CHICAGO — They still wear suffragist-white outfits and cheer on the prospect of “Madam President.”
But eight years after Hillary Clinton became the first woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, Democrats are sending American women a more sober and urgent message even as they try to elect another barrier-breaking candidate.
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Republican policies, they argue, have had disastrous and once-unthinkable consequences for the health and autonomy of women and their families since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A second term for former President Donald Trump, they warn, would be even more dangerous.
“Simply put,” Vice President Kamala Harris said this past week from the stage of her party’s convention, “they are out of their minds.”
From the women who described harrowing pregnancies and their difficulties receiving medical care to Harris’ finale Thursday night, the tone and emphasis were a radical departure from the optimistic feminism and chants of “I’m with her” that dominated Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
“This is a time where the rights of women are fundamentally under attack as it relates to abortion, IVF, when and how to have a family,” said Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a close Harris ally. “It’s not about minimizing the importance of race or gender. It is about appreciating that in this moment in the history of our country, this election is bigger than anybody’s race or gender.”
Much of what has transpired in the last eight years was unfathomable to the Democrats caught up in their excitement about Clinton’s campaign. The idea that Trump — a man who had bragged about sexual assault — would win, and that his Supreme Court nominees would help erase the constitutional right to abortion, seemed remote.
“In 2016, people felt they had the luxury of equality in the law and reproductive freedom in the law, and I think many people didn’t see risk ahead of them,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
The Supreme Court’s decision to wipe out Roe two years ago unleashed a cascade of far-reaching abortion bans in many states across the country. Democrats quickly harnessed shock and fury over the decision into political momentum in key races that year and since. At the convention this past week, Democrats offered their clearest signs yet of just how central the issue will be to their fall campaign.
“The abrogation of our rights has been so severe and so aggressive in red states across the country that the wake-up call has been received,” Gillibrand said. The senator, who ran for president in the 2020 campaign on a message anchored in issues of women’s equality, said that the moment required a “fighter,” and added of Harris: “It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman, to be honest. It matters that she’s a fighter. And it’s just great that she also happens to be a woman.”
In ways overt and subtle, plenty of speakers also highlighted the history-making potential of Harris, who is already the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to accept a major party’s nomination. If elected, she would be the first female president in American history.
Clinton cast Harris’ bid as a continuation of her efforts to shatter what she has called the “highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
“On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office as our 47th president of the United States,” Clinton told the cheering crowd Monday.
But Harris herself does not embrace such explicit messaging, instead favoring subtle references to the encouragement she received as a child to “be anything and do anything,” as she said this past week.
As she formally accepted her party’s nomination Thursday night, she said she did so “on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks.”
For some voters, representation is a powerful and energizing motivator. Others recoil from discussion of identity.
“Sometimes I feel like, when you talk about ‘first woman,’ it’s like ‘first woman’ becomes the focus,” said Mayor Cherelle Parker of Philadelphia, the first woman to lead the city. “That is extremely important. But don’t forget about the work that went in to ensure that she could be prepared to meet every opportunity.”
Many Democratic women credit Clinton’s candidacies with helping Americans grasp what a female presidential nominee might look and sound like, giving Harris running room to define herself more broadly this time around. (Of course, Clinton — a former first lady, senator and secretary of state — hardly reduced her campaign to her gender, either.)
“The focus today is, it seems to be on a discussion really about a much more holistic view of identity, and I think that’s important for where we are as a country,” said Gov. Maura Healey, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ+ person to be elected governor of Massachusetts, who also emphasized that “representation really matters.”
Clinton, she added, “broke that glass ceiling.”
In a campaign in which Trump, a white man, has already tried to question Harris’ racial identity, Democrats are bracing for sexist and racist attacks on Harris.
This past week, Michelle Obama, the former first lady, warned her party against complacency, saying that there were many “who are ready to question and criticize every move Kamala makes, who are eager to spread those lies, who don’t want to vote for a woman.”
“We cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala, instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected,” she said.
So far, Trump has struggled to press a consistent and effective message against Harris, but leading Democrats do not bank on that lasting.
On Friday, at least, Trump — who relies on the support of social conservatives and has said he is “proudly the person responsible” for overturning Roe v. Wade — seemed to acknowledge that on the issue of abortion rights, the Democrats had put him on defense.
“My Administration,” he insisted on Truth Social, “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
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