During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has been subject to sexist attacks by Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party – a reality that is familiar to all women in politics worldwide. Research has frequently shown that candidates at the receiving end of a political attack should respond to it. But how can women politicians respond to the sexism they encounter during the campaign? And how does their response resonate with voters? Based on the prejudice confrontations literature, we tested eight different types of responses, varying from not responding at all to strong retaliations against the sexism. We employ a large-scale pre-registered survey experiment among 7000 US voters in which we also manipulated the type of attack (implicit/explicit) and the partisanship of the politicians (Democrat/Republican). Our findings show that gender stereotypes play an important role in voters’ evaluation of responses: They most approve educational or funny responses by women politicians, while they like uncivil argumentative or aggressive sarcastic responses least – this is universal over voters’ gender and partisanship. However, sexist campaign attacks are generally disliked by voters, as they punish the attacker for it, irrespective of the type of response by the female target. Only in specific combinations of factors (e.g. Republican attacker, male Republican voters and least appreciated responses by the female Democratic target), we see a net electoral gain for the attacker. Thus, these findings bear some good news for woman politicians: in almost all cases, whichever strategy they choose to react to sexism on the campaign trail, they are not punished for it electorally.
