They were both extremely bad candidates who should not have been in a position to run. If the party had been allowed to speak they would not have been allowed to run.
They weren’t really candidates that failed on their own merits, they were set up to fail by being put into a position they should never have been in.
Neither Hillary nor Kamala could have won a primary that wasn’t rigged in their favor. Since they didn’t get to their position as candidate based on their own merits, it’s reasonable to describe their failure in similar terms.
That said, there is such a thing as more than 100% blame, and this is a situation where A lot of people have a lot of blame. Those two women are 100% responsible for the stupid decisions they made. No one can take that failure away from them, but because of the nature of the mistake, there were a lot more people who should also be blamed and similarly excommunicated from politics.
There are elements of sexism here, but that’s just endemic to politics. They didn’t fail because of sexism, they got to where they were because of it and were set up to fail by it, but there are a lot of problems here beyond and before sexism.
In America, our system works like this:
The police will shoot you, maybe burn your house or neighborhood down, steal everything you own, Lock you up without charges, and then if you can ever afford a lawyer to sue them you might get out of jail only to find the burned-out hole in the ground you used to live in was sold to a property developer and none of the money found its way to you.
You also owe tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes on the burned down house for the time you were in jail, but all of the money for selling the house was given to some scam artist who knew you wouldn’t be able to stop them.
You can’t afford to go to the doctor, but a third of your income is spent on health insurance. It takes 2 hours of work to afford a dozen eggs. You no longer have a car because they towed it from your driveway while you were locked up and you can’t even afford to get it out of impound despite the fact that every day the cost of storing the vehicle goes up by more than you earn.
This country is a fucking nightmare for so many people.