Joy Behar thinks she knows something about American voters that nobody on her panel wanted to hear.
Her fellow hosts on The View pushed back hard, right there on set.
And one blunt sentence about identity politics turned into the loudest fight of the show.
Pritzker’s Weight Loss News Turns Into A Fight Over Identity
The segment started innocently enough. The co-hosts discussed Gov. JB Pritzker, D-Ill., and his news that he has been on a GLP-1 before delving into a debate about identity politics. Nobody expected a conversation about an Illinois governor’s weight loss drug to spiral into a referendum on whether America will ever elect a woman president.
But that is exactly what happened. “I think this country will vote for an obese, Jewish, Black, homosexual before a woman,” Behar said. That is not a stray comment. It is Behar’s worldview, stated plainly, on national television.
Guest host Star Jones did not push back. She piled on. “We just had one of the most beautiful, brilliant women run for president. And you see what we got,” Jones added.
Jones was referring to former Vice President Kamala Harris, while Behar said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also unsuccessful. So in the span of one segment, two of daytime television’s loudest liberal voices decided that two of the most consequential and heavily scrutinized presidential campaigns in modern history came down to nothing more than gender.
Not everyone at the table went along with it. “You don’t win on identity alone, and you don’t lose on identity alone,” co-host Sara Haines pushed back. And Haines was right to say it, even if the rest of the table wasn’t in a listening mood.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the lone Republican co-host, predicted there would be a woman president in the next 20 years. But even Griffin’s optimism didn’t slow Behar down. This is not a new position for her, either. Behar raised the same argument back in July, telling her co-hosts, “Think of a woman that could win. Tell me one woman.”
Outside Voices Say Behar Is Dodging The Real Story
Behar’s argument didn’t sit well outside the ABC studio, either. Patrice Onwuka, vice president for economic policy and director of Independent Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity, told Fox News Digital, “This warped view is directly the result of elevating identity politics above common sense and connection.”
Onwuka went further, and she didn’t let either Clinton or Harris off the hook for their own campaigns. “Joy Behar and Star Jones can’t bring themselves to admit that the female candidates they fawned over could not win over the voters,” she continued, referencing the four Americans killed in the 2012 Benghazi attacks during Clinton’s time as secretary of state and her infamous comment calling Trump supporters “deplorables.”
And Onwuka didn’t stop with Clinton. “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,” Onwuka added. That is not a small charge. It is a direct accounting of a border crisis that swelled on Harris’ watch, dressed up during the campaign in slogans instead of solutions.
Onwuka’s bottom line was simple. “It was not their looks or gender but their policies and personalities that America rejected.” Voters didn’t reject a demographic category. They rejected two specific candidates and the records those candidates carried into the race.
Psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert made a similar point. “I think Joy Behar is taking a very complicated election and giving it a very simple explanation,” Alpert told Fox News Digital. He didn’t stop there, either. “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,” Alpert said.
What Does It Mean?
Behar’s argument is the same excuse Democrats have leaned on for a decade whenever a favored candidate loses. Blame the voters. Call them sexist. Call them racist. Never once look at the candidate, the platform, or the record.
But that explanation collapses the moment anyone looks at the actual campaigns in question. Hillary Clinton spent a general election calling half the country “deplorables” and never fully answered for Benghazi. Kamala Harris ran a campaign built around border numbers that spiraled out of control on her watch as the administration’s point person on the issue, then pivoted to vague talk about “vibes” instead of addressing it.
And neither of those problems has anything to do with gender. Voters watched both campaigns up close for months, sometimes years, and made a judgment about substance, not chromosomes. Reducing that judgment to sexism doesn’t just insult the millions of Americans who voted, it also lets two badly run campaigns off the hook entirely.
This is not the first time this argument has surfaced from a prominent Democrat-aligned voice, either. Former First Lady Michelle Obama has made a nearly identical case, arguing that sexism remains deeply embedded in how voters judge female candidates. It is a talking point with staying power on the left, regardless of how thin the underlying logic is.
But the country does not run on identity math, and it never has. America is a nation built on equal opportunity under the law, not a scoreboard where candidates are owed a win because of their gender or background. When voters reject a candidate, the far more likely explanation sits in the policy record, not in some undiagnosed collective prejudice that only ever seems to strike when Democrats lose.
Behar can keep insisting that a woman can’t win. But the more honest conversation is the one Sara Haines tried to start and got shouted past: candidates win or lose on what they actually did in office and what they actually promised to do next, not on the box they check.
Sources: Fox News, “Joy Behar doubles down on argument US will not elect a woman president”