How will sexism impact Harris's presidential campaign?
With Vice President Kamala Harris now the expected Democratic nominee for president, she'll be the second woman, and first woman of color, to receive a major political party's nomination for president in the United States. And while Democrats' elevation of Harris since President Joe Biden's exit from the race has been largely smooth, the early reaction from the Republican Party suggests that Harris's gender (and race) may be central to their criticisms. There's certainly a history of gender being leveraged to undermine women in politics, but recent years have seen significant progress in normalizing women's success at high levels. With that in mind, Harris's campaign could tell us to what extent those types of criticisms still hold weight, and to what extent they could backfire.
The 'electability' trap
Attitudes about women in American politics have evolved a lot over the last 70 years. In 1958, just 54 percent of respondents said they would vote for a well-qualified woman to become president, according to Gallup. In January 2024, 93 percent said the same. That support is higher among Democrats; 99 percent of Democrats compared with 87 percent of Republicans said they would vote for a woman. (Independents fell in the middle, at 93 percent.) Of course, Gallup doesn't ask the same question about male presidential candidates.
Attitudes about people of color in American politics have evolved, too. For example, in 1958, just 38 percent of respondents said they would vote for a Black presidential candidate, compared with 92 percent in 2024. Again, Democratic support is higher than Republican (96 percent compared with 88 percent, respectively). Gallup doesn't ask this question specifically about women of color, Asian candidates, or white candidates. (It more recently began asking about "Hispanic" candidates — 93 percent of respondents said they would support in 2024).
Overall, support for a female or Black candidate has been fairly consistent since around 2000, and the partisan split is limited in this hypothetical, with Democrats modestly more open to supporting women and nonwhite candidates. But other polling shows Democrats are particularly enthusiastic about electing a female president. A 2018 poll by Pew found 63 percent of Democrats said that they "personally hope the United States will elect a female president in their lifetime," compared to just 24 percent of Republicans. And according to a new AP/NORC poll, a majority of Democrats say electing a woman or person of color would be a "good thing" (70 percent and 61 percent, respectively), while the majority of Republicans say it doesn't matter (68 percent and 78 percent, respectively); 15 percent of Republicans and virtually no Democrats say it would be a "bad thing" to elect a female president.
Of course, to have the opportunity to vote for female candidates, or candidates of color, Americans have to nominate these candidates through party primaries. In the 2020 primaries, Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in 2016 seemed to loom large in many Democrats' minds — studies have shown that sexism motivated voters' choice at the ballot box and negatively impacted Clinton's vote share in the 2016 general election. This probably helps explain why, despite expressed support for an abstract female or Black candidate, the 2020 primary saw Democrats seemingly balk at nominating someone with either (or both) identities. While a 2019 YouGov/CBS News poll showed Democrats preferred a woman or a person of color as their party's presidential nominee, the party ultimately went with the "safe" pick in Biden (and Sen. Bernie Sanders was his closest rival).
These statistics point to the fact that some Americans may not support female candidates or candidates of color not because of overt sexism and racism or even implicit bias, but because of more complicated fears about whether candidates with these identities can win. This is a concept known as "strategic discrimination," which explains that women and people of color are underrepresented in U.S. politics because voters hesitate to support nonwhite, nonmale candidates based on concerns about whether other voters will support them. Of particular note for Harris's candidacy, the linked paper found Black women to be perceived as less electable than either white women or Black men, demonstrating the unique challenge she faces as a candidate with multiple marginalized identities.
Another study found Democrats in the 2020 primary rated women and people of color as less "electable" than their white, male counterparts despite more often being the preferred candidate in a hypothetical matchup. And in 2019, a poll by LeanIn.org found that among Democrats, 58 percent said that it would be at least slightly harder for a woman to win against Trump as opposed to a male candidate. In that same poll, 53 percent said they were very or extremely ready for a woman president — a near-identical number to that in a YouGov/Economist poll last month — but far fewer, 16 percent, thought "most Americans" were very or extremely ready.
One reason Biden selected Harris as his running mate was an effort to appeal to Democrats' demand for a ticket that represented an increasingly diverse party. But with Harris now making her own choice for VP — almost all of the names that have been floated are white men — it's clear that electability concerns remain a key factor here. A July 19-21 YouGov poll found Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents still think members of the party would be less likely to support a woman for president, compared to a man, especially if her running mate was also a woman. And according to a 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll fielded July 22-24, 40 percent of respondents think Harris will have a better chance of winning with a white male running mate, while 42 percent think that choosing a woman would have a negative impact on her campaign (just 16 percent believe it would have a positive impact).
Will Harris neutralize gendered and racialized attacks?
Political opponents have long exploited voters' skepticism about women and people of color in politics, and Harris's identity as a multiracial woman inevitably means voters' attitudes about gender, race and their intersection will come into play in this election, whether or not they are directly invoked by her opponents … But even at this early point in her candidacy, they are. Renewing an attack they've made throughout her vice presidency, Republicans have called Harris a "DEI candidate," a label that stokes racial resentment by suggesting that success by minority individuals is not earned, or even comes at the expense of others. Other conservative commentators have suggested that Harris "slept her way to the top," a trope that also reflects sexualized stereotypes about women in politics, especially women of color.
