This isn’t a repeat of 2016.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy has undoubtedly shaken up the 2024 race. National polls now show her leading former President Trump, including in five battleground states. If elected, she would become the first female president, and Democratic strategists say this isn’t lost on women.
“Becoming the highest-ranking woman in history as the vice president of the United States was a historic moment in its own right,” Jonae Wartel, a partner at political consulting firm Arc Initiatives, tells Katie Couric Media. “Now the opportunity for her to make even greater history as potentially the first woman president, the first Black woman president, and the first South Asian American president is pretty incredible. And the energy we’ve seen from across the country around her candidacy has just really powered the campaign.”
As historical as Harris’s run is, she’s also following in the footsteps of former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was the first woman to secure the backing of a major U.S. political party. Now, the question is whether she can do what Clinton failed to do: beat Trump.
While it’s impossible to predict the future, Harris is already proving to be a much different candidate than Clinton. She has drawn record-breaking fundraising and energized her party, as demonstrated by her packed arenas. But maybe more importantly, so much has changed since 2016.
Harris making history
While Harris isn’t the first woman to lead Democrats at the top of the ticket, her emergence comes against a much different political backdrop than it’s been for any woman who’s come before her. It might not seem like it now, but a lot has changed since Clinton. Her loss to Trump in 2016 was a galvanizing force for many women. Just a day after Trump was inaugurated, millions of women marched in cities all across the country to protest his election. Then, two years later, a wave of female Democratic leaders was elected to Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.
Over the last eight years, other broad changes have occurred, including the workforce growing to include more college-educated women than college-educated men for the first time. There was also the #MeToo movement that exposed sexual harassment at the hands of powerful men across multiple industries and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal right to an abortion that was protected under Roe v. Wade, which further activated women.
But will these upheavals help rally women around Harris? One strategist thinks so, particularly when it comes to abortion, which swayed the results of the 2022 midterm elections in Democrats’ favor. And few are better to deliver on this message than Harris, who has become Democrats’ top voice on the issue.
“Harris has a tremendous opportunity to mobilize female voters, especially suburban women,” says Sara Sadhwani, an assistant director of politics at Pomona College. “The abortion issue has proved to be a winner for Democrats, particularly in the 2022 elections, and Kamala Harris has been the face of that movement, which will serve her well in winning support from female voters.”
Women (and men) coalesce around Harris
Ever since Biden dropped out of the race and backed Harris, there’s been a rush of Democratic enthusiasm behind her. Black women led the charge, with some 44,000 participating in a four-hour Zoom call to organize for her campaign just two days after the announcement on July 21. The call raised more than $1.5 million in a single evening.
Harris volunteer Elizabeth Minnella and gun rights activist Shannon Watts were so inspired by this activism that they organized their own record-setting “White Women: Answer the Call.” The session drew over 160,000 participants and raised more than $11 million for Harris. Watts tells Katie Couric Media it was “less of a rally and more of a reckoning,” given that white women have largely backed former President Trump in the last two elections.
In the first week of her White House campaign alone, Harris raised $200 million, most of which came from first-time donors in the 2024 election cycle. While it’s too early to compare this haul to Clinton’s fundraising in 2016, we can compare it to Trump’s current efforts. Her former campaign spokesman, Tim Hogan, believes the latest flood of donations isn’t just a temporary rush. “It’s a question of where this money goes and how it gets used,” he told NewsNation. “And on that question, the Harris campaign is way ahead. You’ve got 260 coordinated offices across Battleground states. You’ve got 1,400 paid staff. We just don’t hear those numbers from the Trump campaign.”
This call to action is only the tip of the iceberg, though. South Asian women, Latinas, and Native women also organized virtual meetings. There was even a “Cat Ladies for Harris” call, which was formed in reaction to a GOP vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, calling the vice president and other female politicians “childless cat ladies.” It’s worth noting that men have been organizing, too, and not just Black men: 60,000 self-proclaimed “White Dudes For Harris” met in solidarity to prove that Trump doesn’t speak for them and raise over $4 million for his competition.
“This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen or experienced — all generations are getting involved in their own unique way,” Watts tells us. “I think we’re all experiencing something we haven’t for a while, and that’s joy.”
What Harris’s candidacy means for women of color
Upon becoming vice president in 2020, Harris credited Black women as the “backbone of our democracy.” She has also acknowledged their role in her own historic ascent.
Born in 1964 to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, the presumptive Democratic nominee has reenergized Black voters. This is especially true for Black women, who overwhelmingly backed Clinton in 2016 and helped secure Biden’s win in 2020.
In addition to the nationwide Zoom, Black women leaders have continued to rally around Harris. ”For women and girls who don’t feel represented or reflected in elected leadership, it’s a real opportunity for them to see themselves in that way,” says Wartel.
Still, Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket has been plagued by a wave of racist attacks from politicians on the other side of the aisle. In an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, Trump falsely asserted that his Democratic rival previously downplayed her Black heritage. (Contrary to his claims, Harris has long publicly identified as both Black and South Asian American — it’s even highlighted in her White House bio.)
Meanwhile, some Republicans, including Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, have dismissed Harris as a “DEI hire” (DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives). Though the party has railed against these programs in recent years, top GOP leaders have called on fellow conservatives to avoid this rhetoric as the party tries to court Black voters. This includes Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who told reporters that the election “is going to be about policies, not personalities,” and Harris’s “ethnicity or gender has nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds — the only Black Republican in the state’s congressional delegation — stressed that these DEI comments must be “nipped in the bud.” If the party continues these attacks, some say they could ultimately backfire. “These attacks just make them look small, and it really shows their lack of respect for communities of color,” says Wartel.
Changing attitudes about women in politics
Despite these attacks against Harris, attitudes about women in politics have evolved significantly over the last few decades. In 1958, 54 percent of respondents said they would vote for a well-qualified woman to become president, compared to 93 percent in January 2024, according to Gallup.
According to a July AP/NORC poll, 70 percent of Democrats say electing a woman or person of color would be a “good thing” for the country. Meanwhile, 68 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Independents feel it doesn’t matter.
Though studies have shown that sexism negatively impacted Clinton’s support in 2016, strategists don’t think this will be the case in November when voters head to the polls.
“The climate toward women and women’s rights has shifted since 2016,” says Sadhwani. “While sexism will certainly be at play to some extent now, we can anticipate that sexism won’t be as salient as we had seen during the 2016 cycle due to #MeToo and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which have brought heightened attention and even anger about the treatment of women across the United States.”
Even Clinton is confident Harris can win this time around, despite the lingering double standards in politics. In a New York Times op-ed, she acknowledged that the presumed Democratic nominee will face even more challenges as the first woman of color to be at the top of a major party’s ticket, but she remained hopeful: “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible.”
