It’s time to talk ‘electability’ again, apparently

President Joe Biden is still the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee three weeks after his faltering debate performance. But when pundits and political watchers raise the specter of replacing him, they are often, to mangle a favorite phrase of Vice President Kamala Harris, burdened by what has been.

Even as many names have been floated as possible Biden replacements, Harris has the clearest path to the top of the ballot — both because people have voted for her there before and because she would have access to the Biden-Harris campaign’s resources and fundraising war chest.

But in the still hypothetical world of Biden stepping aside, the country’s real history shapes the conversation. Such a decision would spark chaos in a way no political party wants this close to a national election, regardless of who would take Biden’s place. And when it comes to Harris, there’s an added question of whether America is ready to vote for a woman — even one who has served as vice president for three and a half years.

It’s a conversation shaped by gender and race and by the many men, all but one of them White, who have been president before.

That record is not an accident, said Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University and the director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP). Politics as a system was built to exclude women and people of color.

“When we have these discussions about electability, so much of it is just reinforcing, unfortunately, the original and intentional biases of these political institutions,” Dittmar said. “We have to be really careful about assuming that simply looking at the record, that it’s somehow an unbiased record, when we know that the gates to becoming a candidate are very much influenced by these norms, perceptions, and expectations of ‘appropriateness’ and ‘fitness.’”

Harris has broken a number of glass ceilings as the first woman or woman of color elected to her past offices: San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and U.S. senator from California. She made a name for herself with her sharp, prosecutorial questioning of Supreme Court nominees of then-President Donald Trump, now the GOP presidential nominee. But with a higher profile has come greater scrutiny and heightened political attacks.

Ann Fox, a voter who attended the rally Harris held Thursday in Fayetteville, North Carolina, lived in California when Harris was attorney general and is a strong supporter of the vice president. Women candidates, she argued, are often coached to have a softer and sometimes “syrupy” delivery — but Harris is a most effective orator when she leans into her prosecutorial skills.

Fox was still supporting Biden but said she would support Harris replacing Biden as the nominee if the polls “leaned her way.”

Most polls show both Biden and Harris trailing Trump. A CBS News/YouGov poll released Thursday showed Trump with a five-point edge over Biden and a three-point advantage over Harris among registered voters. Biden’s numbers have slipped in many polls since the June 27 debate.

The issue of Harris’ electability versus Trump is often whispered or hinted at, in questions about whether she could win over states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a kind of code for asking if White voters in key Rust Belt states would be willing to vote for a presidential candidate who doesn’t look like them.

Though Harris’ frequently repeated line “I can imagine what will be, unburdened by what has been” has become material for many Internet memes , Dittmar said that she sees its use as “strategically smart.”

“She’s trying to disrupt the electability conversation. She knows she has to take it head on. She’s saying in a very clear way that just because women haven’t ever won this office doesn’t mean we are not electable,” Dittmar said.

It’s why many political scientists and grassroots organizers alike cringe at the very word “electability,” one that has often been deployed against women candidates, including the only woman to ever be a major party’s presidential pick.

“‘Electability’ is always a stand-in for sexism in this country, full stop,” echoed Taylor Salditch, who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and is now the executive director of Supermajority, a progressive grassroots organization focused on building up the voting bloc of 18- to 35-year-old women.

Salditch said younger, multiracial women voters often comment that they sit out elections in large part because they do not see themselves reflected in the leaders available to them. The relevance of that lack of representation is reflected in recent polling from the Supermajority Education Fund that found almost four in five young women who aren’t regular voters think more diverse leadership — including better representation of women of color — would help fix the problems currently facing the country.

“We’re looking at the wrong denominator when it comes to electability,” Salditch said. “We don’t have a statistically significant sample size of this yet. A woman has been the nominee for president once. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Christina Reynolds, who also worked for Clinton and is now the senior vice president of communications and content at EMILY’s List, which backs women in politics who support abortion rights, pointed out that Clinton bested Trump in the popular vote in 2016 even as she lost the election.

“I think to argue that that means in America, who has had one woman be the nominee from her party ever, a woman cannot be elected president? No,” Reynolds said. “I always like to point out that significantly more men have lost presidential races than women and we don’t say that they’re not electable.”

That said, people’s perceptions about electability are also largely shaped by their understanding who has previously held elected office. “You can see a White man as electable because that’s who we elect the most,” Reynolds said.

Dittmar added that oftentimes in American politics, being a woman or a person from a historically marginalized racial or ethnic group is automatically assumed to be a disadvantage — and a double disadvantage for a candidate who holds both these identities. But political science research says something else.

