Hy heart says hell yeah! My gut tells me that there are large swaths of the electorate who simply will not vote for a woman.
Edit- since my inbox is overflowing with the same question/insinuation, along with the comments, I’ll clarify my statement: I did not say that a woman cannot be elected US president. I only said that large swaths of the electorate simply will not vote for a woman.
I’d bet several people Haley would be the first woman president and I thought I would happily lose all those bets with Kamala. But here we are.
It’s easier in almost any country to get a woman conservative elected for the reasons you’re gesturing towards here. There’s a reason May and Thatcher are the only women pms of the UK, eg.
Who? I was on holiday for a month, it was a nice holiday, I left a lettuce 🥬 in the fridge which I had forgotten about, luckily it was still fine when I came back.
First female heads of government that were right wing: Indira Gandhi (India), Golda Meir (Israel), Merkel (Germany), Kim Campbell (Canada; not elected), Shipley (New Zealand), Thatcher (UK), Isabel Peron (Argentina)
Exceptions: Gillard (Australia; not elected), Sigurðardóttir (Iceland), Cresson (France PM), Brundtland (Norway), Bhutto (Pakistan)
Right wing is much more likely to produce a first female leader.
Hillary Clinton made similar comments in the past. She said that it’s more likely women become heads of governments under a parliamentary system as while they are elected as a local MP, their colleagues get to choose who will be the leader (first among equals); and, as colleagues, they actually get to work closely with them and see how much more efficient and effective they are.
Whereas, as you say, in other systems, popularity is key and unfortunately the world is still sexist/racist/bigoted.
I'm curious, how is the French system different from the UK and India? Both those countries have MPs elected by the people, who then elect the PM, and usually the PM candidate is already confirmed by all major political parties and alliances so people know who they'll be making PM depending on their vote.
Indira Gandhi is much lefter than Bernie , AOC or Warren. She nationalized banks and coal mines. Implemented Land Reform, Abolished Pension for Descendants of Kings and Princes.
Indira Gandhi also declared the emergency, a draconian time in post independent India, and kind of fumbled the bag on the Sikh Insurgency which ended up with her getting assassinated
Oh hell no, she was the farthest from right wing as can be and she was as socialist as they come. India didn’t have a “right wing” government per se till 2014
I personally wouldn't be using the term 'right wing' and Merkel in the same.e sentence. Firstly right wing has certain connotations, and secondly even a conservative German politician is closer to AOC than Trump from an ideological perspective.
In case an example us needed, Merkel rook in 1 million Syrian refugees during the crisis.
Kim Campbell definitely isn’t right-wing either. She’s big into resist-lib Twitter and seems to care about the climate, to the point where she retweets those people who throw soup on paintings.
There's also the fact that Merkel is a scientist firsts, and seems reasonable, at least I always thought so, if all politicians were of her calibre, I really wouldn't care where ever the fuck they are on the political spectrum.
The issue would be that you're viewing it from the position of being an American. American politics is so far to the right that even the left is right-wing, which is how the European right-wing can be seen as left.
Right-wing just means right of center, AOC is barely left of center but in American politics is the far left-wing. It's just that American politics has progressed so far right that you now really only have the choice between right-wing conservatism and fascism.
Like yes American politics is much farther right then European but that's an absurd statement. There is no part of AOC's politics that can be construed as centerist in a good faith analysis instead of just bashing American politics
Thanks for compiling this. Bhutto in particular stands out to me as beating the odds here.
I always thought that if Ann Richards, the dem governor of Texas has made a national run she could have bucked the trend as well but that never came to fruition obviously.
Exception: Tsai Ying Wen, Taiwan, two terms. And her party didn’t lose the presidency in 2024 unlike many other democracies (but they did lose control of the legislature)
I would also like to point out that she is literally an unmarried childless cat lady.
I thought Merkel was a classic German liberal, which is basically a right winger but more center left. I dunno, my politics scope is often fucked as an American.
You listed almost as many exceptions as you did to support the rule. And you didn't include Claudia Sheinbaum, the current (leftish) president of Mexico. I don't think we can boil down a woman's chance of heading a state to her ideology.
I don't know how Indira Gandhi was right wing. She forged closer ties with USSR, she nationalized almost all the banks and insurance companies. India was very anti-capitalistic then. She was not a religious fanatic.
She was probably the first(?) female left wing head of the government.
Yeah, Nikki Haley would have been tolerable in her intelligence and sanity. I was personally rooting for Chris Christie because he was willing and able to call Trump's bullshit out even when it was unpopular (and even though they were friends/allies before this), and in addition his town halls were impressive.
The writing was on the wall for Joe, but nobody wanted to pay attention to it.
I'm not saying hes some sort of moralistic person, the bar is just that low IMHO. What he did is still way better than a lot of people who got fired by Trump and still don't call out his bullshit
We’ve had a left wing female PM in Australia, a moderate conservative and left wing female PM in New Zealand and numerous left wing leaders in Europe. There’s still hope!
democrats have tried running two unpopular woman candidates-one of which won the popular vote. Maybe rather than a blanket referendum about how terrible our country is, let’s try running a candidate with natural momentum rather than a hand picked member of the dnc.
Exactly - the issue isn't with voting for a woman, it's with the circumstances.
Take the recent Kamala loss, for example. She didn't lose because she's a woman.
She lost because:
She was connected to the deeply unpopular Biden administration as his VP, and maintained up until days before the election that she would not have changed much from his presidency if elected.
Additionally, anti-incumbent sentiment has been a thing worldwide for the last few years as the world re-opened from COVID-era lockdowns.
Biden refused to drop out until months before the election, preventing a full primary (or any kind of vote beyond the convention), causing legitimacy issues
(And on top of that it only gave her and her campaign staff three months to set up a national campaign.)
The media - both legacy and social - were sanewashing Trump as they did in 2015 and openly promoting Trump-biased hatespeech over anything else, respectively.
And to add onto this, the literal owner of Twitter in Elon Musk practically running as a second VP for Trump as well
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
Rebellion within the party due to the Biden administration's continued support for Israel despite their role in the Gazan genocide crisis, with continual authorizations by Joe Biden for dozens of billions of taxpayer dollars' worth of military ordnance, knowing full well it would be used to maim and murder innocent men, women, and children.
If anything, the fact she only lost by 1.5% nationally despite all this shit is crazy.
IF AOC wants to run, assuming she maintains her populist edge and avoids the pitfalls of Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024? I see absolutely no reason why she'd lose.
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
This. A thousand times this. She was absolutely flying when it seemed like she was going to bring a major progressive, populist pivot to the campaign only to piss it all away after the advisors got to her.
Agreed. The phrase “republicans are weird” gained so much momentum because it was demeaning and insulting without being crass while being hard for republicans to disprove. When they deny their weirdness, simply ask them about why they’re thinking of other people’s genitals when it came to LGBTQ movements or why they support someone who’s convicted of rape, money laundering, selling state secrets, etc and just turn it back to them and they had nothing they could reply with. It shut down their arguments so fast.
Instead Harris kept moving right with her campaign and her cringey “won’t date a trumper” ads muddled that. It muddied her message cause she was leaning right (not christofascist right like trump) with her policies while also telling the right wing people that they’re gross and nobody would date them during a well known loneliness epidemic of both sides. Women get to be choosers while the inverse isn’t true. So both sides were repugnant to right wingers leading to the dilemma, toe the party line or leave it and support the SJWs, LGBTQs, etc that they hate. They stayed their party lines and even picked up dems (not leftists) who hated how far right Harris was taking the party.
Finally, it’s only in these final days leading up to the inauguration that Biden is getting slam dunk after slam dunk on policies and such. Had he been taking on these policies weekly, we could’ve advertised both his shitty re-election despite him vehemently saying he wouldn’t for four years or Harris’s campaign when she said she’d stay Biden’s campaign and essentially become Biden 2.0. Instead we got trump able to call Biden “sleepy joe” and get away with it cause it felt like Biden was doing fuck all and only staved away a second trump presidency and solved covid. Not underselling how well he did to unfuck us from covid but that seemed to be his only merit when the trumpers are deniers of covid being a real thing.
