For Second Time in Eight Years, a Loss for a Woman Presidential Candidate

The Washington Post / Joanna Slater, Karin Brulliard

13:08 JST, November 7, 2024

The chance to sweep away a barrier to women that is as old as the United States vanished as Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris to become the nation’s 47th president, devastating voters who hoped she could make history.

Trump’s win, secured early Wednesday, means that the practice of electing a man to the nation’s highest office remains unbroken after more than 200 years.

For many American women – most of whom supported Harris – it was a defeat infused with bitterness and despair: A female candidate lost for the second time in eight years and just two years after abortion rights were stripped away in many states.

Particularly brutal was the victory of an opponent with a long and troubling history on gender: Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual abuse and in the past has bragged about groping women on tape. At least 17 women have accused him of sexual misconduct, allegations that Trump denies. His campaign against Harris, the sitting vice president, featured a torrent of attacks steeped in sexism.

Harris’s loss is disheartening enough, said Rebecca Kuske, a 28-year-old doctoral student in Wisconsin. But for the country to elect someone who has made his disrespect for women clear is “basically kicking you when you’re already down.”

Yet for other women, there was relief and exultation that Harris would not be president. Many said that ideology mattered much more than gender and that they would be happy to see a woman elected president provided the candidate embraced Republican or conservative politics.

Others said Harris – whose campaign began only in July after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid – hadn’t convinced them she was ready for the job.

Cheryl Dulac, 66, a nurse in North Carolina who normally votes for Democrats, left the presidential line on her ballot blank. Trump is “crazy,” Dulac said, but Harris failed to impress her.

Dulac’s son voted for Trump and told her that he didn’t think “a woman could face Putin.” Even given her own ambivalence, Dulac was aghast. “My own son!” she said. “I don’t even know where that came from.”

Exit polls showed a wide gender gap in the support for the two candidates, with women favoring Harris by 10 points and men favoring Trump by the same amount – but the margin was slightly smaller than in the 2020 and 2016 elections.

During a bruising and truncated campaign, the two candidates adopted sharply different approaches to questions of gender.

Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris downplayed the trailblazing nature of her candidacy, which could have made her not only the first woman to sit in the Oval Office but the first Black and South Asian woman to hold the job.

“Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris said in an interview with NBC last month. “The point that most people really care about is can you do the job and do you have a plan to actually focus on them.”

Trump, meanwhile, ran a campaign heavy on domineering rhetoric that reveled in displays of strength and supposed masculine prowess, veering at one point into a discussion of male genitalia.

Trump called Harris stupid, lazy and weak; he shared lewd insults about her on social media and said world leaders would treat her “like a play toy” if she were elected. In the campaign’s closing days, he proclaimed that he would protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”

For Trump, such rhetoric served a purpose, said Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. It may seem irrational to make “what seem like potentially sexist statements with five days left in a campaign with the gender gap at a historic high,” Valentino said. But “the answer is that he gains men while he loses women.”

Valentino and his colleagues Carly Wayne and Marzia Oceno studied the attitudes of voters in the 2016 race. They found something unusual that did not appear in any of the previous three presidential elections: People who scored higher on an index of subtly sexist attitudes – including that the push for gender equality was overdone – were more likely to vote for Trump, even controlling for variables such as partisanship and ideology.

In the 2024 contest, “Harris didn’t play the gender card; Trump did,” said Susan Faludi, the noted feminist author of “Backlash,” a book on the counterreaction to advances in women’s rights. Harris was “pretty pitch-perfect” during her abbreviated campaign, Faludi said, making her defeat “so much worse for future generations of aspiring female politicians.”

Harris’s loss leaves the U.S. in the same category as most other countries in the world: Just 7 percent of the 193 countries that make up the United Nations have a woman as their head of government. Only 30 percent of them have ever had a woman leader.

Unlike in parliamentary systems, where a party leader becomes prime minister, U.S. presidential candidates nearly always emerge from a long series of primaries. Harris was able to skip that process, one that has proved a barrier to women seeking the highest office.

There’s also a more symbolic challenge, said Jackson Katz, a filmmaker and author who has written about the politics of masculinity. He said the president occupies a role tied to the national identity in traditionally masculine ways – the commander of U.S. military forces, and the head of the first family, complicating the path for any woman trying to break the mold.

Katz credited Harris with cracking one part of the conundrum women face seeking to lead in the United States: the need to project both strength and likability. It’s “one of the things she’s been able to do perhaps better than any woman ever in American politics at this level,” Katz said, citing Harris’s ability to come across as friendly, caring and willing to laugh at herself – without giving any ground to her opponent.

Harris’s defeat could have profound consequences for future contests, some experts said. Diana O’Brien, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, worries that Trump’s victories over Clinton and Harris could lead to Democrats “convincing themselves that women cannot win,” she said. The attitude becomes, “We’ve tried this twice, and it doesn’t work.”