“I do think part of why some folks are changing their tune on Kamala Harris is being able to see that there are other ways in which these identities can also bring electoral advantages — and substantial policy advantages once these candidates are elected,” Dittmar said. “Let’s also think about the strategic ways in which they can bring together particular coalitions of voters because of their community connections or their identity-based relationships.”

One group that Harris is routinely heralded as performing well with are Black women ; Harris herself attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the country’s oldest Black sorority.

That doesn’t mean Harris would automatically get their vote, said Ayana Best, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University who focuses on race and gender in American politics, but she would offer Black women something no other presidential nominee has before.

“She does descriptively represent them and in that way, she will be more electable on an electability scale for Black women than she would be for any other group,” Best said. “I know that Black women will support her more than anybody else — but will that be enough to get her elected one day? I don’t know.”

Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an independent, Black-led grassroots organization that works to engage Black voters, sees the moment as ripe for Harris to reach voters. Americans right now are most concerned about the potential impact of policy on their lives, she said, and Harris’ history of speaking about reproductive rights, voting rights and economic opportunity can boost her.

“People have very specific things they can point to right now: the loss of voting rights, the loss of reproductive rights, the loss of affirmative action, the loss of access to opportunity. On all of those issues, she’s been very forceful ,” Shropshire said. “She’s talked about not just why it’s wrong, but about what we can do to make sure we are shoring up the rights we should have in a democracy. She’s talked about specific policy stuff, what a second term of the administration addresses — and people hear that.”

Abortion specifically could prove to be a critical factor this year, Reynolds stressed. Harris’ professional history is a boon: Her background as a prosecutor committed to protecting the safety of women and girls has combined with her knowledge of constitutional law to make a clear messenger for the abortion rights side. She has devoted ample time to being on the road and in front of American voters since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, making the case that the loss of abortion access is loss of freedom.

“Harris can definitely do the policy and she can definitely do the details — but what she has done with abortion is really drill down on why it is so powerful an issue. And that is that she says, ‘They want to take your freedom away and here’s why that matters.’”

Those who have worked closely with Harris say she is someone whose family background and personal identity, the same factors oft weaponized by her opponents, have absolutely informed her leadership.

“After the Dobbs decision, I remember sitting in her office in the West Wing while she charted the path forward to protect reproductive rights, and I felt so lucky — as a woman in this country — that we had Kamala Harris fighting for us,” Rachel Palermo, former deputy communications director and associate counsel to Vice President Harris, told The 19th.

“When you’re the first, that comes with a magnifying glass — you are unfairly scrutinized and held to a different standard. Throughout my time working for Vice President Harris, I observed people criticize her in a way that was baseless and laced with racism and sexism,” Palermo said. “But the vice president is undeterred and tunes out the noise.”

Shropshire said that in BlackPAC’s focus groups, voters said that the number one threat to the Black community today is Trump — they named him specifically above things like white supremacy, economic challenges, or educational opportunity.

This dynamic speaks to something else that Dittmar said might in fact make Harris very electable: “It’s hard to remember a time ever when the opposing party has spent more time attacking the vice president than [Trump] has with her.” It’s not coincidental that Republicans and Trump, whose appeals to racism and sexism were core to his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, are making Harris the face of the opposition.

But that could play to her advantage in a general election, Dittmar said, noting that if Harris ever were to become the nominee, she would expect her favorability ratings to go up from where they are today — the opposite of what usually happens once a person becomes a party’s nominee.

Ken Slankard, a veteran who attended the Tuesday rally in Fayetteville, noted that he was still firmly behind Biden but believed Harris would prove a formidable opponent to Trump.

“She’d wipe the floor with him,” he said.

“Because she’s already been the subject of all of these attacks, you might not see as big of a dip in favorability as you would should someone else become the candidate, even if it were a White man, like Gavin Newsom,” Dittmar said, pointing to the governor of California, whose name has been mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate.

Sharyl Grant, a voter and Biden supporter who attended Harris’ Fayetteville rally, said she didn’t think Clinton’s loss eight years ago means Harris couldn’t beat Trump now.

“Things are precarious and toxic,” Grant said. “All the old rules and expectations are out the window.”

Beyond the issues though, Shropshire also sees in Harris someone who operates as an “aspirational figure” in American politics.

“She’s the embodiment in some ways of what it means to be American, to look at a person and not start talking about ‘electability’ but saying, ‘They embody what we believe is possible in America — that we can be a mutiracial democracy, led by leaders that represent the idea of a multiracial democracy.’” she said.

Black women were well-represented among the crowd of those who came to see Harris speak in Fayetteville. Alda Midgette, a social worker, said she believed Harris would have “a great chance” at winning despite the barriers for women of color on the national stage.

“She gives us possibilities. She brings us hope,” she said. “And we may need to put her in.”