A Lot Has Changed for Women Since 2016. What Does That Mean for Kamala Harris?

MIAMI — In the eight years since Hillary Clinton failed to win the U.S. presidency, the workforce for the first time grew to include more college-educated women than college-educated men. The #MeToo movement exposed sexual harassment and toppled powerful men. The Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Will any — or all — of it make a difference for Vice President Kamala Harris?

Harris seems almost certain to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection. As such, she faces, fairly or not, some of the same electability questions that Clinton confronted in a nation that, unlike many of its peers around the globe, has yet to pick a woman as its leader.

A presidential contest pitting Harris against former President Donald Trump would represent a rematch of sorts: Trump would again have to run against a woman who held a top administration position and served in the Senate. He defeated Clinton in 2016 despite her winning the popular vote by a wide margin.

But the dynamics would be unquestionably different. Harris has neither the political legacy nor the baggage of Clinton. Trump, having served a turbulent term in office, is now a known quantity. Harris is Black and of South Asian descent.

And the country is not the same as it was eight long years ago.

“Women are angrier, and that could be motivating,” said Karen Crowley, 64, an independent voter and retired nurse in Concord, New Hampshire, who would not vote for Trump, did not feel like she could support Biden and now planned to back Harris.

Among the motivations Crowley cited were the demise of Roe v. Wade and comments and actions by Trump that many women see as sexist and misogynistic. “A woman president might be more possible now,” she said.

But for female voters and activists eager to break that elusive glass ceiling, there was also fear that sexism would remain difficult for Harris to overcome.

“It’s a patriarchy out there,” Crowley said. “She’s smart and she’s a prosecutor, but there are a lot of old white men who will want to stop her. The only thing wrong with her is that she’s a woman.”

Discussing the gender of a politician can feel reductive and regressive, especially when it does not seem as relevant in other countries. The United Kingdom has had three female prime ministers. Mexico elected its first female president this year.

Yet, when a woman runs for office in the United States, many voters still mention her gender unprompted in interviews, identifying it as a concern — often not for themselves, they say, but for the wider electorate.

Julia Blake, 80, of La Jolla, California, said she had spent a lot of time arguing with her book-club friends about whether a woman could be elected president. One after the next — professional women, with doctorates and master’s degrees — they said they thought the answer was no. Blake was indignant with them.

“I said, ‘If women think a woman can’t win, and they repeat that year after year, we will never get a female president,’” said Blake, who supported Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and also donated to Harris during the Democratic primary in 2020. “I don’t think they’re giving women enough credit.”

To be sure, party affiliation, not gender, remains most important for many voters. “I would not vote for her,” said Naomi Villalba, 74, a Republican from Dallas who supports Trump but thinks Harris is a better choice for Democrats than Biden.

Biden won 55% of the female vote in 2020, compared with Clinton’s 54% in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump’s support among women grew slightly to 44% in 2020, up from 39% in 2016.

The prospect of having Harris atop the Democratic ticket energized some voters looking to elect a female president. But it also resurfaced old fears about the fact that Trump had lost to a man (Biden) but defeated a woman (Clinton).

Though ultimately not successful, Clinton’s candidacy did change the idea of what was possible, said Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who studies women’s voting patterns. Klobuchar and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., were taken seriously as candidates during the 2020 election, as was former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, who challenged Trump this year.

“That suggests to me that post-Hillary Clinton, people are increasingly comfortable with the idea of a woman president,” Wolbrecht said.

Forty-two percent of women felt it was at least somewhat important to elect a woman as president in their lifetime, according to a Pew Research Center report last year. In the poll, 39% of respondents, both male and female, said a female president would be better at working out compromises, and 37% said a woman would be better at maintaining a respectful tone in politics. (More than half said that gender did not matter on those measures.)

Harris appears to have a special bond with Black women in particular, who comprise a key part of the Democratic base and have been especially enthusiastic in their past support for her.

Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson, director for the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said much had changed for women since 2016. Concerns over Trump’s positions on issues such as abortion transformed from remote possibility to concrete reality after he took office, she said.

“When he was elected, we were disappointed, we were upset — there were marches, demonstrations, all kinds of things — and we had a good idea what was going to happen,” Nsiah-Jefferson said. “But now we know what happened.”

Trump has already signaled that he considers his gender worth highlighting: At one point during the Republican National Convention last week, he walked out to “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” by James Brown.

But Nsiah-Jefferson thinks Harris will also lean in to the fact that she is a woman. “She’s going to talk about the way in which politics and policy impacts on women,” she said.

Some voters would like to lose the gender talk altogether.

“We have to take the emphasis off the gender identification stuff and put it on the person themselves and their own abilities,” said Marilyn McDole of Oregon, Wisconsin, who attended a weekend reelection rally in Stoughton, Wisconsin, for Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat. “Because that’s so stigmatizing and damaging to women. That’s not fair.”

Harris, McDole added, has “got experience up the wazoo.”

Several Democratic voters, however, said that a female nominee would help amplify perhaps the party’s strongest issue: abortion access.

Katy Sorenson, 69, a former commissioner in Miami-Dade County, Florida, said the overturning of Roe had been a “galvanizing phenomenon.” “It’s not just abortion; it’s problem pregnancies that have so many women concerned about what they’re going to do, and can they get the health care they need,” she said.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, Mary Lucas, 36, said Harris gave her new motivation to campaign. “My immediate reaction is ‘How do I get involved?,’” Lucas said.

Women also pointed to societal shifts that might make Harris’ run different. Dr. Liz Bradt, 64, a retired veterinarian and chair of the Salem Democratic City Committee in Salem, Massachusetts, said younger people seemed less likely to make judgments based on rigid definitions of male and female.

“Where my generation is like, ‘Male or female, where’s the check box?’ I think the younger generation is more accepting of different genders,” Bradt said. “That will make a difference.”

Still, Bradt, who campaigned for Clinton in New Hampshire, expects a tough road ahead for Harris. “It’s going to be hard to see what she has to go through,” she said. “I fear for her, like I feared for Hillary.”

Although Clinton won the most votes in 2016, some voters said they found her off-putting. Among them was Dr. Maria E. Laurencio, 73, a retired anesthesiologist in Coral Gables, Florida, who was a lifelong Republican until she pinched her nose and voted for Clinton.

“Women were not sympathetic to Hillary because a lot of them said she stood by the president,” Laurencio said about former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs. “Hillary tended to be a little arrogant and not so likable, even though she was so prepared.”

In 2020, Laurencio changed her registration to vote for Biden. Now, she intends to support Harris. “For me, anything that prevents Mr. Trump from getting to the presidency again, I will go along with,” she said.

And more women are now veterans of political campaigns.

Luisa Wakeman, 57, a flight attendant in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, said women like her were relatively new to politics when they campaigned against Trump in 2016. Now, their informal and largely female-led networks in the area have matured into durable, battle-tested electoral machines.

“I think like many people, I’m feeling invigorated,” she said.

And she said she was impressed by Harris’ qualifications. “It’s not just because she’s a woman,” she said, “but I’m excited that she will make history.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .