The day after the debate, Marcy Wheeler asked why the pundits didn’t listen to Kamala Harris the several times before the debate when she said what she was going to do. She notes that they paid attention to Donald Trump’s comments about the debate. The easy answer is that she is an Indian and Black woman and he is a white man, so of course sexism and racism are in play. That’s not wrong, but I think we can narrow in on further understanding. Here’s Marcy’s answer:

Journalists missed the Vice President’s clear intent because they treated Donald Trump as the protagonist of this story.

And why would that be? I have an answer, but it requires a setup. I am not talking about the gutter-variety sexism and racism that issue from Trump’s or JD Vance’s mouths every time they open them. Nor am I talking about elite media disdain for reality. I am talking about something much subtler but widespread. It is a factor in the coverage of abortion rights and other “women’s issues” in the news. It is a factor in the election.

I am going to start from my experience of something I might call a black mental hole. Some subjects simply cannot be comprehended by some people. They may be able to read the words and even parrot some ideas, but then the ideas drain out of their heads, beyond the event horizon. It is not a denial of those ideas or argument against them. It comes before those mental processes. The subject simply does not exist in their universe.

The polling/pundit debacle that predicted a “red wave” in the election has reminded me of this brilliant title of a short story by James Tiptree, Jr. Except that’s Alice Bradley Sheldon. Back in the day, a sure way not to be seen was to have a name coded as female.

Names coded as female are more acceptable now, but, as in Shelton’s story, much that is female is still not seen. We could still be traveling down to Mexico to get a lift to other solar systems, and nobody would know. The story is told from the limited viewpoint of a man who stumbles into two women’s vacation to Mexico. He cannot understand the women in any way but as sexual targets.

A great many pollsters live in a similarly limited world. Theirs depends on their models and the limited worldview those models encapsulate – gasoline prices, inflation fears, what they sometimes call kitchen table issues. Additionally, a conventional wisdom of how elections play out and fluctuate. No space for self-determination being taken away from half the population.