the Pew Research Center. (White women without college degrees are much more likely to lean Republican, while a majority of those with college degrees align with the Democratic Party; education levels among Black and Latino women do not have a significant impact on their party affiliation.) While a majority of all American women have voted for a Democrat for president since 1996, white women have not. In fact, a majority of white women have cast their ballots for the Democrat running for president just once since 1968 — and that one time was not for Hillary Clinton but for her husband, Bill, in 1996.

Black men, on the other hand, have already proved they will vote for a woman for president. In 2016, eight of 10 Black men voted for Hillary Clinton in her historic run. The only two groups where a majority did not support Clinton were white men and white women. Despite Clinton’s running against an opponent who was facing multiple sexual-assault cases, who was exposed in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes bragging about grabbing women’s genitals and who promised to seat Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, just 45 percent of white women voted for Clinton, compared with 98 percent of Black women. Now polls show that 51 percent of white women say they will vote for Trump over Harris.

That could end up being the most important number for Harris. If indeed she becomes the first woman to breach the 235-year unbroken line of men ascending to the highest office in the land, it may very well be because white women do something they have long struggled to do: align their interests with those of Black women. In an election where our very democracy may be at risk, the stakes could not be higher. History shows us that advances toward equal rights in this nation can come to pass when white women join with Black Americans to fight for a common cause, but that same history reveals how fragile that alliance can be.

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