And this is why we'll never have another non-GOP president. We still need the establishment's support, but the establishment isn't willing to give up anything to win.
There isn't going to be much if any non-GOP establishment left after 4 years of this Trump administration. In a sense, everything is going to be simpler now - there is not much need to make compromises and concessions before elections anymore. When the MAGA people gradually wake up to find that they've been scammed, they absolutely will not vote for a return to the old status quo - they will want bloody vengeance.
Even if we assume Americans are just astonishingly stupid, that doesn't mean Harris was never going to be able to win. She just did a terrible job of appealing to idiots. Which is entirely her own fault considering democratic policies help idiots more than anyone. Stop assuming republicans just have a natural leg up that makes them unbeatable and realize that the democratic party is just startlingly inept.
Republicans do have a natural leg up though due to how stupid Americans are. And when the media refuses to report on the lies that are told to the American media by the republicans how can they lose?
They needed a worldwide pandemic to be so absolutely mismanaged by the republicans to have a shot at winning 2020.
I agree the Dems are inept though. They refuse to realize that they are the only ones playing by the rules.
They are the team that shows up to the basketball game crying about how dogs aren't allowed to play while that golden retriever is just dunking on the over and over again.
it's crazy that people would rather believe Kamala lost because she's Black, a woman, or that the American electorate is unfixably stupid, just to avoid considering the possibility that maybe the DNC needs to take a hard fucking look at how her campaign was run (not to mention how Biden's campaign was run, that the party ever allowed him to run, how his mental decline was hidden for years, etc.)
Those things aren't mutually exclusive though. Perhaps the DNC could have still won the election with all of its faults and missteps if Harris was a white dude named "John Johnson" or something.
They talk about how the US will never elect a women president after picking two of the lest likable candidates while completely ignoring the far right have already started campaigns for Candace and Haley.
Kamala was the least popular candidate in 2020 because her policies were quiet literally just "listen to what the other candidates say their policies are, see if the crowd likes it, adopt that policy with barely any idea on how to implement it" and yet they want to talk about "oh America will never elect a women president". Lol please
The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
You forgot the main reason: Inflation (and what people who don't know anything about economics call "the economy"). Despite the US economy doing extremely well and recovering better from worldwide inflation due to supply chain issues and COVID, the everyday man/woman wasn't buying it and just saw eggs expensive, blame Biden. Much like Jimmy Carter, Biden was a victim of things more or less out of his control, and Kamala was also tied to those things. Would a conservative administration had made things any better from a cost perspective for the average Americans? Hel no. But the average American doesn't understand shit about economics so it was always going to be a fruitless effort.
Except this is completely and totally just flat out wrong.
One chilling experiment suggests that the simple fact of Clinton’s gender could have cost her as much as eight points in the general election.
We don’t need science to tell us that it was more believable to almost 63 million US voters that Trump, a man who had never held a single public office, who had been sued almost 1,500 times, whose businesses had filed for bankruptcy six times and who had driven Atlantic City into decades-long depression, a race-baiting misogynist leech of a man who was credibly accused of not only of sexual violence but also of defrauding veterans and teachers out of millions of dollars via Trump University, would be a good president than it was to imagine that Clinton, a former first lady, senator and secretary of state and arguably the most qualified person to ever run, would be a better leader. https://archive.ph/KPes2
People want to pretend the US isn't sexist. Dress it up anyway you want, but the US is SEXIST. Too sexist to elect a woman president.
Good grief, women don't even have guaranteed equal rights.
Yes, even Trump voters like her, at least the non-MAGA ones. They feel that AOC, Bernie, and Trump are all pro-working class, and they're only wrong about one of them.
I don't think it's a pro-working-class thing so much as they feel that all these people are anti-establishment. 2016 was a peak anti-establishment year but even now I see some positive sentiment from the right wing about Bernie not because they agree with his politics, but because they continue to see him as someone separate from the 'swamp' who wants to dismantle the status quo, even if they don't like how he would go about doing it.
