Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Women won more than half of Team USA’s medals at the Olympics, only 33 Fortune 500 companies sponsor women's pro sports, and Kamala Harris would be the first female president—but she's talking about other issues on the campaign trail. Have a lovely Tuesday.
- First report. Kamala Harris would be the first female president—voters know it, and she knows it. It's obvious. Is it so obvious she doesn't feel the need to talk about it?
As I've watched Harris's short campaign so far, that's a question I've been asking. With memories of Hillary Clinton's 2016 #ImWithHer , I've wondered whether Harris is running on the history-making nature of her candidacy in the same way Clinton did, with her slogan, white pantsuits, and election-night glass ceiling at the Javits Center. Nadia Brown, a professor of government and chair of the women's and gender studies program at Georgetown University, explains: "What we're seeing from Harris's campaign is an acknowledgement that it's there, but it's not something that she's always talking about—because everyone else is aware," that this is a historic race, she says.
When Clinton ran in 2016, a woman as the general election major party nominee was still a novelty to voters. Harris benefits from the fact that voters have seen this before. "There's a playbook for running for president that she has, that Hillary Clinton did not have," says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics. Voters have also seen sexism and racism in national politics before—including from Donald Trump—and are savvier about it, Walsh says.
Harris's campaign started amid chaos, so there were factors of her identity other than her gender that rose to the top of the conversation, including her relative youth in comparison to President Joe Biden. In addition, she has other history-making aspects to her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, so the "firsts" she would achieve are a broader conversation than only "first female."
Most crucially, Harris seems to understand a shift in what voters expect. "Voters are moving on from voting because of a historic first," says Brown. "Voters are more interested in thinking about how this person's historic first fits into the policies that they care about." We've seen this from Harris in her campaigning on the issue of reproductive rights. With Roe v. Wade overturned (which was of course not the case in 2016), abortion is a key issue for Democratic voters. As vice president, Harris served as the Biden administration's key voice on reproductive rights and she's continued that on the campaign trail. She's tapped into her intersecting identities, too, to connect with Black and Asian voters .
Looking back even further to 2008, Harris's candidacy could represent a move to the center on the "first female" question. If Clinton purposefully avoided being seen as a "female candidate" in the 2008 Democratic primary and ran on it in 2016, Harris seems to fall somewhere in the middle.
Some things haven't changed since 2016, including the GOP opponent (see recent reports that Trump has called Harris a "bitch" in private). Compared to Clinton, Harris has an eight-year head start on better understanding the political appeal of Trump and effective ways to respond to him.
The Democratic National Convention, set for next week, could see Democrats lean more into Harris's history-making candidacy. So far, Harris's identity is exciting a subset of voters, but it's not the entirety of her candidacy. And that may be a lesson learned for Democrats—that achieving a "first" in the Oval Office is historic and important, but not enough on its own to get there.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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