Vice President Harris’s defeat in last week’s presidential election raises a thorny dilemma for Democrats as they look ahead to future election cycles, including the 2028 presidential race.
Twice in the past three presidential elections, Democrats have nominated a woman. Both times, they have lost.
The sole Democratic victor in those three elections was President Biden, a white man who was 77 years old at the time of his election.
Those scorching experiences create an uncomfortable reality for a party that is committed to gender equality as a central form of social progress — but that is also desperate to win.
It also could have real ramifications for 2028, where there is at least one obvious female candidate — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) — who would be instantly among the top-tier contenders if she sought the nomination.
There are other women who could also plausibly run. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) both contested the nomination in 2020. A different and progressive generation could be represented by 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Harris herself has said nothing about her own political future and might argue that she faced an impossible political task this year.
But any female candidate would now be certain to face the suggestion that her nomination would be a political risk that the party cannot afford.
The entirety of the situation is frustrating, not only for Democrats but for those more generally concerned with women’s place in the highest firmaments of electoral politics.
Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, asserted that President-elect Trump had used numerous gender-coded and racially coded lines of attack against Harris.
The fact that those attacks were effective, at least to some degree, was “disturbing,” Walsh said, adding that it is “a challenge that women and people of color will have to confront in future campaigns.”
But Walsh also pushed back strongly against any sense that women carried overly heavy political handicaps.
She noted the number of women who have served as governors or senators, as well as Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) historic role as the first female Speaker.
Walsh also emphasized that the idea that women are in any way unelectable was belied by the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a clear margin back in 2016, even as she lost the election.
The whole question, Walsh added, was “complicated.”
“If the question is, are Americans ready to pull the lever for a woman for president, I think the answer is yes,” she said. “I don’t think there are barriers great enough that a woman can’t get elected.”
Be that as it may, last week’s election was a severe disappointment to Democratic-leaning women for reasons beyond the outcome itself.
A hoped-for tsunami of female support for Harris on the basis of reproductive rights simply did not materialize.
The reasons why it did not happen are unclear — but it was startling to many that the outcome seemed so at odds from the 2022 midterms, when Democrats overperformed expectations five months after the Supreme Court had struck down Roe v. Wade.
Preelection polls that indicated a Harris-Trump election would produce the largest gender gap in modern history were also incorrect.
According to the main exit poll conducted for a consortium of television networks, Harris won female voters by an 8-point margin last week. Biden had prevailed by 15 points in 2020.
In addition to all of that, a broader Republican critique aimed at diversity itself also appears to have made some kind of mark — or at least failed to spark any significant pro-Democratic backlash.
For example, Harris was explicitly referred to as a “DEI hire” by Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), the ardent Trump loyalist who ended former Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) political career by defeating her convincingly in a GOP primary.
The term “DEI hire” refers to diversity, equity and inclusion programs — but also functions as a not-so-subtle way to suggest women and nonwhite Americans get positions that they do not deserve on merit.
The idea that a commitment to diversity itself may have backfired against Democrats is a tough one for a party that believes in the ideal — and whose 2008 nominee, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), became the nation’s first Black president.
More specifically, the danger is that the 2016 and 2024 results will lead to women being seen as an inherently “risky” choice as presidential nominees.
Advocates for women in politics, like Walsh, believe that is unfair — and outdated.
She recalled the 2020 Democratic primary, which had several credible female candidates.
“There was this overriding terror that you would hear from Democrats saying, ‘We need someone who is electable.’ They were very risk-averse, and women and people of color were seen as risky,” she said.
She argued this ultimately led to the nomination of Biden, who “might not have been the best choice but was seen as the safest choice.”
Now that a female nominee has lost again, the danger for Democratic women is that the party will be reluctant to take that perceived risk again anytime soon.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
