Will a Woman Ever Be President?

What the 2024 election tells us about identity, power, and politics.

Photo by Ronda Darby on Unsplash

For the second time in three election cycles, a highly-qualified woman has lost the presidential election to disturbed, cruel, venal reality TV star — to the same disturbed, cruel, venal reality TV star. To add insult to injury, that reality TV star lost when his opponent was a boring and uninspiring white man (don’t get me wrong, I think Joe Biden has been an excellent president, but no one has ever accused him of being an orb of charisma). In text chains and in private chats with friends, I keep hearing the same thing, mostly from women: Democrats will never run another woman again.

This, of course, is almost surely an exaggeration. Democrats will run another woman someday. But they probably won’t run a woman for president next time around, and maybe not the next, either.

This is the wrong lesson to learn.

Women face particular challenges in running for office, and in pursuing executive roles — and the highest office in the land — specifically. But “a woman can’t win” isn’t the conclusion to draw from this particular election. This was an election about gender, sure. But it was also an election about power: Who has it, who wields it, how it alienates and attracts. And maybe not in the way you might think.

There is no single reason why Trump won and Harris lost, and anyone giving you a unifying theory of 2024 is probably filtering the outcome through their own preconceptions and ideas. But one reason I think Trump did so well and Harris did so poorly is that American voters tend to not like prudes, lecturers, and scolds, and that’s how many Americans see the left. Harris was none of those things. But lecturing and scolding are, unfortunately, now part of the progressive brand (as a progressive who loves to lecture and scold… I get it, and whoops). The previous iteration of the Republican Party was a deeply moralizing one — a prudish and scolding one. And those aspects of the party were deeply unpopular. This iteration of the Republican Party is authoritarian and controlling and the moral scolds are still there with their book bans and abortion bans and obsessions over birth rates, but the MAGA brand is more of a gross anything-goes boys-do-what-they-want macho carnival. Many voters like Trump because he’s a powerful Big Daddy figure, and in the US we are accustomed to the face of power looking like Donald Trump’s (well, slightly less orange, but you know what I mean). And many voters resent Democrats because they’ve seen some liberals wielding identity and progressive moral righteousness for personal gain, or to shame others, and that’s a kind of power-seeking that feels unfamiliar and bad. “Power” is not a ladder; it’s a matrix. Voters like or at least accept some more-familiar expressions of it and chafe at newer ones. And even many moderate and liberal voters are frustrated by how it’s been wielded in left-of-center spaces. They conflate that with Democrats more broadly. That all worked to Trump’s benefit — especially since his base is made up of voters who thrive on cruelty and dominance.