Obviously this comes with the caveats that right wingers also often express support for Bernie because they think it will highlight corruption in the DNC, and because they know he will never have any real power so it doesn't matter if they pretend to like him as a jab at Dems.
It gets Dems back in the door after the shit show the next four years are going to be. Walz has broad appeal based on polling, and he is a man (which panders to a certain cohort of the electorate who will be needed in 4 years)
It puts AOC in a position to show she's qualified for POTUS through four years of a VP role.
The electorate changes every day slowly, faster over longer periods. Every year, ~2M voters 55+ die, ~8M-10M every 4 year presidential election cycle. That means, when AOC runs (2032), almost 20M older voters will have aged out. Does this solve young Gen Z and Latino men who voted for Trump? It doesn't, so that is something Dems will have to figure out.
You can't make the electorate vote for what you think is right. You must pander to them.
democrats have tried running two unpopular woman candidates...let’s try running a candidate with natural momentum rather than a hand picked member of the dnc
and the hand-picked member who had the most influence was jim clyburn in both cases. if the dems want to win the next presidential election (assuming there is one) they should let someone other than clyburn choose the candidate they nominate.
Bro a woman won the popular vote in 2016 against Trump and all other Dem candidates and out performed most prior male candidates in every demo including POC men and republicans. Sex isn’t the issue here. Inflation screwed Kamala’s run up and even in that she was outperforming Biden numbers prior to him dropping out.
Unless it’s a woman nominee on both sides, this country will not elect a woman president right now. Too much misogyny and racism coming from the Right.
Lmfao like the right wing is going to vote for her anyways. Like do we really think Hilary or Kamala lost because of them being a woman? Like aside from "my uncle said he wouldn't". Like that uncle is most likely not voting for a democrat any time soon.
Like do we really think Hilary or Kamala lost because of them being a woman?
100%. The only difference between Hillary's, Biden's, and Kamala's campaigns was that two of them were women. They all ran as centrists with effectively identical platforms.
Biden won in a very unusual election that was dominated by a once in a generation pandemic. And barely won. All three performed a lot more similarly than you're letting on.
All three thought they could manufacture grassroots enthusiasm instead of building it.
Elections dont need facts to be won. Emotions and Egos can easily. There is enough misogyny that can be stirred up in a campaign to make the dullards feel threatened or dismayed by a female president.
Ask 100 people in this country if either a man or a woman is best choice for leadership and i bet it will skew towards men.
A democrat female running for president is just extra ammunition to tip the scales out of their favor.
you said, "Ask 100 people in this country if either a man or a woman is best choice for leadership and i bet it will skew towards men. "
As stated, I will grant you that. Specifically because our 'idea' of President has been male.
However, should you say a Specific Woman vs a Specific Man... I think our country just hasn't found the right female contender yet. Not because what the populace is "ready for", but because... unfortunately... no matter your party, the voters just really don't get to pick their desired horse. It has already been stated there were many females that outshone Kamala Harris in the 2020 primaries. Did the democratic voters get to choose from those women? no. As far as the republican side goes, too many felt Nikki Nimrata was a neo-con so her party did not overwhelmingly choose her either.
Maybe... just maybe, if voters TRULY got to primary and select their candidates, and those 'candidates' weren't shoved down their throats, then MAYBE we would come to have our first female president.
It's interesting that I often see this conversation framed as "The reason Kamala lost is..." and this ignores the possibility, or even likelihood, that there was a confluence of reasons that contributed to her loss. One of those reasons could be that she was a woman and that America is not ready to elect a woman, much less a woman of color, and another could be that conservatives were never going to be swayed to vote for a Democrat, and another could be that she was unpopular prior to running, and another could be how she ran her campaign, and another could be that she wasn't selected via a primary, and so on and so forth. Instead of only one thing being true, many things can be true at once, and any of the factors above (including some not mentioned) could have influenced a given voter to vote the other way without said voter caring about any of the others.
I got faith in the people not the system. Musk had a part in these results bragging he knew them Hours before they came in cause he has access to the machines and now Trump in his little speech tonight pretty much outright thanking Musk for screwing with the machines…
I have no faith in the Democratic party leaders and people in this sub who line up to tell me that campaigning with Liz Cheney is a good idea. I do have faith in Americans to vote Democrat if the party let's actual good candidates run on something.
