Democratic women see a country that is ‘not ready for a woman president’

The agony for Democrats wasn't just that the vice president lost. It was also, to many women, that for the second time in a decade a Democratic woman had lost to Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton faced off against Trump under dramatically different circumstances, and with different strategies. But the result was the same for both candidates. They lost to a former president who has been found liable for sexual abuse , insulted his opponents with sexist and racist language and assured the reversal of .

And in the aftermath on Wednesday, some Democratic women were finding it hard to draw anything other than the most demoralizing conclusion about the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office.

In interviews with POLITICO, nearly a dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists argued that Harris faced headwinds including an ornery electorate and her connection to an unpopular incumbent. But to them, it was also more than that.

"I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president," said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

"I was hoping we'd get closer, at the very least, this time around," Solis Doyle said. "But we got farther."

Sexism and racism, inextricably woven into our culture and politics, played a central role in the 2024 campaign, these Democratic women said. But they were divided on how much those forces ultimately affected Trump's landslide victory, where he gained strength across nearly every demographic group.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, like others, said that "any Democrat" would've lost Tuesday night because it's about "something much bigger," and ruled out sexism as a deciding factor. But others disagreed. Democratic pollster Angie Kuefler, who worked on several abortion rights initiatives in recent years, said Trump "explicitly weaponized gender and purposely tried to activate men in a traditional masculinity-focused way."

"We don't want to say it publicly, a woman can't get elected," Kuefler said. "But what else are we supposed to take away from this moment? I hope this is unique to women running against Trump."

In her concession speech Wednesday afternoon, Harris did not explicitly address " all the little girls ," as Clinton did in 2016. Instead, she spoke broadly about the long view of progress, urging her supporters that even though "sometimes the fight takes a while, that doesn't mean we won't win."

"The important thing is don't ever give up," she said.

During her three-month presidential campaign, Harris staffers bet they could improve Harris' performance with women over Biden's in 2020, prying the gender gap open even further to make up for her losses with young men. They believed abortion rights, coupled with Harris' economic message, could win over more women under 40 and non-college educated women than her former running mate.

Instead, she performed worse, according to exit polls . She won women by an 8-point gap, down from the 15-point gap Biden built in 2020, while Trump added to his strength with men, winning them by 13 points. In fact, Harris fared worse than Clinton, who maintained a 13-point advantage with women.

The only group Harris performed better with were white college-educated women, who backed her by an additional 7 percentage points over 2020 .

Eight years ago, Clinton explicitly leaned into her gender throughout much of her 2016 campaign, immortalized by her slogan: "I'm With Her." She wore white pantsuits and talked about breaking the "highest, hardest glass ceiling." Her election night party was held at the Javits Center in New York beneath a literal glass ceiling.

But for all the "Future is Female" merch that was sold, more than half of white women did not vote for Clinton in 2016, according to 2016 exit polls .

Drawing a lesson from Clinton's loss, Harris this year did not accentuate the history-making elements of her candidacy , betting swing voters were ready to vote for a woman but cared more about her record and her platform.

"These two candidates handled the historic nature of their campaign very differently. He remained the same guy, but the result is the same," said Martha McKenna, a Democratic consultant. "I don't know how to process that yet."

"In 2016, people were crying," but this time, McKenna said, "people are hardened and resigned."

Since 2016, women ran at record levels for higher office, and in many places, winning. In 2023, a dozen women served as governors across the United States, the most in history.

"We've made so many strides with executive female leadership, but what presidents deal with but governors don't, generally speaking, is national security and the military," said one Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. "There was something in the language of what Trump said about Harris being a 'play toy' to world leaders ... I think that might be a sticking point for us, that internalized misogyny of women not being strong enough in a foreign policy context."

Even as she sought to ignore her gender, Trump looked to exploit it. The former president repeatedly talked about Harris' physical appearance. He frequently suggested she used sex to rise professionally. When a rally-goer in North Carolina shouted that Harris "worked on a corner," a crude reference to sex work, Trump responded , "this place is amazing."

And in the closing days of the campaign, a pro-Trump super PAC, backed by Elon Musk, released an ad calling Harris "a big ole c-word," labeling her a communist, but an obvious reference to a vulgar and offensive word used to demean women.

"I need white women to dig deep and figure out why they, to this day, given all Donald Trump's sexism, all of his racism, is still the person they voted for over Harris," said North Carolina state Sen. Sydney Batch. "It is dumbfounding."

It is particularly shocking, these women said, after all the moments that shook the country's understanding of gender politics over the last eight years. It was the guilt after Clinton lost. It was the Women's March. It was the #MeToo movement. It was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. It was the overturning of . It was the preventable deaths of pregnant women who weren't being treated.

"It's pretty damn bleak out there." Batch said. "We need a post mortem on why Americans have such a hard time wrestling with a woman being the leader of this country."

She added, "The only thing we can do is wake up and continue to work."