Has the Idea of a Woman President Become “Normalized”?

Are you feeling a bit “ho hum” about a woman running for President? Like it’s no longer a big deal?

After all, Kamala Harris is the second woman in our nation’s history to win a major party’s presidential nomination eight years after Hillary Clinton, who was the first. While they are the only two to get this far, multiple women, Democratic and Republican, have campaigned to win the nomination in all recent presidential election cycles.

“Definitely it’s normal,” says A’shanti Gholar, president of EMERGE, a national organization working to elect more Democratic women. “I  think about my niece, and she only knows a time when you had Hillary Clinton in 2016 and you had Elizabeth Warren and other great women running in 2020 and now you have Kamala Harris. For this next generation, all they know is that a woman can run for President of the United States.

“I love that for the younger generation that this has become so normal for them that you can’t say to a girl, you can’t run for president, because they’re seeing it,” adds Gholar, who also is the founder of The Brown Girls Guide to Politics.

Of course, seeing a woman run is not the same as seeing her inaugurated next January 20. With that goal in mind, the Harris campaign has taken a different strategy from that of Clinton eight years ago when her shtick often seemed all about electing the first woman president. For the Harris team, it appears to be more about urging voters to elect a prosecutor not a felon.

“It seems like her campaign has made a concerted choice to not focus on her gender and not focus on her race, in other words, not focus on her identity. I think that is a smart move. She wants to differentiate herself from Hillary Clinton’s historic campaign,” says Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics.

Sinzdak recently met with a group of middle school girls to talk about women in politics and, like Gholar, realized that for them it was routine to see a woman run for president.  “There have been a lot of women in the mix the last three election cycles. When we were growing up, that was not even remotely the case. The ideal is that these girls grow up in this perception that it’s completely normal.”

But, adds Sinzdak: “We still know that voters question gender. The Harris campaign is taking that off the table and making Harris look presidential. Her being visible is enough. She doesn’t need to say it; it’s there, part of the narrative. She’s running as a presidential candidate, and it’s a smart move. Voters can observe the difference.”

While the Harris team might be taking that tack, the Trump campaign isn’t. Trump is sticking to his usual attack mode of weaponizing race and gender. He has called Harris  “crazy,” “nuts” and “dumb as a rock.” And during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists he said: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” 

These attacks don’t surprise Harris. She weathered similar nasty name calling when she ran for vice president. Harris and her campaign have learned to respond to the slurs and lies as needed without engaging in the kind of mud fight Trump likes to provoke.

It’s a great strategy against a bully, but it’s likely Trump will continue his sexist and racist harangues because they fuel his supporters. He’s well aware there remain voters unlikely to cast a ballot for a woman president. Polling for The Hill found that “54 percent of the country says they are ready for a woman president and 30 percent said they aren’t.” The Hill noted that after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy in 2015, “an Economist/YouGov poll found 63 percent of voters were ready for a woman president.” That’s an uncomfortable dip in the number who said they were ready.

“I ran for office, and I’m a woman, and I have plenty of voters who supported me, but when it comes to the national electorate, I’m not sure that I am yet convinced that they are embracing or normalizing female candidacy, and I won’t be until I actually see a winning candidate nationwide,” says Washington State Rep. Julia Reed, D-36. “I’m really anxious about can she win? Will voters at the end of the day vote for her?”

Reed worries that there is “inherent and deeply rooted misogyny from some voters and a real concern about whether some voters just do not like female candidates. That’s not something that they necessarily say to pollsters, but in their heart when they’re in that voting booth by themselves, is that something? Is that what we saw with Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump? I want to believe that it will be different this time.”

Pointing to the recent inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum as the first female president of Mexico and the growing number of other countries that have or have had women leaders, Reed says she sees people’s attitudes changing. “I have to believe we’re moving forward. What does James Baldwin say? ‘I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive.’ That’s the only choice.”

Younger voters, at least, seem to be moving forward. A U.S. News poll of 18 to 34 year olds found that “more than 80% of young voters in key battleground states say that a woman could be an effective president and strong leader.” 

Susannah Wellford, founder and CEO of Running Start, a national organization based in DC that trains young women to run for office, suspects that people are starting to look beyond gender. Hillary Clinton took the popular vote even if the electoral college vote went to Trump. “We’ve gone great strides to normalizing the idea of a woman running for president. It’s a good strategy of the Harris campaign to not run on identity labels but to run on who she is and maybe they can pull over more people from the other side that way.”

The Harris campaign might not emphasize gender as a key selling point, but her stances on reproductive justice and support for families among other issues have contributed to a growing gender gap between the candidates. Recent polls show women choosing Harris over Trump by 18 points, with Politico noting that “If women continue to turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, like they have in every presidential election since 1980, it could cost him the election.”

An intriguing question, however, is whether the Harris campaign will successfully defang the sexist and racist attacks against her and manage to shift the conversation to policies, temperament, and character. University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless suggests that might be what we are seeing with the normalizing of a woman’s candidacy. 

“We’ve reached an important change in the political environment,” Lawless told The New York Times. “We’re not having a lot of pained conversation this time about whether the U.S. is ready to elect a woman or a Black woman. That has reared its head, but it’s not the central narrative.”

It might not be the central narrative, but electing a woman president remains unprecedented. Doing so would not be business as usual in American politics. It would be historic and the fulfillment of a vision of politics not fueled by sexism and racism. It also would be the fulfillment of a quest by remarkable women dating back to the 19th Century who dared to dream big.

The list of women who have sought to become president, compiled by the Center for Women in American Politics, is longer than I expected. It includes Victoria Claflin Woodhull who in 1872 became the first woman to run for president as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Her opponents were Ulysses S. Grant (R) and Horace Greeley (D). Also on the list, Margaret Chase Smith, who in 1964 was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president by a major party. She received 27 first ballot votes at the Republican National Convention and removed herself from contention after the first ballot. And then in 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to seek a major party’s nomination. She campaigned throughout the country and was on the ballot in 12 primaries, receiving 151.95 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention.

Some of these historic campaigns may have been quixotic, but each has been a step towards where we are now and where we may be on January 20.