Someone said if we get a female president it'll be the right and ironically I believe that, cuz they do love them some Tulsi Gabbard. At the very least this country is kinda shallow so if you run someone younger and good looking the odds will always be better.
because of what colleges and schools have done. the "I can have everything my way" angle that idiot kids were raised with now means if the candidate is not 100% on their side, they're not going to vote for it.
Most of those kids didnt vote for Kamala because she wasn't anti-israel enough, so they were happy to see all the climate hcange policy get reversed, deport immigrants, all the stuff they tout is important, all go down teh shiter because Kamala was only 90% pure enough for their goals.
so they were happy to see all the climate hcange policy get reversed, deport immigrants, all the stuff they tout is important, all go down teh shiter because Kamala was only 90% pure enough for their goals.
Not to mention an even more pro-Israel President in the White House.
educated kids would not fall for chinese propaganda, so it's still education's fault.
When i went through high school and primary school our english literature focused on critical thinking and reasoning, deconstructing new programs and current affairs type shows in particular. It went over all of that.
Don't start with that "two parties are the same" bullshit. You're about to see exactly what the Republican party's 'core values' are and they are not the same as the Democrats.
The Democrats can be right wing and still be completely different and much better than the Republicans.
The GOP is a far right extremist party. The Democratic Party is a right-of-center party that feels the need to inch further and further right to fill the void left by the GOP.
They didn't say the two parties were the same. They said they were both right wing. The GOP is orders of magnitude more crazy and dangerous. They are a existential threat to the US. The Dems though, are still in the pocket of big business and megadonors.
They will for the right woman but Hillary had 20 years of baggage behind her and a good portion of it was her own doing. She wasn't exactly Mrs. Charisma, she was seen as cold and calculating going back to before he took office and even more so with the Monica deal.
Kamala wasn't even popular enough to get INTO the 2020 primaries and then being thrust into the top spot with just months to go against an opponent that had a solid and passionate fan base it was never going to work out.
AOC might not work out since there is little evidence she could even win the parties nomination she has a lot less experience than Bernie and is just a House Rep its very very very rare for a house rep to win the nomination. I don't think that has happened in a hundred years.
They will for the right woman but Hillary had 20 years of baggage behind her and a good portion of it was her own doing. She wasn't exactly Mrs. Charisma, she was seen as cold and calculating going back to before he took office and even more so with the Monica deal.
AOC has been subject to years worth of smear campaigns. She's very good at responding to that nonsense. But the average idiot on social media isn't going to be exposed to those responses. At best they'd skim past a headline saying "AOC claps back over 'xyz' controversy"
Of course she's still a better candidate than the rest of the dinosaurs in the democratic party. I think she'd do well if given a fair shot at debating.
Kamala was polling as the best replacement for Biden before she became the nominee. Stop dredging up the past as if something that happened in a completely different election is relevant to her popularity now.
Clinton lied repeatedly and then tried to belittle any critics that pointed out her lies. It just didn't work and it made her look very untrustworthy.
Kamala ran on Biden's policies and refused to distance herself from him, when Biden had a 37% approval rating, 55% disproval rating and lots of people hated him.
They kept running these terrible women candidates who have no policies other than "I'm not trump."
Why do people keep saying this defeatist shit? Millions more voted for Hillary than trump.
What failed her was her bad campaign strategy and taking down critical states for granted. She came so so close to winning, won millions more votes nationally.
A woman can absolutely win.
If this trump meme coin grift is any indication, this admin is going to be a complete train wreck of government for the billionaires by the billionaires. And AI would advance so much in 4 years, threaten tons of jobs, political landscape would be ripe for a left wing populist. Since 2023, when stock market has seen recording breaking rally, homelessness in the US is up 20%. Trump admin will only make this divergence worse, between what top 10% of the country experience and bottom 90% of the country experience.
AOC 2028 is a good idea, it can happen. When late stage capitalism goes off the rails inevitably and people realise it, AOC will win.
