NEW YORK, United States — Jamaican Americans here who had hoped to see someone of their heritage ascend to the presidency of the United States have been left “disappointed, devastated, and shocked” by the defeat of Vice-President Kamala Harris by former President Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election.

Many have already began serious soul-searching over the unexpected outcome in which Harris, a daughter of a Jamaican father lost all seven battleground states where American elections are lost or won.

“I really believe this country is just not ready to elect a female for president,” Florida-based retired real estate broker Juliet Mattadeen told the Jamaica Observer.

Her grief was shared by many of those who offered their views on the result in interviews with this newspaper.

“I am totally shocked; it’s as if I am in a different world,” said Hyacinth Davis, a retired educator of Georgia who also attributed Harris’s gender as the big reason for her loss.

Retired New York health-care worker and founding president of the Ex-Correctional Officers Association of Jamaica, Keith Smellie, said he was “deeply disappointed and devastated” about the results, which he described as “certainly not what I anticipated”.

He added that he believed that the former president “was able to use the state of the economy and the border [immigration] issue effectively against the vice-president”.

In Maryland, Rick Nugent, who heads the Jamaica Association of Maryland, said that “while the outcome is not what I would have preferred, this is a democracy and we have to accept the results”.

He attributed her defeat to the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, along with her gender and sexism.

The election result was a particularly bitter pill to swallow for Stafford Grant, head of the Jamaica Ex-Servicemen and Women Foundation. Grant, who is based in Pennsylvania, said he was “totally shocked”.

“It [result] does not reflect what we saw on the ground leading up to and during the turnout yesterday [Tuesday],” said Grant, who was among several Jamaican and Caribbean nationals who formed Caribbean Americans United in Support of Harris shortly after she became her party’s presumptive nominee in July.

He worries about some of the policies the former president has advocated he will be carrying out, as he believes they will be detrimental, especially to Jamaicans and other Caribbean people.

“We will now have to remain more focused and use the laws where and when necessary to protect ourselves,” he argued. Sadie Campbell, the long-serving president of the Jamaica Progressive League, said that while she is deeply disappointed and the result is not what she was looking for, “there were signs that things would end up the way they now have”.

She believes the Harris campaign “needed to have focused more on what the Biden Administration did for the economy, which was faltering as a result of COVID when they took office. She said that she was “also disappointed that a lot of Jamaicans seem to have voted for the former president only because Harris is a woman”.

Commenting on the election result, California-based Roy B Davidson, president of the Caribbean Cricket Club of Los Angeles Inc, said, “The loss of the election by the vice-president is very disappointing. I think she was undone by the state of the economy, and I believe, too, that her late start as head of the ticket did not serve her well.”

Davidson added that he was proud of the campaign she ran and that she should be commended for doing extremely well, a sentiment shared by Grant.

For Carlene McIntosh, “the loss by Harris is hard to take. I just feel that she was held to a higher standard than if it were a male under similar circumstances”, the Long Island, New York-based hospital secretary told the Observer.

At least one member of the Jamaican community in The Bronx who did not wish to be named said he welcomed Trump’s victory as he believes his policies would be better for the economy and that he would fix the border problem.

He also felt that the Biden-Harris Administration was too soft on crime.