On the arduous climb toward the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” female presidential candidates persisted and resisted. They promised they were unbought and unbossed. Most of all, they believed the nation was ready for them. And, one by one, they were proven wrong.
The United States has been led by men for all of its 248 years, and that will continue for at least four more. On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris became the latest woman to fail to break the gender barrier to the presidency, and the second to be defeated by Donald J. Trump.
Across the country, on text chains, during their commutes, in offices, with friends and family, women were processing the sting of another loss. Mothers consoled their daughters. Others tried to figure out how to explain what it meant, to their loved ones and to themselves, that Ms. Harris had been defeated by a man like Mr. Trump — who had bragged about stripping away the rights of women, about grabbing them by their genitals, and who had been held liable for sexual abuse.
“I’m terrified by him, to be honest,” said Nicole Saylor, an independent voter in Hendersonville, N.C., who has voted Democratic in the past few elections. “And I’m terrified that I live in a country where 51 percent of the people voted for someone who is bigoted and misogynistic. I’m terrified that half of the country thinks it’s OK.”
Ms. Harris’s loss brought many women a wave of sadness and pain, to be sure. But this time, there was another emotion at play. When Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump in 2016, the anger and shock had been so palpable that it sparked a pink-hatted protest movement. Now, faced with the reality that Mr. Trump had been swept back into office with a broader electoral mandate than before, women across the country expressed grim resignation that their country was more welcoming to a second Trump term than to the idea of a woman leader.
“It’s just nothingness in my head. I can’t look ahead,” said Abby Clark, 42, who does environmental advocacy work in Detroit. “I don’t know how to plan. I can’t picture the world we’ll be in and what it will really be like. I just know that it will be difficult and hard.”
Delivering her concession speech at Howard University, Ms. Harris did not speak about her loss in terms of gender or race. There was no talk of a glass ceiling. Instead, Ms. Harris spoke directly to the young voters who had gathered to see her.
“Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place, you have power,” Ms. Harris said. “You have power. And don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.”
Throughout her 15-week campaign, Ms. Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, had tried to pivot away from questions about the historical significance of her candidacy to her desire to serve as a president for “all Americans” — a strategy that freed her to challenge Mr. Trump on matters of policy and character. By the time Election Day arrived, she had taken her gender and her opponent’s name out of her closing argument altogether, casting her fight as one about embracing a more united future.
Ms. Harris and her party had bet it all on appealing to women by attacking Mr. Trump’s character and reminding them that he was proud to have appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
She showed clips of Mr. Trump’s bizarre behavior at her political rallies, and focused on his disparaging comments about women, minorities and political opponents in the final stretch. She invited women who had been harmed by restrictive abortion bans to take the stage at her events. And she and her advisers had been hopeful that Mr. Trump’s own rallies would be a reminder of his track record with women.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who for ran president in 2020, framed the loss as one that stung but one that still represented progress in the slow march toward a woman in the White House.
“It is enormously disappointing not to make it across the finish line in 2024,” said Ms. Warren, who had vied for the Democratic nomination in a field that included Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ms. Harris. “But we’ve come a long way in just a decade, and we’re not giving up.”
For his part, Mr. Trump made an aggressive play for male voters, and at times he used misogynistic language to describe Ms. Harris, insulting her intelligence and claiming she lacked the stamina to lead the country. At a rally in North Carolina in the last days of the campaign, he chuckled at a remark shouted by a rallygoer that insinuated Ms. Harris had been a prostitute. “This place is amazing,” he said.
Ms. Harris did not respond to any of it.
Some women who supported Mr. Trump argued that Ms. Harris’s loss had little to do with gender.
“I think America is ready for the right female president,” said Fanchon Blythe, a Trump supporter and a Republican committeewoman who owns a nail salon in Lincoln, Neb. “Kamala was not the right one.” She said that Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who became a Republican and endorsed Mr. Trump, would make a good one.
Christian Ramirez, 34, an executive assistant at Arizona State University who lives in Phoenix, said she had been a lifelong Democrat until the 2020 election, when she “jumped ship” and voted for Mr. Trump. She voted for him again in 2024, saying that Democrats had lost her on a number of issues.
“They were trying to make it, ‘Oh, Trump’s against women. Kamala’s pro-women,’” she said. “But I don’t think that’s what it comes down to. It comes down to a lot more policies than just the abortion.”
In the end, more than 105 years after the 19th Amendment was passed to bar states from denying women the right to vote, and 59 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure that all Black women and others could exercise that right, Americans again decided against sending a woman to the White House.
Ms. Harris had been deliberate in trying to get Americans to see her in the role. She stood beside President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, checked up on people in states hit by hurricanes and delivered her campaign’s closing argument in front of the White House.
As they parsed the results of an election that had shown a drift toward Mr. Trump among nearly every voter demographic group, Democrats were soul-searching on Wednesday, questioning how much Ms. Harris’s gender factored into her loss.
“I think it all mattered,” said Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. “Race, gender, city, rural, etc. We’ve run a battleground strategy for 20 years. It’s not working.”
The United States lags behind several other nations — Britain, Germany, Israel, India, Canada and, this year, Mexico — which have chosen women as leaders. Despite the long wait, America is far from alone. Men do still run the world, numerically. Only about a third of the countries in the United Nations have ever had a woman head of the government. Just 13 of the body’s 193 member countries are currently led by women, according to the Pew Research Center.
Eight years ago, Ms. Clinton, a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College to Mr. Trump. In her concession speech, Ms. Clinton said she hoped that a woman would come along and shatter the glass ceiling “sooner than we might think right now.”
That wait continues. And this time, the road ahead seems more uncertain.
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