In the eight years since Hillary Clinton failed to win the US presidency, the workforce for the first time grew to include more college-educated women than college-educated men. The #MeToo movement exposed sexual harassment and toppled powerful men. The supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Will any – or all – of it make a difference for vice-president Kamala Harris?
Harris is now assured of becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election. As such, she faces, fairly or not, some of the same electability questions that Clinton confronted in a nation that, unlike many of its peers around the globe, has yet to pick a woman as its leader.
A presidential contest pitting Harris against former president Donald Trump would represent a rematch of sorts: Trump would again have to run against a woman who held a top administration position and served in the Senate. He defeated Clinton in 2016 despite her winning the popular vote by a wide margin.
But the dynamics would be unquestionably different. Harris has neither the political legacy nor the baggage of Clinton. Trump, having served a turbulent term in office, is now a known quantity. Harris is black and of South Asian descent.
And the country is not the same as it was eight long years ago.
“Women are angrier, and that could be motivating,” says Karen Crowley (64), an independent voter and retired nurse in Concord, New Hampshire, who would not vote for Trump, did not feel like she could support Biden and now plans to back Harris.
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Among the motivations Crowley cites are the demise of Roe v Wade and comments and actions by Trump that many women see as sexist and misogynistic. “A woman president might be more possible now,” she says.
But for female voters and activists eager to break that elusive glass ceiling, there is also fear that sexism will remain difficult for Harris to overcome.
“It’s a patriarchy out there,” Crowley says. “She’s smart and she’s a prosecutor, but there are a lot of old white men who will want to stop her. The only thing wrong with her is that she’s a woman.”
Discussing the gender of a politician can feel reductive and regressive, especially when it does not seem as relevant in other countries. The UK has had three female prime ministers. Mexico elected its first female president this year.
Yet, when a woman runs for office in the United States, many voters still mention her gender unprompted in interviews, identifying it as a concern – often not for themselves, they say, but for the wider electorate.
Julia Blake (80) of La Jolla, California, says she has spent a lot of time arguing with her book club friends about whether a woman could be elected president. One after the next – professional women, with doctorates and master’s degrees – they say they think the answer was no. Blake is indignant with them.
“I said, ‘If women think a woman can’t win, and they repeat that year after year, we will never get a female president,’” says Blake, who supported Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, and also donated to Harris during the Democratic primary in 2020. “I don’t think they’re giving women enough credit.”
To be sure, party affiliation, not gender, remains most important for many voters. “I would not vote for her,” says Naomi Villalba (74), a Republican from Dallas who supports Trump but thinks Harris is a better choice for Democrats than Biden.
Biden won 55 per cent of the female vote in 2020, compared with Clinton’s 54 per cent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump’s support among women grew to 44 per cent in 2020, up from 39 per cent in 2016.
The prospect of having Harris atop the Democratic ticket has energised some voters looking to elect a female president. But it has also resurfaced old fears about the fact that Trump lost to a man (Biden) but defeated a woman (Clinton).
Though ultimately not successful, Clinton’s candidacy did change the idea of what was possible, says Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who studies women’s voting patterns. Klobuchar and senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren were taken seriously as candidates during the 2020 election, as was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, who challenged Trump this year.
“That suggests to me that post-Hillary Clinton, people are increasingly comfortable with the idea of a woman president,” Wolbrecht says.
Forty-two per cent of women felt it was at least somewhat important to elect a woman as president in their lifetime, according to a Pew Research Center report last year. In the poll, 39 per cent of respondents, both male and female, said a female president would be better at working out compromises, and 37 per cent said a woman would be better at maintaining a respectful tone in politics. (More than half said that gender did not matter on those measures.)
Harris appears to have a special bond with black women in particular, who comprise a key part of the Democratic base and have been especially enthusiastic in their past support for her.
Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson, director for the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, says much had changed for women since 2016. Concerns over Trump’s positions on issues such as abortion transformed from remote possibility to concrete reality after he took office, she says.
“When he was elected, we were disappointed, we were upset – there were marches, demonstrations, all kinds of things – and we had a good idea what was going to happen,” Nsiah-Jefferson adds. “But now we know what happened.”
Trump has already signalled that he considers his gender worth highlighting: At one point during the Republican National Convention last week, he walked out to It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, by James Brown.
But Nsiah-Jefferson thinks Harris will also lean in to the fact that she is a woman. “She’s going to talk about the way in which politics and policy impacts on women,” she says.
Some voters would like to lose the gender talk altogether.
“We have to take the emphasis off the gender identification stuff and put it on the person themselves and their own abilities,” says Marilyn McDole of Oregon, Wisconsin, who attended a weekend re-election rally in Stoughton, Wisconsin, for Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin. “Because that’s so stigmatising and damaging to women. That’s not fair.”
Harris, McDole adds, has “got experience up the wazoo”.
Several Democratic voters, however, say a female nominee would help amplify perhaps the party’s strongest issue: abortion access.
Katy Sorenson (69), a former commissioner in Miami-Dade County, Florida, saysthe overturning of Roe v Wade, which protected the right to abortion across the US, was a “galvanising phenomenon”. “It’s not just abortion; it’s problem pregnancies that have so many women concerned about what they’re going to do, and can they get the healthcare they need,” she says.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, Mary Lucas (36), says Harris gave given her new motivation to campaign. “My immediate reaction is ‘How do I get involved?,’” Lucas says.
Women also point to societal shifts that might make Harris’s run different. Dr Liz Bradt (64), a retired veterinarian and chair of the Salem Democratic City Committee in Salem, Massachusetts, says younger people seemed less likely to make judgements based on rigid definitions of male and female. “Where my generation is like, ‘Male or female, where’s the check box?’ I think the younger generation is more accepting of different genders,” Bradt says. “That will make a difference.”
Still, Bradt, who campaigned for Clinton in New Hampshire, expects a tough road ahead for Harris. “It’s going to be hard to see what she has to go through,” she says. “I fear for her, like I feared for Hillary.”
Although Clinton won the most votes in 2016, some voters said they found her off-putting. Among them was Dr Maria E Laurencio (73), a retired anaesthesiologist in Coral Gables, Florida, who was a lifelong Republican until she pinched her nose and voted for Clinton.
“Women were not sympathetic to Hillary because a lot of them said she stood by the president,” Laurencio said about former president Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs. “Hillary tended to be a little arrogant and not so likable, even though she was so prepared.”
In 2020, Laurencio changed her registration to vote for Biden. Now, she intends to support Harris. “For me, anything that prevents Mr Trump from getting to the presidency again, I will go along with,” she says.
And more women are now veterans of political campaigns.
Luisa Wakeman (57), a flight attendant in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, says women like her were relatively new to politics when they campaigned against Trump in 2016. Now, their informal and largely female-led networks in the area have matured into durable, battle-tested electoral machines.
“I think like many people, I’m feeling invigorated,” she says.
And she says she is impressed by Harris’s qualifications. “It’s not just because she’s a woman,” she says, “but I’m excited that she will make history.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
