When then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton conceded her defeat to President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016, she told her audience to keep one thing in mind.
“I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day, someone will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now,” Clinton said at the time.
Eight years later, Vice President Kamala Harris assumed the Democratic nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, meaning another woman was within striking distance of finally winning the White House.
However, that did not materialize. Trump won the race after securing 312 electoral votes while managing a clean sweep of the seven battleground states. Trump is also still on track to win the popular vote.
As Democrats continue to assess the reasons for the bitter loss, many wonder about the effect the result will have on future female presidential candidates.
As opposed to Clinton in 2016, Harris did not emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy, choosing to not bring up her gender as part of this campaign.
“I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News in October. “I don’t need to point that out to anyone.”
Despite their different strategies, both lost to Trump, indicating a unique challenge for female candidates.
“It is clear how much work we have to do, because you can’t win either way,” said Erin Loos Cutraro, the founder and CEO of She Should Run, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on increasing the number of women considering running for office. “There isn’t a road map for this.”
Despite the issue of crafting an effective message as a female candidate, Cutraro said it is undeniable that the U.S. would benefit from more female representation.
“We cannot have the smartest policies if we’re not tapping into the full panel of this country has to offer,” Cutraro told HuffPost. “And whether or not the country is ready to talk about that as an advantage seems to be determined. But the reality that women’s voices and perspectives matter is not up for debate.”
The Electability Question
The Democratic primary that followed Clinton’s defeat saw a record number of six women presidential candidates, including Harris, vying to get the party’s nod.
At the time, electability, meaning a candidate’s perceived ability to defeat Trump, loomed large on Democratic primary voters’ minds, benefiting now-President Joe Biden, who eventually won the race to become the party’s nominee in 2020.
While it’s still early to determine how the 2024 result will factor into the minds of potential presidential candidates and voters in the future, some Democrats appear to already be lining up to lead the party into the next general election.
It remains unclear what role Harris intends to play in 2028 given the disappointing result on Nov. 5.
Harris’ defeat was likely a combination of multiple factors at play that her 107-day campaign did not manage to withstand.
Christine Matthews, a center-right pollster and president of Bellwether Research & Consulting, said the “fundamentals,” namely inflation, Biden’s unpopularity and the rise of populism around the world, played a big role in Harris’ defeat.
Matthews argued that even if Democrats had picked a male nominee, that candidate would still have likely lost for the same reasons.
Matthews added that while she doesn’t expect Harris’ defeat to make voters less inclined to support female candidates in the future, she says the outcome of the race could be “demoralizing” for female politicians seeking to run for the White House, especially considering the campaign Trump ran, often resorting to sexist attacks against his opponent.
“It may depress interest among women candidates who look at such a high bar, seemingly, and what voters are willing to accept from men, particularly Donald Trump, right, and and how none of that would be acceptable if a woman did it,” Matthews said.
But Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, told HuffPost we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of candidates who lost past presidential races are men.
“Whenever a man loses one of these elections, we don’t go back and say, ‘98% of the people who have lost presidential races are white men,’” Mackler said.
Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, an organization focused on promoting gender-balanced representation at every level of government, echoed Mackler, suggesting it would be a mistake to “draw the conclusion that women aren’t going to be supported by voters” after the defeats of just two female presidential candidates.
Richie Terrell cited the success women have seen on the local level, including in state legislatures where women are poised to become the majority of legislators of Democratic caucuses.
“There is a hunger for women’s leadership. And I think there’s a hunger for the kinds of policy decisions that are associated with women candidates and women elected officials,” Richie Terrell added.
Women Are Not A Monolith
A survey conducted by Pew Research Center last year found that while 31% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults said it is very or extremely important to see a woman elected president in their lifetime, just 5% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters shared the same view.
Matthews anticipates Republican women won’t be as “demoralized” when assessing the result of the election, suggesting they are more averse to “identity politics” compared to Democrats.
Ali Vitali, a Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News and author of the book “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House… Yet,” suggested that the fact that Republicans don’t like “identity politics” may explain why Harris chose to not emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy as she tried to court GOP voters who may have never voted for a Democrat before.
Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who was the last candidate standing against Trump in the Republican primary, also largely avoided leaning into her gender, perhaps in recognition of that.
The desire to see a woman run the White House, though, should not be seen as a partisan issue.
“The reason that we should want to see this glass ceiling broken has nothing to do with parties. It has everything to do with reflective government,” Vitali said. “When you have a greater diversity of opinion and lived experience, you get better policy.”
‘The Kamala Effect’
A’shanti F. Gholar, the president of Emerge, an organization dedicated to recruiting and training Democratic women to successfully run for office, said that following Clinton’s defeat in 2016, there was a big surge in women interested in entering politics.
“People called it the Trump effect. And I said, ‘That is incorrect. This is the Hillary effect,’” Gholar told HuffPost.
Gholar says Harris’ run will similarly inspire more female candidates to enter politics, noting that Emerge is already seeing many women attend their community gatherings and join their trainings.
“We’re absolutely going to have the Kamala effect,” Gholar said.
“We’re definitely going to see more women running, but it’s because they want to continue on the legacy of Secretary Clinton and Vice President Harris,” she continued.
Prior to her presidential run, Harris made history on several fronts in 2020 when she became vice president as the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to be elected to the role.
And before Harris, the late Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, made history in 1972, becoming the first female candidate to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination as well as the first Black candidate to seek any of the two major parties’ nods.
Glynda C. Carr, the president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to elect Black women, told The Guardian that Chisholm set an example by having “the audacity to run for president all the way to the convention” as a Black woman.
“The direct byproduct of that Chisholm effect was a Barbara Lee — Congresswoman Barbara Lee,” Carr said. “There are one or two or many that will be inspired by a Kamala Harris and it can’t be lost.”
It is true that setting aside the presidential race, women made history this Election Day. For instance, incoming Democratic Sens. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware will be the first two Black women to serve concurrently in the upper chamber of Congress.
Vitali told HuffPost presidential races are an imperfect measure of the strides women have made in American politics, in part, because of the many external factors affect the primary process that propels candidates to the nomination.
Still, Vitali argued that the more women that run for the presidency “it becomes less fatal when one loses, and it becomes still jubilant when one wins.”
“That kind of repetition, that kind of habit building, is exactly the kind of thing that it will take to eventually break the glass ceiling,” Vitali added.