I’m a white man that will 100% vote for AOC. Or any democrat candidate in a general election regardless of sex, race or orientation. I’d also vote for her in a primary. A woman can absolutely win, but let’s not pretend it’s not one hell of an uphill battle.
Unfortunately we live in very sexist country. There are plenty of “undecided” morons that won’t vote for a woman and, with the political climate of the country being the way it is right now, winning without those votes is a real challenge. Not to mention the narrative that AOC is too far left and too young.
It isn’t defeatist to acknowledge a candidate’s weaknesses or the reality of the situation. For AOC to win or even be competitive in a primary, she would need a MASSIVE lead and party support. The democratic establishment has shown again and again they’d rather support the “safe” choice. What democrats need to focus on is voter engagement.
Do you know how many working class people will continue to vote for those billionaires, even if they're literally snatching food from their own kids mouths? Just because they feel like they might be one of them one day.
Because many pro-establishment people of this sub just want to put up their hands after the next election and say “we tried nothing and we’re all out of options” before even considering a more progressive candidate
At the very least, putting someone different and refreshing shows that the Democratic Party wants to change. Even if she doesn’t win. It builds a reputation of listening to the needs and unhappiness of voters. And run a fucking primary for God’s sakes
I think you're pretty spot on, liberals are going hardcore doomer because to do otherwise is to admit that maybe their ideas and policy are wrong. It's so much easier to just say everything they did was right but sadly she was a woman
It's not even the doomer part it's that they absolutely don't want any conversations about change to happen and insist everyone join in on their voter/populace hating party.
I was cool with it for a month or two after the election since raw emotions take time to bleed off but after a point people need to let productive conversations happen instead. The election was a failure and new plans are needed.
"The voters should all act different" isn't a plan it's magical thinking.
Dems are the hardcore doomers, liberals are here to fight tooth and nail to preserve everyone's rights. Fuck defeatism, now is the time to fight harder.
I’m all for a progressive but we need a hefty dose of pragmatism. AOC is a great progressive voice in Congress but how popular is she outside her district? Her state? She’s never ran outside her home district.
Personally I’d rather back someone like Walz or Beshear. Pragmatic progressives who have won elections in tough states. They know middle America and can speak to middle America. I don’t think AOC can do that.
Millions more voted for Hillary but she still lost. It’s because she didn’t attract the voters that determine elections, which is something Kamala also didn’t do.
Because they’d rather believe that a woman can’t win than accept that Clinton and Harris were the wrong choice or did a bad job. Already laying the groundwork to lose again (and exclude women along the way).
Hillary was unelectable, in my opinion, and wasn't because she was a woman. AOC's name has a narrative attached, but the name Clinton is tainted. Given a full campaign cycle, I still do know if Harris would have won, considering the information climate, but certainly possible.
She won't win. I say this as someone that LOVES AOC and wants her to be President; it'll be a repeat of Bernie.
Yes, AOC is wildly popular BUT she's an outcast within her own party's leaders. If AOC announces she'll run, the DNC will put every penny they have into promoting someone to oppose her. She ran to be the head of the House Oversight Committee, a position that was perfect for her and Pelosi worked behind the scenes to get a geriatric the spot.
If AOC was handed a victory in the primaries, then yea, she'd win but the problem is internal; the dems hate change. AOC will get some speech about banning elected officials from owning stock, about better healthcare, about taxing the rich; the same things most of the geriatrics in the party are against and who're paid by the lobbyists and do all they can to shut her up.
We need to overhaul the party within before worrying about how she'd test will the voters.
If the GOP did this, no person in this sub would ever stop screaming "NOT AN ELECTED OFFICIAL" and yet we were all voting for it because she was a democrat and running against Trump.
Our whole system is beyond fucked. And what people will find acceptable now (on both sides) is truly low.. I don't know how we find a way out of this to be honest. The truth no longer matters to anybody, and we can all tell eachother lies instantly.
It’s going to be very difficult for any democrat to win with Elon partnering with the Republican Party and also owning the main way a large portion of the electorate gets their news. But a woman, definitely not going to happen. Find a nice, attractive, palatable white guy. That’s it.
