Like many of you, I am still questioning the election. I do not understand how it is that the news media posted polls that showed Kamala Harris at 45% and Donald Trump 47%, or Harris at 49% and Trump 46%, only for Trump to garner the majority of votes that he did. People were on edge because the numbers were so close. The result was debilitating.

How did this happen? There were terrible objections to Harris’ candidacy. The worst was, “Real men don’t vote for women.” To date, 24 women have run for the presidency under various banners over 152 years.

The first female candidate, Victoria Claflin Woodhall (1872), ran as a member of the Equal Rights Party. She founded a newspaper and later established an investment firm. Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1884, 1888) ran under the same party. She was the first woman to practice before the Supreme Court. Both were active in the woman’s suffrage movement encouraging women to fight for the vote, and for equal pay. Both moved into what had been “male” professions.

The first woman to represent one of the two major parties, Hillary Clinton, scored well. Her lowest Massachusetts’ tally was 50.8% in Plymouth County; her highest in 78.7% in Suffolk County. Her opponent received 18.8% of the Suffolk count, and 43.2% in Plymouth. She won the popular vote which brings us to the second reason why Hillary was not the president, despite her professional training and experience that outclassed her opponent’s. It’s voter fraud, whether real or imaginary.

Why Harris did not win is grounded in the election process. The Associated Press observed that her opponent “bulldozed … more than a dozen challengers, many of them with high profiles, by refusing to appear with them at debates.” According to the AP, some Republicans “believed he was wrongly denied the White House … based on false theories of voter fraud.”

Trump never stopped referring to voter fraud from November 2020 onward. One of the strangest remarks made during this campaign was to his Christian followers was, “You won’t have to bother voting again.” Was that the accidental release of some sort movement?

Let’s move from the Republicans and their candidate to the Democrats and Harris.

Harris’ preparation for the presidency is outstanding. Pew Research found interviewees who think Harris was superior to her opposition on being even tempered; a good role model; down-to-earth; mentally sharp; honest, and exhibiting care for average people.

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The Democrats, however, are upset over the absence of a primary. I disagree.

Alexandra M. Traver, writing for the Democratic Erosion Consortium, cites not creating a primary after the withdrawal of Biden as “a significant departure from … democratic norms” and “an act of democratic erosion” which “limits voter participation, consolidates power among party elites and weakens the integrity of electoral competition.”

This made me curious about voter participation in primaries. I expected it to be low. I was wrong. I found 1952 saw the highest turnout: 94.89%, while 2014 saw only 50.84% of voters showed up, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. The numbers rise and fall between these two.

Traver bases her work on Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die,” as well as from Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”

They cited the lack of competition eliminating part of the voters’ role; encouraging the centering of power and creating an “oligarchic structure within the party.” The biggest fear is setting rules for the future which lessens “competition and participation.” Do they realize that the Republicans have reduced their party to a narrow circle?

Republican primaries ran from March 5 to mid-September. Democrats should remember that Biden withdrew and Harris declared on July 21, after four months of Republican primaries which were not run in an orderly fashion, thanks to Trump’s behavior. Only three months were left to assemble Democratic primaries. Those three months were perfect to exhibit the intelligence, the warmth and the knowledge of Kamala Harris and her terrific running mate, Tim Walz.

Susan Wozniak has been a caseworker, a college professor and journalist. She is a mother and grandmother.