WASHINGTON — In Vice President Kamala Harris’ quick, if unorthodox, rise to the top of the Democratic ticket, elected officials, activists and operatives see in her a new chance to beat Donald Trump and make history in one swoop.
Eight years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Harris could be the first female president and the first Black woman to hold the nation’s top job, as well.
Democrats are somewhat optimistic, now set in a landscape they didn’t have in 2016: a messenger in Harris who is uniquely positioned to energize voters following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn national abortion rights, more proof from the ballot box that women can win in battleground areas and the knowledge that Trump himself is beatable — if still politically dangerous.
“The lessons that still apply [from 2016] are that people need to take Trump and his supporters seriously,” Shaunna Thomas, who co-founded and runs the pro-women group Ultraviolet, told NBC News. “That’s even more of a top-line message than whether or not a woman can win the presidency.”
In 2016, Clinton’s behemoth campaign and perceived air of inevitability left some Democrats unengaged and resting on their laurels. “I think we’re not going to leave anything on the field this time,” Thomas said.
Now, many of the party operatives and groups who pushed for Clinton to be the first female president are working, to borrow a phrase from President Joe Biden, to “finish the job.”
“‘Let’s finish the job’ is actually for us, too, from 2016,” said Mini Timmaraju, who leads the pro-abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All and was the women’s vote director on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “We ran and lost against Donald Trump and we suffered an incredible, horrific loss nationwide overturning Roe and so much damage to our country that this is sort of the ultimate fight back for us.”
A Harris victory in November would mean finishing the job that many of those operatives started with Clinton, one that extends further back to Shirley Chisholm, of New York, the first Black woman in Congress, who ran her own historic long-shot presidential bid in 1972.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who once worked to elect Chisholm and now backs Harris, told NBC News.
Harris, herself, has pointed to Chisholm as an inspiration, even having used colors in her 2020 campaign logo similar to those Chisholm did in her presidential run.
Shirley Chisholm created a path for me and for so many others. Today, I’m thinking about her inspirational words: “I am, and always will be a catalyst for change.”
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) January 16, 2021
The influx of female lawmakers into Congress in 2018, as well as women who have risen to the top in key swing states, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, also serve as counters to the “electability” argument that has been used against female candidates before, especially in Democratic primaries.
“What is fundamentally different from 2016 and 2020: The first is Dobbs, and that’s huge. It just changes the dynamic all over the place,” said Christina Reynolds, senior vice president at EMILY’s List, who also worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “But I also think we’re not in a primary. And that’s where ‘electability’ matters so much. … So it’s not a question of ‘who best stacks up against Trump?’ We’re just going to stack her up against Trump. And I like that contrast.”
Harris has urged voters and skeptics alike to be “unburdened by what has been” and believe that women leaders can win so long as voters support them.
After all, it has been eight years since a woman topped the Democratic ticket and broke the glass ceiling of becoming a major-party nominee, but an even more durable one still lies above, surrounding the presidency itself. The aftermath of Clinton’s shock 2016 loss bled into 2020’s Democratic presidential primaries, which hinged heavily on the idea of “electability” and whether any woman could beat Trump after one woman struggled to win by the Electoral College metric that mattered. Harris was one of five women who ran and lost in that primary campaign.
“You have one woman nominee for president who loses and everyone says, ‘Oh, I don’t know, can a woman win?’” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., who is running for governor. “How many men have run for president and lost and nobody ever says that?”
Timmaraju made it clear that even amid the optimism, “we’re not naive,” referring to the sexism and racism that still exist for nonwhite, non-male candidates. “We’re eyes wide open.”
It has already led to some questions about whom Harris should choose as her running mate: lean in to history with a pick that highlights her history — be it as a woman or as a person of color — or go with what many in the party still consider as the “safer” choice, a white man?
In 2016, Clinton and her team briefly considered doubling down with two women on the ticket: Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Ultimately, Clinton picked Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. — even he described himself as “boring.”
“I thought about everything,” Clinton said in a 2022 interview for the book “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet,” acknowledging, as some of her aides also did, that there was a push to lean into the history of the moment.
“It was an upside-downside,” Clinton concluded then. “I mean, you would be asking a lot for the electorate to elect two women. That would be a huge step. On the other hand, it would be history-making and let’s roll the dice. But that’s not, in the end, why I made the decision to pick Tim Kaine. I was looking for somebody who — and I think this should be the primary consideration — could immediately be president. And he had the attributes that I thought really enabled me to envision him along with the country as stepping in to be president.”
This time around, there is similar excitement around the possibility of leaning in with a female pick, as well as hesitations around asking too much of the electorate.
“People always demand balance,” Reynolds said, looking back to President Barack Obama’s pick of Biden as his running mate.
The pick was meant to assuage experience concerns about Obama’s youth and relative inexperience, as well as bring a certain familiarity and comfort level to the ticket. But Biden was also a white man on a ticket with what would be the first Black president. Biden wasn’t “going to be saddled with the burden of racism that Obama was saddled with,” the thinking went, a person close to Obama said in an interview for “Electable.”
Even now, the list of Democrats floated as potential Harris running mates is overwhelmingly white and male, with just two Black men and a single woman among the names being floated publicly. Harris could well pick a surprise candidate, and she hasn’t said anything publicly about whom she is eyeing, but once again the conventional wisdom seems to be that the likely female nominee for president needs a politically moderate white man on the ticket to assuage potentially nervous voters.
“It tells you where we are in America,” said Rep. Jazmine Crockett, D-Texas. “But nevertheless.”
“It’s not like when we look at, traditionally, who ends up making up these tickets that there is a large bench of people of color,” Crockett said, pointing out that the U.S. still has yet to elect a Black female governor and that Wes Moore, of Maryland, remains the only Black man serving as a governor.
“I think that that’s also a problem that we need to solve. We need to start making sure that our benches are representative of who we are in this country and that it’s not a matter of the only people that are being elevated to the highest offices in the country tend to be white men,” Crockett said.
The demographic makeup of the bench aside, Harris’ backers were pleased to see so many Democrats — from Biden to Democratic leadership in Congress to some progressive rebels — all quickly line up behind her in recent days. It was a coronation of sorts that even her supporters say they couldn’t have imagined at the outset of her time in the administration — a period marked by criticisms, both fair and unfair, of the job she was doing. When Biden vowed in 2020 to choose a female running mate, women’s groups sprang into action immediately, organizing “We Have Her Back” in anticipation of the sexism and racism that any number of the potential picks could have faced. Now, many of the groups that were part of that effort don’t feel the same pressure to organize — though they will be ready if any of those attacks take over.
“She’s got all of us now,” Thomas said, referring to the full Democratic Party’s embrace of Harris.
For now, Democrats are focused on toppling Trump — and maybe the glass ceiling along with him.
“I feel very confident she’s going to win,” Spanberger said of Harris. “But if she doesn’t, it’s not because she’s a woman. Just as when Donald Trump loses, it’s not because he’s a man. It’s because he’s a terrible candidate who has terrible policies.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
