“The View” co-host Joy Behar said Tuesday that she does not believe a woman can be elected president, reviving an argument she has made repeatedly on the show this year.
The comment came during a discussion that began with Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and news that he has been using a GLP-1 medication before turning into a broader debate about identity politics.
“I think this country will vote for an obese, Jewish, Black, homosexual before a woman,” Behar said.
Guest host Star Jones agreed, pointing to the 2024 election. “We just had one of the most beautiful, brilliant women run for president. And you see what we got,” Jones said, referring to former Vice President Kamala Harris. Behar added that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also failed to win the presidency.
Co-host Sara Haines pushed back on the framing. “You don’t win on identity alone, and you don’t lose on identity alone,” she said.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the panel’s lone Republican, predicted a woman would be elected president within the next 20 years.
Critics Say Losses Weren’t About Gender
Patrice Onwuka, vice president for economic policy and director of Independent Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity, told Fox News Digital that Behar and Jones were avoiding a harder truth.
“This warped view is directly the result of elevating identity politics above common sense and connection. Joy Behar and Star Jones can’t bring themselves to admit that the female candidates they fawned over could not win over the voters,” Onwuka said.
Onwuka pointed to the 2012 Benghazi attacks, which killed four Americans during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, and Clinton’s remark calling some Trump supporters “deplorables,” as factors in her loss. On Harris, she said: “Kamala Harris was a failed vice president who oversaw a massive influx of tens of millions of people into America illegally and ran on vibes rather than making Americans’ lives better. It was not their looks or gender but their policies and personalities that America rejected.”
Psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert offered a similar critique. “I think Joy Behar is taking a very complicated election and giving it a very simple explanation,” he told Fox News Digital. “Two women lost to Donald Trump. That doesn’t prove Americans won’t elect a woman. It proves those two women lost those two elections. Sexism may have played a role for some voters, but you can’t take millions of votes and diagnose all of them as sexism.”
A Recurring Argument
Behar has made similar statements before. During a July episode of “The View,” she challenged her co-hosts: “Think of a woman that could win. Tell me one woman.” In another July episode, she dismissed the idea of Harris running again in 2028. “I love her, she was great, but she didn’t win one time. What makes you think she’s going to win again?” Behar said, adding that anyone who believed Harris could win a second run was not being realistic.
The remarks come as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that she is weighing a 2028 presidential run. “Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” she said. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.” Ocasio-Cortez added that she is thinking seriously about a potential run.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login