Let’s be clear: The chances of a vice president replacing Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election would be much higher if that vice president was a white man.
This is fundamentally unfair and extremely infuriating. Conservatives are positioning Harris as the “DEI candidate,” but the truth is that race and gender overwhelmingly favor white men in electoral politics. The United States has been ruled by men for 235 years. In that time, we have had one black president, a once-in-a-generation political genius. Kamala Harris is the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president in a country where both houses of Congress are mostly white and mostly male. If Harris wins, she will be the first woman and first woman of color to become president. This is a historic possibility, and it's very exciting.
But in 2016.
Those of us who were convinced that Hillary Clinton would crush Donald Trump may be in a very bad position to evaluate Harris' chances. I'm going to make a truly horrifying and humiliating confession: When the Republican Party selected Donald Trump as their candidate, I was both stunned and relieved. Because while I thought his selection was certainly indicative of a deep corruption of the Republican base, I also thought he was the weakest and most beatable candidate the party has fielded in my lifetime. In other words, he was uniquely well-suited to be pitted against a highly competent feminist woman. Coming into the White House toward the end of the Obama administration, I truly believed that Americans would watch Trump's incoherent ramblings, his racist and misogynistic rants, and his disparaging of his female rivals, and that Clinton would offer clear, reasoned policy proposals and approach the presidency with the dignity and respect that befits it, and thus win with ease. Sure, many conservative voters hated her, and were under no illusions that America had somehow solved sexism by electing a black man president and then the Democrats put a white woman in office, but Trump was so obviously a con man, said such terrible things, and acted like a total idiot that it was hard to imagine that most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, would listen to him and conclude: This man should have the nuclear codes..
And yes, Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes. But she still lost the election. And I have lost a lot of faith in the American people and in my own perception of the American people.
Perhaps the most obvious lesson from the 2016 election is that a large segment of the mostly white American electorate lost its mind completely when faced with the possibility of a female president after a black one. Clinton certainly had her shortcomings as a candidate. But a politics of rage rallied around her candidacy that cannot simply be explained by, say, the fact that she was a liberal and the left wanted a socialist (or that she didn't campaign in Michigan). Joe Biden, after all, ran as a centrist just four years later and had a more moderate legislative record than Clinton, but he never attracted the same level of rabid rage. The misogyny that rained down on Clinton was mostly a storm on the right, but there was also a sexist storm on the left.
It's 2024 now, and maybe the country has changed. After eight years of two old white men, the voters who feared and resented a woman in power have probably been sufficiently pacified. Some of them are probably dead. But my fear is that if Harris becomes the top candidate, the same dynamics that caused the total meltdown around Hillary Clinton after the Obama administration will come back with a vengeance.
But here's the problem: If we are too afraid that racism or sexism might destroy a candidate, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy, granting white men eternal dominance.
The risks of running Harris are different from the risks of running Biden again, but I don't think they are greater. In fact, it's hard to argue that Harris is a weaker candidate at this stage. She's part of an administration that's accomplished a lot, and she's the most visible member of the administration who can speak on the issue the Democrats are strongest on: abortion. (She can also speak for more than a few minutes at a time, past 8 p.m., which is a plus.) She's far enough apart from Biden on foreign policy that she might avoid being completely hobbled by the Israel/Gaza issue, which seems certain to deeply divide the Democratic base and disrupt the Democratic convention. Her weaknesses in 2020, mainly summed up in left-wing heckles about “Kamala being a cop,” as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, are specific to a highly unusual election year and would seem to be strengths in the 2024 election, where she'll be taking on convicted felons.
And from a purely practical standpoint, one of the biggest benefits of adding Harris to the shortlist is that it would likely make it easier for her to use Biden-Harris funds for her own campaign. Republicans would no doubt challenge Harris' candidacy in court, and the fact that many of them want Biden means that do not have Harris is considered the leading Democratic presidential nominee, but the fact that she is already campaigning alongside Biden would make any proposed replacement for him financially easier.
Plus, she's under national scrutiny, and the top names being floated as potential successors are ambitious, well-groomed politicians who are probably well-behaved Girl Scouts with closets as clean as their noses — or maybe John Edwards.
There's another important way in which the America of 2024 will be different from the America of 2016: Experienced 2016 and its aftermath. Voters who had expected to have the first female president were shocked and hurt by her defeat. This shocking event gave birth to the Women's March, the #MeToo movement, and an election that put a record number of women into office. Just a few years later, American voters witnessed women's rights being rolled back by half a century by unaccountable, far-right Supreme Court justices (in some states, to a time before women had the vote), three of whom were appointed by deeply misogynistic genital-grabbing men who defeated the woman who looked set to become the first president in the White House.
Voters who care about women's rights understand its importance, and they know in ways they couldn't know in 2016, how devastating it will be when we collectively crash into America's oldest and strongest glass ceiling.
Certainly, it's reasonable to be worried about Harris's possible candidacy and factors outside of her control, but just because one woman lost eight years ago doesn't mean she's a candidate for the presidency. this Women can't win. Of course they can. We and the current top contender are giving her chance.
