This New York Times piece about the failure of female presidential candidates has some good, bad, and ugly parts. Despite the headline, it’s not as insane as you’d expect. It’s fair-ish, though you wouldn’t know if you didn’t get past the first few paragraphs. The Democratic Party is still reeling from its 2016 and 2024 losses, where twice the party has had female candidates that have lost to Donald J. Trump. The article goes through the usual motions about whether it was sexism and the like, which a great many Democrats still cling to despite Kamala Harris being one of the worst candidates in recent memory. Yet, it’s this line that made me recoil. It dealt with erasing the stigma of a female candidate if more ran (via NYT) [emphasis mine]:
The New York Times. pic.twitter.com/4leWljT5qk
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) December 26, 2024
Those candidates have been conservative and liberal, racially diverse, and from big cities, small towns and across the country. Some campaigned on an economic message, others focused on social issues. Only two — Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris, both Democrats — captured their party’s nomination.
Excuse me? Ms. Harris stole that nomination, fellas. Even your own Maureen Dowd called it a coup in the editorial section. No Democrat has ever voted for Kamala Harris in a Democratic primary. Second, the sexism narrative is the place of safe refuge but a false oasis as Harris had the lowest levels of female support in nearly a generation. The Times noted that this go-to coping mechanism could also be blinding Democrats to the serial flaws of the Harris operation:
For Democrats still scarred by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald J. Trump in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat at the hands of the same man in November has only deepened anxieties over gender bias and prompted a fresh round of debate over the electability of women to the nation’s highest office.
While few will say so aloud, some Democrats are already quietly hoping their party doesn’t nominate a woman in 2028, fearing she could not overcome an enduring hold of sexism on the American electorate. Many others anticipate another — perhaps even more aggressive — round of questions and doubts about female presidential candidates that have plagued the party for the better part of two decades..
“People feel pretty stung by what happened,” said Liz Shuler, the first woman elected to lead the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the largest federation of unions in the country, who supported Ms. Harris and believes she made no significant missteps in the race.
[…]
Yet to chalk Ms. Harris’s loss up to sexism alone — and to the idea that women are held to a higher standard when seeking the White House — could also be a way of minimizing campaign missteps.
[…]
Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, who won a tough re-election race against a male candidate in November, said she saw more traditional political factors playing a larger role in Ms. Harris’s defeat, noting that she heard “very little focus” on her gender or the barrier-breaking potential of her candidacy.
“This was a change election. People — if people are expressing that they’re concerned about the direction of the country, they’re not going to vote for the incumbent party,” she said. “It has much more to do with that than I think the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman.”
The results indicate that, yet again, voters were not particularly motivated by a desire for greater female representation. Despite the liberal hope that women would flock to her candidacy over issues like abortion rights, Ms. Harris won the lowest level of support from female voters of any Democratic nominee since 2004, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Democrats gambled and lost on abortion. It’s not the only issue, and female voters know that. They misread the Dobbs fallout. You saw that when they chortled over Kansas rejecting a right-to-life amendment to their constitution by an overwhelming margin while remaining oblivious to the fact that there is no state or federal funding, there are parental consent laws. Abortion is banned after 22 weeks except for the usual exceptions (life of the mother et al.).
Everything I just mentioned would make pro-aborts vomit, though it’s a window into how most of the country views this issue: legal, but with a host of restrictions. For sure, the Left will try to thread gun control into this debate with more restrictions on women’s health than gun purchases, but with Hunter Biden’s pardon and progressives cheering Luigi Mangione—the Left can take a seat for a while. They can sit down for the next four years because they lost.
Regarding Republicans, no woman has ever won the nomination for a national race, but there’s a bit of a wrinkle here: Donald J. Trump was running. Trump was going to bulldoze any candidate in the GOP field this year, so it will be interesting to see what comes next after the second Trump presidency. This bit was added after the article mentioned Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and former President Bill Clinton admitting that America will elect a female president someday. Still, it’ll likely be from the Republican Party.
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