Is America ready for our first woman president? Why Harris' biggest obstacle is gender.
Is 2024 the year a woman will be elected president of the United States? A majority say America is ready for a woman president, but will it finally happen? People have doubts.
Last year, 1 in 4 American adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center said it is extremely or very likely they will see a woman president in their lifetime. Of course, last year’s thought experiment has turned into a real-life contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Harris is not only a woman, but she is also of Jamaican and Indian descent. The question becomes: Is America ready not only for a woman, but for a woman of color to serve as president?
The hurdles are seen as significantly higher for Black women than for white women, according to a Pew Research survey. Many a think piece has been devoted to the idea that our first woman president would be a white Republican woman, but that opportunity for 2024 was extinguished with Nikki Haley’s primary loss to Trump.
Instead, the possibility exists for a biracial Democratic woman to break that final gender barrier, but it won’t be easy.
We’ve studied attitudes toward women candidates for decades and are honored to be the pollsters behind much of the ground-breaking research on this topic conducted by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. This research has covered a wide range of themes, including – how women candidates can rebound from a loss, demonstrate competency in a crisis, run for the top job as the second in command, and how to address many of the implicit and explicit expectations put on women candidates.
Women politicians are held to higher standard than men
Simply put, women have to do more than men to prove they are qualified and are held to a higher standard of likability.
If a woman candidate doesn’t have children, she might be subject to criticism that she is a “childless cat lady,” but if she has young children at home, she will face questions about her ability to manage both her family and her job.
If you have ever noticed that Harris has a uniform similar in style to the Hillary Clinton pantsuit, it is because women don’t have the luxury of looking like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., with mittens. Voters expect women to be pulled together on the campaign trail and in office.
Sanders can get away with more than mittens. Some voters find his aura of curmudgeon core to his appeal. That doesn’t work for women; voters need to find women candidates likable.
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In focus groups, one of the kiss-of-death comments we would hear about Clinton – often from women – was that the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was “smart.” Then there would be a pause, and what would be implied or sometimes said outright was that she wasn’t relatable or likable. Opponents often try to take likability away from a woman.
The Trump campaign’s early assault on Harris’ laugh as a point of ridicule largely missed the mark, although more personal attacks can be expected from a GOP presidential nominee who seems to revel in them. How she reacts will be key.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was highly attuned to the need to not come off as an “angry Black man,” and this is something that undoubtedly is on the minds of the Harris campaign. Black women – even more than white women – walk a tightrope with voters when it comes to expressing anger.
That could be why when Trump said recently that Harris just “happened to turn Black,” the vice president came out with an even-keeled response focused on the larger picture and not herself: "The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts."
Kamala Harris needs to show what she has accomplished
More than anything, though, Harris will need to demonstrate that she has the qualifications to be president and to show tangible evidence of what she delivered. Before coming to Washington, D.C., she was California's attorney general, and her record has tested well with voters.
We have been a little taken aback by the number of voters who say to us, “What has she done?” It feels like this question is coming up more for Harris because she is a woman. What do they think the men have done as vice president?
Republicans keep missing opportunties.Trump needs to go after Harris on policy.
We know a woman presidential candidate has to prove she has a good economic plan. In the Barbara Lee Family Foundation work, voters had more doubts about Democratic women candidates on the economy. Women need to include explicit communication about economic policies and benefit more from economic validators than men.
In our research examining how a female lieutenant governor could successfully run for governor in her state, we found that voters wanted to hear what she had achieved and what problems she had solved independently from the governor. They needed to see her leadership abilities, not just her ability to stand in for or help the governor with their goals.
It will be important for Harris to identify things she has owned and successfully championed apart from President Joe Biden. She took on a more prominent role in speaking out for abortion rights after Roe v. Wade was overruled, and she appears more comfortable than Biden asserting a leading role for restoring abortion rights.
Harris was highly visible during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington in late July, undoubtedly to address questions about her ability to manage foreign relations as commander in chief.
And while Trump has said that if Harris is elected, she would be a “play toy” to world leaders, a majority of voters disagree that a president’s gender would affect the world’s respect for the United States.
Americans haven’t seen a woman in the role of commander in chief, which makes it more difficult for them to visualize – something the Barbara Lee Foundation refers to as “the imagination barrier.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came close in 2016 and, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, “Sometimes you have to fight a battle more than once to win.”
Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, was one of two lead pollsters for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. She also is a pollster for the Democratic National Committee. Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research, is a leading public opinion pollster known for her understanding of swing voters, particularly women.