Voting the Same, Feeling Differently: Sister Circles, Black Feminist Epistemologies, and Black Women’s Political Emotions During the Harris Campaign

Kamala Harris, a first multi-racial Black woman, became the official Democratic presidential nominee on August 5, 2025. This historic achievement only amplified the intensity of discussions about Black women’s politics in the United States. As Black feminist political scientists studying Black women’s politics, we knew we needed to document the nuance, dynamism, and historical nature of Harris’s campaign. We were keenly aware that we needed to capture the narratives of Black women voters to fully make sense of this historic moment. The media narrative that Black women were excited about Harris’s nomination (Jones 2024; Walker 2024) and scholarly findings that Black women voters preferred Black women candidates (Brown et al. 2019; Philpot and Walton, Jr. 2007) seemed superficial. We believed that beneath Black women’s support for Harris lay a particularized set of emotions and wide variation in candidate evaluations, which are underexplored because Black women consistently vote Democratic and are the demographic group most likely to support Black women candidates. These varied emotive responses lead to the same political behavior: a vote for Harris. Our research examines how Black women feel about politics and how these emotions translate into political action.