Ruth Simmons, 79, is the former president of Brown University, the first woman to lead the institution and the first Black person to lead an Ivy League school. She said Harris’s loss says less about the readiness of Americans to elect a woman than it does about their willingness to overlook Trump’s defects.

“My greatest concern is the country and the number of people who gave no care for the requirements of the highest office in the land,” Simmons said. The character of leaders matters, she said. “Our children are watching them. Our future depends on them. The peace of the world depends on their disposition.”

When it comes to talking about women – their abilities, their appearance, their roles – Trump “gets an F all the way around,” Simmons said.

Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory over Clinton defied most predictions, some younger women who voted for Harris said they were devastated but not surprised. Elizabeth Kandel, 29, was spending a semester abroad in Austria in 2016. After that race was called for Trump, she remembers stumbling around the streets of Vienna, weeping.

Now she’s angry and anxious about what a Trump presidency will bring but also resolute. She’s not yet 30, and she has seen two women emerge as major-party presidential candidates.

“I’m going to take that as a sign of progress,” Kandel said.

Shweta Parthasarathy, 22, was a high school freshman in 2016. At the time, she didn’t know much about politics but remembers not liking how she felt when Trump talked. “What stood out to me was his rhetoric on women,” Parthasarathy said. “Even though I knew he wasn’t speaking to me directly, I felt disrespected, that women as a general matter were being disrespected.”

Parthasarathy, whose parents are immigrants from India, grew up in a predominantly White town in New Jersey and was often the “other” in a room. The prospect of Harris – someone with whom she shares a background – rising to the presidency made her ecstatic, even if she was critical of some of her policies.

Now a law student in Philadelphia, Parthasarathy says Trump’s win is “crushing,” especially to someone entering the legal profession. “It’s hard to think that people still don’t see the damage he could do.”

When The Washington Post asked readers before the election what it would mean to them for a woman to become president – or alternately for a woman to lose the presidential election for the second time in eight years – it received hundreds of responses.

Some were from older women who remembered all too well the barriers they faced earlier in their lives: contraception available only to married couples; women unable to apply for credit cards in their own names; abortion illegal and dangerous.

Susan Maxman, 85, dropped out of college to get married. After her children were in school, she decided to study architecture. Physics was a required course; on the first day, the professor told her she would never pass because “women can’t do physics.” Maxman not only passed but went on to become the first woman president of the American Institute of Architects.

Harris is a “wonderful and extremely qualified woman,” Maxman said. Her loss is a “tremendous setback to the strides that we all have made through the many years of our struggle.”

Trump’s win may be an indication that his campaign managed to blunt the salience of reproductive rights, an issue that energized certain voters in three prior national elections, or at least keep it from being a top priority for most voters. Democrats had sought to turbocharge female turnout with ballot initiatives centered on access to abortion after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a watershed moment for which Trump took credit. But while abortion rights measures on Tuesday ballots were largely successful, the issue did not provide Harris with the boost she sought nationwide.

Katie Vos, 63, a conservative Republican and former nurse in Arizona, said that she was deeply angry when Roe fell. But as time went by, she came to see the 2022 Supreme Court ruling as giving each state the right to decide what to do, something in line with her preference for less interference by the federal government.

Talk by Democrats of nationwide restrictions on abortion was fearmongering, she said, even if Republicans have proposed that step in the past. “The Democrats keep saying that Trump will make a federal abortion ban,” Vos said. “I don’t believe that. … I don’t think there’s an avenue to get that done.”

Vos added that she would be “more than proud” to see a female president, but she hasn’t seen a candidate she thought was “truly capable.”

Penny Young Nance, the chief executive of Concerned Women for America, a major evangelical group founded in the 1970s, echoed that sentiment. Nance, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said she thinks the first woman to be elected president of the United States will be a Republican, someone akin to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, both famed for a steeliness that ran counter to gendered stereotypes.

Women “want someone who can be in a room with a dictator and stand up to them,” Nance said. Harris was not up to the job, she added, not because of her gender but because of “her personality, her manner, her ability to project gravitas.” Nance said it was a “lethal mistake” for Harris to obtain the nomination without even an abbreviated primary process to ensure she was her party’s best candidate.

Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, has spent her professional career studying women in elected office. Back when Walsh started at the center in 1981, there were just 21 women in the House of Representatives, almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Today there are 126, three-quarters of them Democrats.

Walsh found some aspects of the Trump-Harris contest “deeply disturbing,” including rhetoric from Trump allies casting him as an angry father who was going to spank an wayward daughter, or that referred to Harris’s “pimp handlers.”

Harris faced an “onslaught of misogynist, racist attacks, but she stood up to it,” Walsh said.

This isn’t the end for women running for president, Walsh added: “I can’t imagine there will be a race anymore where there won’t be a woman in the mix.”