Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, don’t agree on much. Yet, recently the ideological adversaries found some common ground on a political question that has quietly endured over nearly two decades.
Yes, a woman can win the White House, they agree. But she’s probably going to be conservative.
“Are there women out there, governors, Republican, Democrat, that can be the next president of the United States? Absolutely,” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Capitol Hill this month. “If you have a Republican female nominee, they would have a good shot of being the first woman president.”
A few days earlier and several hundred miles north, Mr. Clinton — whose wife tried and failed twice to win the White House — made a similar argument.
“Ideologically, the people who are most likely to be against women are most likely to be conservative, so when people agree with you, it’s easier to be for them,” he said in an appearance at the DealBook Summit hosted by The New York Times. “But I think a woman can be elected president. I do.”
Their similar predictions are the latest in a conversation that has frustrated and foiled two generations of female candidates.
For Democrats still scarred by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald J. Trump in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat at the hands of the same man in November has only deepened anxieties over gender bias and prompted a fresh round of debate over the electability of women to the nation’s highest office.
While few will say so aloud, some Democrats are already quietly hoping their party doesn’t nominate a woman in 2028, fearing she could not overcome an enduring hold of sexism on the American electorate. Many others anticipate another — perhaps even more aggressive — round of questions and doubts about female presidential candidates that have plagued the party for the better part of two decades..
“People feel pretty stung by what happened,” said Liz Shuler, the first woman elected to lead the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the largest federation of unions in the country, who supported Ms. Harris and believes she made no significant missteps in the race. “She totally over-performed and yet fell short. So it does feel like that sucker punch of, like, ‘Wow, even when you do everything right, that glass ceiling is still elusive.’”
For decades, advocates for female political leaders argued that if more women ran for president, their presence in American politics would become normalized and one would eventually win the White House. Since Mrs. Clinton’s first attempt to break what she called “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” in 2008, nine other women have vied for a major party’s nomination.
Those candidates have been conservative and liberal, racially diverse, and from big cities, small towns and across the country. Some campaigned on an economic message, others focused on social issues. Only two — Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris, both Democrats — captured their party’s nomination.
As they process the second defeat of a female nominee, Democrats are divided over the question of how much Ms. Harris’s gender actually contributed to her loss, making it hard to divine what exactly that could mean for their party in 2028. Two weeks before Election Day, Ms. Harris openly dismissed concerns that sexism could hurt her chances, saying in an interview with NBC News that the country was “absolutely” ready to elect a female president.
She rarely mentioned her gender or her race during her brief campaign, a choice that reflected both her personal approach to barrier-breaking opportunities and the long-running Democratic anxieties about female nominees.
Now, after her defeat, few Democrats dispute that sexism was a factor in a race against a man who had been found liable for sexual abuse — a verdict Mr. Trump called a “disgrace” — and has long made hyper-masculinity part of his political brand.
“I do not think that this race swung solely on her being a woman or a woman of color. But I think that you cannot look at a woman and a woman of color and not think that didn’t have an impact on this race,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Ms. Harris’s campaign chair, told a group of strategists, journalists and academics gathered for a campaign post-mortem at Harvard this month. “We are fooling ourselves if we don’t think that there is an element of her being a woman or a woman of color that was harder for people to see as comfortably, perhaps.”
Yet to chalk Ms. Harris’s loss up to sexism alone — and to the idea that women are held to a higher standard when seeking the White House — could also be a way of minimizing campaign missteps.
“Kamala Harris made a very bad decision in her choice of vice president. So that was her first big decision to make, and in my judgment, she did not choose well,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said of the selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a relatively untested national figure, as her running mate. Behind Ms. Harris and Mrs. Clinton’s losses, she added, “there were circumstances in the campaign that were unrelated to gender.”
Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, who won a tough re-election race against a male candidate in November, said she saw more traditional political factors playing a larger role in Ms. Harris’s defeat, noting that she heard “very little focus” on her gender or the barrier-breaking potential of her candidacy.
“This was a change election. People — if people are expressing that they’re concerned about the direction of the country, they’re not going to vote for the incumbent party,” she said. “It has much more to do with that than I think the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman.”
The results indicate that, yet again, voters were not particularly motivated by a desire for greater female representation. Despite the liberal hope that women would flock to her candidacy over issues like abortion rights, Ms. Harris won the lowest level of support from female voters of any Democratic nominee since 2004, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
A majority of white women continued to support Mr. Trump, a result that is consistent with their support for the Republican nominee in every race since 2004. Yet, Ms. Harris also made few, if any, inroads among key blocs of female voters: A smaller percentage of Latino and young women backed Ms. Harris than backed any other Democratic nominee since Barack Obama first ran in 2008.
“Voters were more worried about issues like the economy or immigration and less concerned with the vice president’s gender and race,” said Amanda Hunter, the executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which promotes women in politics. She added, “This was not the same glass-ceiling candidacy that we saw in 2016.”
Still, other members of the Senate, where women make up a quarter of the body, said they believed Ms. Harris’s gender more significantly affected her support.
“Some people think that a woman can’t run a country, and so there are those kinds of views that we need to address among them,” said Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii and a close ally of Ms. Harris. “There are a lot of cultural issues involved in electing a woman.”
Some elected officials say they believe that only a female candidate with a strong and uncompromising political brand will be able to overcome such gender bias.
Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Graham cited what the South Carolina senator called the “Margaret Thatcher mold,” evoking the famously tough conservative leader who became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979.
“Fair or not, I think that Republican women are seen as stronger on national defense,” Ms. Collins said.
So far, at least, such conservative bona fides haven’t been enough: No woman has won the Republican nomination. And Nikki Haley’s victories in the 2024 District of Columbia and Vermont primaries were the first presidential primary wins by a Republican woman.
Some of those who have been at the center of such debates seem visibly exhausted by the subject of female electability.
In January 2019, just days after she began her presidential bid, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, steadfastly refused to engage with questions of sexism. “I’m going to keep fighting on the issues because I think that’s what matters most,” she said in an interview on Capitol Hill.
Two years later, after her primary bid had ended in defeat, Ms. Warren detailed in a memoir how her focus on ideas in the race had collided with concerns about her gender. She was taken aback, she recounted, by how many times potential donors and supporters had raised Mrs. Clinton’s loss as a reason for their trepidation about Ms. Warren’s bid.
“I wondered whether anyone said to Bernie Sanders when he asked for their support, ‘Gore lost, so how can you win?’ I wondered whether anyone said to Joe Biden, ‘Kerry lost, so clearly America just isn’t ready for a man to be president,’” she recalled thinking as she lay in bed after her first day raising money for her presidential bid. “I tried to laugh, but the joke didn’t seem very funny.”
This month, when asked in an interview if a woman could be elected president, Ms. Warren, who won a third Senate term in November, just sighed.
“Someday,” she said. She declined to elaborate.
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