“Are we ready in 2020? I really don’t think we are,” said Cusack, 75, a former Democratic National Committee member from Florida. Too many Americans may not want to “take another chance” on a female candidate, Cusack said, after Hillary Clinton was met with mistrust and even hostility in swing states.
But Andy McGuire, former chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, sees a different reality after a record number of Democratic women won races in the 2018 midterms. “I’d go back to this last election — who won?” said McGuire, who, as a superdelegate like Cusack, supported Clinton at the 2016 convention. “Who had the excitement? Who had all the volunteers and power behind them? It was women.”
As the 2020 primary competition gets underway with Elizabeth Warren’s entry into the race, and with several other women likely to be early contenders, two competing narratives have emerged about the possibility of another woman leading the Democratic ticket, interviews with more than three dozen party officials, voters and pollsters showed.
The year of the woman and the midterm gains that followed electrified Democrats, who have eagerly promoted themselves as the party of diversity. That success has inspired some of the most powerful women in politics to consider running for president. And it has boosted expectations that the political calculus for women has changed in the past two years, and that gender could become an asset, even in a presidential contest. Clinton, after all, won the popular vote by almost 3 million.
Yet at a time of ascendancy for women in the party, there’s a lingering doubt in some quarters about whether there is a risk involved in nominating a woman to take on President Donald Trump, whom Democrats fervently want to unseat.
The specter of Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still haunts some Democratic officials, voters and activists. There is widespread recognition that women in politics are held to a different standard than men on qualities like likability, and toughness, and that voters have traditionally been more reluctant to elect women as executives than as legislators.
Some women see bias in the excitement surrounding a potential presidential run by Beto O’Rourke, the Texan who energized the left in a losing Senate bid, while Stacey Abrams is not mentioned as a possibility even though she had a much narrower loss for governor of Georgia.
“There’s a real tension,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former policy adviser to Clinton. “On one hand, women are leading the resistance and deserve representation. But on the other side, there’s a fear that if misogyny beat Clinton, it can beat other women.”
Much of the debate is grounded in the question of whether Clinton’s loss represented a rejection of women as president, or of one specific woman. How significant a role sexism played in Clinton’s defeat is difficult to separate from the other liabilities that hindered her campaign. Clinton struggled to deal with decades of political baggage and a Republican attack machine that cast her as aloof, elitist and disconnected. Her reliance on a tight-knit inner circle isolated her from tough political challenges, and she struggled to win over working class white women and men.
If Democrats nominate a woman in 2020, she will most likely face an onslaught of gender-based attacks from Trump, who did not hesitate in 2016 to mock the physical appearance and stamina of his female opponents. As the Republican nominee Trump carried more vulnerabilities on gender than any other modern candidate, facing allegations of sexual assault and harassment and having a record of lewd comments about women.
Still, exit polls indicated that a majority of white women voted for Trump, helping him seal crucial Electoral College victories in traditionally Democratic states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
As Democrats look toward 2020, the conversation is particularly relevant because the 2020 primary season could prove to be as historic as the 2008 and 2016 races; in those years, Clinton became the first woman to become a top-tier candidate and then a nominee.
For the first time, multiple women may be serious contenders: Warren is in, and Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota are seriously considering running. A female front-runner would become a norm if a woman wins the nomination four years after Clinton did.
Women’s political mobilization — as volunteers, candidates and donors — fueled the Democratic Party’s gains in the November elections, and Democrats still far outpace Republicans in elevating women to party leadership and representation in Congress. Female politicians now head all four of the Democrats’ campaign committees.
Regardless of whether a woman wins the nomination, the presence of new, multiple female faces in the race could help the party move past a set of political expectations for women largely defined by Clinton for decades. Already, comparisons to Clinton have been unavoidable for the female 2020 contenders, even though they have little in common other than their gender and party.
“It is very hard, when you only have that one woman who’s tread that ground,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of the abortion-rights organization NARAL. “Everything about that individual becomes conflated with being a woman.”
The rawness of the topic was evident in the furor that broke out this week over Warren’s relatively low likability ratings. Research has found that it is much harder for female candidates to be rated as “likable” than men — and that they are disproportionately punished for traits voters accept in male politicians, including ambition and aggression. “Likability is totally framed by gender,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster and expert on women’s votes.
Pushing back, Warren tweeted a video of herself on a train with the acid comment: “I hear women candidates are most likable in the quiet car!”
Yet for others, Clinton’s loss sounded some notes of caution.
“During the campaign, I was shocked over and over and over again to see the type of attacks toward very strong, knowledgeable women,” said Isabel Farmer, a superdelegate from Ohio who received phone threats after backing Clinton in 2016. “Maybe I’m still traumatized by that.”
Some voters acknowledged the higher standard applied to female candidates but said that was not a reason to abandon the pursuit of the White House.
“I think right now there’s still not going to be a female president, unfortunately,” Jessica Nusbaum, of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, said as she walked through a mall in suburban Philadelphia. “Right now I think we kind of — not regressed, but looked to the past.” But she added, “Women should still run, even if they keep failing.”
Patricia McAuley, a Democrat from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, agreed. “I do believe they’re held to a different standard,” she said, adding: “But could a woman win? Yes, and it’s high time.”
To those still reeling from the 2016 loss, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton’s running mate, had a blunt message: “Get over it and use 2017 and 2018 as the evidence that the pathogen has left the body.”
Rather than a liability, several Democrats believe that having women run could be a galvanizing force in the presidential race, as it was in the midterms, when female candidates changed the playbook for how women run for office. Many campaigned with their young children and made their personal stories central to their message. They were not afraid to challenge incumbents.
Those campaigns, and the prospect of multiple female candidates, may change how women are treated in the presidential race.
“When you have two women running, the question becomes, what are you going to fight for, what do you believe in — not what are you going to do with your children, how do you get your hair to stay like that all day,” said Rep. Katie Porter, who defeated a female Republican incumbent to flip her California congressional seat in November.
Lake, the Democratic pollster, pointed to women’s high turnout rates in primaries, and to their success in championing issues like health care and education, which could continue to resonate in a presidential race. Those topics, along with immigration and income inequality, are likely to form the base of a national message for the nominee.
And she noted that many of the states with early presidential primaries or caucuses have had women as governors or senators, suggesting that those voters had no reluctance about electing women. These include the former Democratic governor of New Hampshire; Democratic senators in New Hampshire, Nevada and California; the Republican governor of Iowa; and the former governor of South Carolina.
As Democrats prepare for a crowded primary field, there are other considerations that have nothing to do with gender, but rather the party’s divisions over ideology and geography. Some are focusing on reversing Electoral College losses in the Midwest and argue a centrist from the region, male or female, might have broader appeal; others believe only progressives can fire up the party base. Harris, Gillibrand and Warren are based on the coasts and have allied themselves with the party’s left.
However gender plays out in this election, many Democrats say it’s impossible to imagine a future presidential field without women who are serious contenders — on both sides of the aisle.
“It is more likely than not that you will have women running for president in both parties,” said Kathy Sullivan, a longtime Democratic National Committee member and former state party chairwoman in New Hampshire. “Women will continue to run and at some point, hopefully before my untimely demise, a woman will be elected president.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.