During the 2020 presidential primary, many voters were concerned above all with choosing a nominee who could defeat President Donald Trump in the general election. According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll, the majority of registered Democrats (51%) said they prioritized nominating a presidential candidate who seemed most likely to win against Donald Trump in November 2020, compared to only 36% who prioritized nominating a candidate whose positions on the issues came closest to theirs. Despite the record six women competing for the nomination, Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was still a fresh wound, and many Democrats wondered: Can a woman win the presidency?
In the weeks and months after Clinton’s defeat, many concluded that she lost because she was a woman. For years, I believed that idea was ridiculous — and, ironically, sexist. Suggesting that no woman can win the presidency reduces all women candidates to their gender, without recognizing them as multifaceted and complex individuals, and ignores the diverse policies they put forward.
Furthermore, suggestions that “America isn’t ready for a woman president” or “America won’t elect a woman” ignore the reality that Clinton very nearly won. By one count, Clinton lost by fewer than 80,000 votes across just three states. In fact, a majority of Americans did elect a woman — she received nearly 3 million votes more than now President Trump. If not for the Electoral College, she would be in the White House.
Many liberals had similar worries about the electoral prospects of Barack Obama, a Black man, in 2008. While studies have suggested that Obama’s race cost him popular and electoral votes, he still won the election in a landslide. No candidate for president has captured that many votes since. His race may have been a political disadvantage, but Obama’s other qualities — such as his captivating oratory — along with Republican President George W. Bush’s disastrous end-of-term economy were enough to overcome that disadvantage.
But this year, I’ve begun to wonder whether women candidates face more difficult odds than I thought. Soon after returning home from campus, I watched Nanette Burstein’s four-part documentary series “Hillary,” which focuses on Hillary Clinton’s many encounters with sexist scrutiny throughout her decades of public life. During her husband’s first term as governor of Arkansas, Clinton’s image clashed with the state’s old-fashioned understanding of how a wife should look and behave. She was a partner at a famous law firm, not a housewife, and she did not dress or style her hair like traditional Southern ladies. What irked conservative Arkansans the most was that she did not take her husband’s name: She went by Hillary Rodham.
Bill Clinton narrowly lost reelection in 1980 to a relatively unknown challenger, Frank White. White’s wife, Gay, later said she believed that attitudes toward Hillary were an “undercurrent” in Bill’s defeat. Afterwards, Hillary altered her entire public identity. She stopped working, started wearing makeup, adopted a more traditional appearance, and changed her last name to Clinton. In 1983, her husband returned to the governor’s mansion in a landslide.
Those first few years in Arkansas marked the beginning of what The New York Times called Clinton’s “precarious shadow game with the American public — a ritualized series of reveals, retreats and resets.” No matter how many times Clinton reinvented herself to please general audiences, she never achieved widespread affection. Any expression of independence or self-sufficiency prompted scrutiny and suspicion. On the campaign trail during her husband’s 1992 presidential bid, Clinton mentioned her choice to become a lawyer when she “could have stayed home and baked cookies.” Americans reacted angrily; focus groups indicated “people think of her as being in the race ‘for herself’ and as ‘going for the power.’” The fact that an offhand remark caused such a violent reaction — and that people so despised the idea of a woman seeking political influence — hints at the continuing strength of gender bias in U.S. politics.
Hillary Clinton’s story made me wonder whether I underestimated how hard it will be for a woman to win the presidency. That Clinton, one of the most experienced presidential candidates in U.S. history, lost to Trump, a xenophobic billionaire who had never held elected office, raises serious doubt about the possibility.
I used to believe that the main reason for Clinton’s loss in 2016 was her stilted stage presence. I thought that a more charismatic woman, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, would fare better. But there, too, I was wrong. Talking to New Hampshire voters while I campaigned for Warren in January, I noticed a clear preference for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders among progressive voters. After this past November, Sanders consistently outperformed Warren in the polls, and he remained in the running more than a month longer than she did.
It was difficult to find a clear reason why Warren underperformed compared to Sanders. In 2016, Sanders defined himself as the radical alternative to Clinton, bolstered by the contrast between his blustery charisma and her somewhat stilted presence at the pulpit. With Warren, there was no such distinction. Warren’s 2020 platform was strikingly similar to Sanders’ ideologically, and even though she sought highly regulated market capitalism rather than democratic socialism, that difference was never the core of her public message. In debates and speeches, she always focused on “big, structural change,” not incremental reform. While there were important differences between the two, they rarely clashed during debates or attacked each other on the campaign trail. Beyond policy, her charisma was just as powerful as Sanders’, and her passion just as obvious.
But where Sanders’ curmudgeonly presence came across as compelling and honest, many people saw Warren’s similar aggression as shrill and unappealing. Voters rejected Warren because, as Clinton’s story shows, many react almost allergically when women assert their authority. Warren’s lackluster performance showed me that antiquated notions of gender are still lodged in the societal subconscious, and they have made it incredibly difficult for women to seem charismatic.
However, these cultural hurdles do not mean that we should not nominate women for president. Women candidates may be at an unjust disadvantage because of their gender, but Obama’s historic victory showed that social barriers can indeed be broken. If we deny women the nomination because they may not win, that disparity will only persist. If Americans were to see more women in the presidential arena, women candidates would seem less shrill and out of place.
To combat the sexism that stands between women and the presidency, we must encourage women to run for office and vote for the women we believe in, so that it becomes normal to see a woman on the campaign trail — and, hopefully, in the White House.
Image Credit: “Hillary Clinton” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.