Democratic women see a country that is ‘not ready for a woman president’
Originally published by Elena Schneider for Politico
The agony for Democrats wasn’t just that the vice president lost. It was also, to many women, that for the second time in a decade a Democratic woman had lost to Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton faced off against Trump under dramatically different circumstances, and with different strategies. But the result was the same for both candidates. They lost to a former president who has been found liable for sexual abuse, insulted his opponents with sexist and racist language and assured the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
And in the aftermath on Wednesday, some Democratic women were finding it hard to draw anything other than the most demoralizing conclusion about the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office.
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly a dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists argued that Harris faced headwinds including an ornery electorate and her connection to an unpopular incumbent. But to them, it was also more than that.
“I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“I was hoping we’d get closer, at the very least, this time around,” Solis Doyle said. “But we got farther.”
Sexism and racism, inextricably woven into our culture and politics, played a central role in the 2024 campaign, these Democratic women said. But they were divided on how much those forces ultimately affected Trump’s landslide victory, where he gained strength across nearly every demographic group.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, like others, said that “any Democrat” would’ve lost Tuesday night because it’s about “something much bigger,” and ruled out sexism as a deciding factor. But others disagreed. Democratic pollster Angie Kuefler, who worked on several abortion rights initiatives in recent years, said Trump “explicitly weaponized gender and purposely tried to activate men in a traditional masculinity-focused way.”
“We don’t want to say it publicly, a woman can’t get elected,” Kuefler said. “But what else are we supposed to take away from this moment? I hope this is unique to women running against Trump.”
In her concession speech Wednesday afternoon, Harris did not explicitly address “all the little girls,” as Clinton did in 2016. Instead, she spoke broadly about the long view of progress, urging her supporters that even though “sometimes the fight takes a while, that doesn’t mean we won’t win.”