Vice presidential candidate JD Vance's attacks on Harris as a longtime politician — "What the hell have you done other than collect a government check for the last 20 years?" he asked at a rally recently — evoke the Welfare Queen trope, which dates back to the 1970s and demonizes single women (especially single Black women) who receive government assistance. And Vance has attacked Harris using more direct gendered tropes as well: In a resurfaced clip from 2021, Vance questions Harris's leadership capacity by referring to her (and other Democratic leaders) as "childless cat ladies," using this language to question their stake in the country's future. (Harris is a mother to two stepchildren, one of whom took to social media to defend her against the caricature.)
Still, there is some reason to think that the effectiveness of racialized and gendered criticism could be stunted this cycle. For one, there's been a stark partisan sorting when it comes to attitudes that tap into racism and sexism since 2016. Research shows that racial resentment among white Americans toward Black Americans has remained stable since the '80s, but these attitudes are now more closely correlated with political beliefs and partisanship. Similarly, beliefs about women in the workplace are increasingly polarized along partisan lines. In other words, these beliefs are largely already baked into partisanship, meaning that those likely to be dissuaded from supporting a candidate like Harris based on her race or gender were already unlikely to vote for any Democrat in the first place.
Moreover, women have made considerable gains in American politics since 2016. In the 2018 midterms, women's win rate in Democratic primaries was double that of men's, and 60 percent of the congressional seats flipped by Democrats in that cycle were won by women. It's not just true of Democratic women, either: In 2020, Republican women were similarly responsible for most of the congressional seats their party flipped. And of course, Harris was elected as the country's first female vice president in 2020. Outcomes like these challenge the notion that women aren't electable.
In fact, in each of those election cycles, female candidates arguably had some electoral advantages. In the wake of Trump's election, the historic Women's March and the growing #MeToo movement brought renewed attention to women's issues, which prompted more Democratic women to run for office — and may have helped Democrats at large by mobilizing young and female voters. Then in 2020, Republicans adopted a concerted strategy to recruit women (and people of color) to their candidate pool, as Republican women, motivated by resentment toward the progressive women's movement sparked by Trump's election, ran on a conservative counter-narrative to what they believed was a misrepresentation of women's interests — a pitch that would've been less sincere coming from GOP men.
And when it comes to the highest office, Nikki Haley made a convincing electability argument in this cycle's Republican primary. "My view is that Clinton's 2016 campaign went a long way toward normalizing a woman presidential candidate, and perhaps even a president," said Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at Notre Dame who studies gender and role model effects in American politics. "Multiple women ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, several of whom were considered credible competitors, and Nikki Haley outlasted everyone except Trump on the Republican side this year. Certainly the fact that these candidates were women did not go unremarked, but it did not seem to be as central to coverage as it had been in 2016."
Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, Democrats have banked on abortion as a winning issue that would drive their voters to the polls, but while Biden appeared to be losing some of this support, Harris could refocus the race around abortion rights to her advantage. As Wolbrecht put it, "talking about reproductive rights comes much easier to Harris than it does to Biden, so we can expect that issue to be even more central to her campaign than it was to Biden's." This is all the more true for Harris because women are viewed as more adept at handling health care and social policy issues more generally.
Harris is also likely be perceived as more liberal than Biden would have been because of her gender — and while that's a potential pitfall in a general election, it could also give her more room to play both sides by pivoting to the center on certain issues, such as leaning into her background as a prosecutor to counter the "soft on crime" attacks that tend to dog both Democrats and women. (Notably, that tightrope is narrower for a woman of color, as Black women are penalized more than white women for using "dominant" language.)
Still, a Democratic ticket with Harris at the top presents a strong contrast to this year's GOP ticket on the basis of gender alone. The GOP convention doubled down on the "tough guy" Trump persona, as did his choice of running mate, given Vance's history of emphasizing male victimhood and gender traditionalism. In fact, Trump's campaign thus far has seemed to endorse a strategy meant to energize and attract male voters, including by making inroads among men of color, even if it could alienate some female voters. Trump surrogate Rep. Matt Gaetz laid out this strategy bluntly in January, saying, "for every Karen we lose, there's a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement." Some prominent Republicans, including party leaders and Haley, have already expressed concern about these race- and gender-based lines of attack, worried that the approach could backfire.
For Democrats, countering these attacks by explicitly characterizing them as sexist or racist can also be fraught, but Harris's campaign and surrogates may have found a more effective counter, one that turns gendered attacks back on Trump and Vance: They've recently started characterizing the Republican ticket as "weird," particularly in reference to their gendered language and stances on women's issues. "These guys are just weird. They're running for, like, 'He-Man Women Hater's Club' or something," Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said.
And Trump and Vance have taken the bait, also using "weird" to describe Harris's positions on climate and immigration. As Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley put it, "The classic maneuver when your opponent has a good position is to shift the battle to new terrain. So, 'they're weird' is not only more accessible, but potentially redefines the contest to 'normal vs not normal.'" And in so doing, gendered and racialized criticism could be rendered less relevant.
***
It's still early, but polling certainly suggests that Harris is a "viable" candidate — she's been polling neck-and-neck with Trump, with similar levels of support as Biden, for whom a big selling point was his palatability to a wide coalition of voters and his ability to beat Trump. Whether or not Harris becomes the first female president of the United States, her status as a major party nominee, and the gendered and racialized attacks already invoked by her opponents, mean the campaign will certainly expose attitudes about women, race and politics in America.
