What Kamala Harris’ loss means for future female presidential candidates

When then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton conceded defeat to newly elected President Donald Trump in November 2016, she told her audience to keep one thing in mind.

“I know we still haven’t broken that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but one day someone will, and hopefully sooner than we think,” Clinton said at the time.

Eight years later, Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, meaning another woman was within striking distance of ultimately winning the White House.

However, that did not materialize. Trump won the race after gaining 312 electoral votes, while keeping the seven battleground states clean. Trump is also still on track to win the popular vote.

As Democrats continue to assess the reasons for the bitter loss, many are wondering what effect the outcome will have on future female presidential candidates.

Unlike Clinton in 2016, Harris did not emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy and chose not to bring up her gender as part of this campaign.

“I’m obviously a woman,” Harris told NBC News in October. “I don’t have to point that out to anyone.”

Despite their different strategies, they both lost to Trump, highlighting a unique challenge for female candidates.

“It’s clear how much work we have to do because you can’t win no matter what,” said Erin Loos Cutraro, the founder and CEO of She Should Run, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on increasing the number of women who considering going for a run. for office. “There is no road map for this.”

Despite the issue of crafting an effective message as a female candidate, Cutraro said it is undeniable that the U.S. would benefit from more female representation.

“We can’t have the smartest policies if we don’t take advantage of the full panel this country has to offer,” Cutraro told HuffPost. “And whether the country is willing to talk about that as a benefit seems to be determined. But the reality that women’s voices and perspectives matter is not up for debate.”

The electability question

During the Democratic primaries that followed Clinton’s defeat, a record six female presidential candidates, including Harris, vied for the party’s favor.

At the time, electability, that is, a candidate’s perceived ability to beat Trump, was high on the minds of the Democratic primaries, which now benefited President Joe Biden, who ultimately won the race to become the party’s 2020 nominee become.

While it is still early to determine how the 2024 outcome will resonate in the minds of potential presidential candidates and voters in the future, some Democrats appear to already be lining up to lead the party into the next general election.

It remains unclear what role Harris wants to play in 2028, given the disappointing result on November 5.

Harris’ defeat was likely a combination of several factors at play that her 107-day campaign could not withstand.

Christine Matthews, a center-right pollster and president of Bellwether Research & Consulting, said the “fundamentals,” namely inflation, Biden’s unpopularity and the rise of populism around the world, played a major role in Harris’ defeat.

Matthews argued that even if Democrats had chosen a male candidate, that candidate would likely still have lost for the same reasons.

Matthews added that while she doesn’t expect Harris’ defeat to make voters less likely to support female candidates in the future, she says the outcome of the race could be “demoralizing” for female politicians running to run for the White House, especially considering they want to run for the White House. the campaign Trump ran, in which he often resorted to sexist attacks on his opponent.

“It may reduce interest among female candidates who are seemingly looking at such a high bar, and what voters are willing to accept from men, especially Donald Trump, right, and how none of that would be acceptable if a woman were doing it, ” said Matthews.

But Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, told HuffPost that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of candidates who have lost in recent presidential races have been men.

“Every time a man loses one of these elections, we don’t go back and say, ‘98% of the people who lost the presidential election are white men,’” Mackler said.

Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, an organization focused on promoting balanced gender representation at every level of government, echoed Mackler and suggested it would be a mistake to “draw the conclusion that women will not be supported by voters” following the defeats of only two female presidential candidates.

Richie Terrell cited the success women have seen at the local level, including in state legislatures where women are poised to become the majority of Democratic caucus legislators.

“There is a hunger for female leadership. And I think there is an appetite for the kinds of policy decisions that are associated with female candidates and female elected officials,” Richie Terrell added.

Women are not a monolith

A survey conducted last year by the Pew Research Center found that while 31% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults said it is very or extremely important for a woman to be elected president in their lifetime, only 5% of Republican and Republican-oriented voters shared the same view.

Matthews expects that Republican women will not be as “demoralized” when assessing the outcome of the election, suggesting that they are more averse to “identity politics” than Democrats.

Ali Vitali, Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News and author of the book “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House… Yet,” suggested that Republicans’ disliking of “identity politics” may explain why Harris chose not to emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy as she sought to court Republican voters who may have never voted for a Democrat before.

Former Republican Party presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who was the last candidate to oppose Trump during the Republican primaries, also largely avoided leaning on her gender, perhaps in recognition of that.

However, the desire to see a woman run the White House should not be seen as a partisan issue.

“The reason we want to see this glass ceiling broken has nothing to do with parties. It has everything to do with reflective governance,” Vitali said. “When you have a greater diversity of opinions and lived experiences, you get better policy.”

‘The Kamala Effect’

A’shanti F. Gholar, the president of Emerge, an organization dedicated to recruiting and training Democratic women to successfully run for office, said that after Clinton’s defeat in 2016, there was a surge of women interested were in politics.

“People called it the Trump effect. And I said, ‘That’s incorrect. This is the Hillary effect,” Gholar told HuffPost.

Gholar says Harris’ participation will similarly inspire more female candidates to enter politics, noting that Emerge is already seeing many women attending their community meetings and participating in their trainings.

“We will definitely get the Kamala effect,” Gholar said.

“We will certainly see more women participating, but that is because they want to continue the legacy of Secretary Clinton and Vice President Harris,” she continued.

Ahead of her presidential bid, Harris made history on several fronts in 2020 when she became vice president as the first woman, the first Black person and the first Asian American elected to the role.

And before Harris, the late Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, made history in 1972, becoming the first female candidate to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, as well as the first Black candidate to run for was looking for one of the kinks of the two major parties.

Glynda C. Carr, the president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization dedicated to the election of black women, told The Guardian that Chisholm set an example by “having the courage to run for office presidency until the convention” as a Black woman.

“The direct byproduct of that Chisholm effect was Barbara Lee — Congresswoman Barbara Lee,” Carr said. “There are one or two or many who will be inspired by a Kamala Harris and that cannot be lost.”

It’s true that, beyond the presidential race, women made history on this election day. The incoming Democratic Sens. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, for example, will be the first two Black women to serve simultaneously in the Senate of Congress.

Vitali told HuffPost that presidential races are an imperfect measure of the progress women have made in American politics, in part because of the many external factors that influence the primary process that propels candidates to the nomination.

Still, Vitali argued that the more women run for president “it becomes less fatal when someone loses, and still more jubilant when someone wins.”

“That kind of repetition, that kind of habit building, is exactly what it takes to finally break the glass ceiling,” Vitali added.

Related…