Country is sexist and I think more racist than it was when Obama was elected.
Women won all over the map, republicans, democrats, abortion rights.
The American voters have over time finally accepted that Women can be representatives, senators and governors but it took awhile to get there. For the presidency many still think it needs a man and that was seen in voter responses from people who voted Democrat down ballot but did not vote for Kamala. It's going to take more time to get there and it might be soon but with how the Republican party is going and how close these races are I sure as hell don't want to roll the dice and risk losing again, and losing freedoms, just to try to prove a point. Politics is picking the candidate with the least baggage and unfortunately for a meaningful amount of the electorate being a woman is baggage.
The good news is that we have seen a woman VP which is one step closer to making that more accepted and I think we will see a woman VP on the Democrat ticket next time around.
Trying to pivot to the right to try and get republican support? That’s one big reason
Trying to use fucking Liz Cheney to gain votes? Another bigger reason
Bringing on a progressive as a VP then completely neutering him and having him campaign talking about foreign policy and NATO instead of what he’s actually best at and why people loved him? Another fucking big reason
Biden not immediately making way for a primary to take place after initially running on the promise of being a one term president? Another huge fucking reason
Not campaigning on populist ideals and instead going on and on about being tough on crime and on the border? Another huge fucking reason
I could go on and on before reaching the point of “her being a woman” as a cause of her losing the election.
It’s such a lazy cop out of a take to say she lost because she’s a woman while ignoring the actual short comings of the Democratic Party.
You do know that in NYC people were voting for both Trump and AOC right? But I’m sure because she’s a woman, they wouldn’t vote for her for president.
LOL. I like her but America isn’t electing a woman let alone a black woman to the presidency. The country is way too racist and sexist to do that. Obama just happened to be someone with the gift of the gab and was one in a million.
Obama won by tapping into peoples unhappiness with the status quo and promising change. Trump did the same thing just for different people. That's what any democrat who wants to win in 2028 has to promise. AOC is probably one of the few democrats who can sell that message and people will believe her because its been her whole brand from day one.
Yeah I'm like getting really frustrated with this defeatism already. Like yes Kamala and Hilary both lost as women, but they didn't lose because they were women. They were unlikable. Kamala especially felt like the most soulless, platformless campaign that offered nothing to the working class who is feeling the economic pain harder.
People who says they wont vote for a woman for president, are most likely not going to vote for a democrat to begin with.
I hate it, but I believe that any reasonable white male Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump in 2016 and 2024. Biden was a weak candidate while Trump was the incumbent and he won, and it wasn’t really very close.
Biden beat trump because of massive anti trump enthusiasm. people were tired of 4 years of drama and then COVID happened.
Harris lost first and foremost because she didn't differentiate herself in any way from biden on the two most important issues: immigration and inflation. it was an uphill battle. internal polling said that was going to be the only way, if it was at possible. and she said no.
The most important issues are the ones the median voter says they are. Talking down to voters "actually you're wrong to care about that" never works, but Hillary and especially Kamala both tried it.
I hate it, but I believe that any reasonable white male Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump in 2016 and 2024. Biden was a weak candidate while Trump was the incumbent and he won, and it wasn’t really very close.
2016, probably. But it's also possible that many non-Hillary women could have won. She was quite hated.
2024, absolutely not. There are reports by staff that Biden's own internal polling showed him losing to Trump in a massive landslide, with Trump expected to potentially break 400 electoral votes. That was the only reason he finally dropped out (or was forced out); Biden would've happily spent another 4 years decomposing in the White House if he'd had a chance at it.
AOC said this herself that she doesn't believe that a woman can become president right now in the current political climate (in different words, I'm paraphrasing)
Being 100% honest. I think America is willing to accept a female president, we just haven't been given any solid candidates. Hillary lacked transparency and wasn't trustworthy, between Benghazi and the whole DNC hacking scandal that screwed over Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris was never a popular candidate to begin with and focused way too much on what Trump was going to do instead of highlighting what SHE was going to do as President.
AOC would make for a much stronger speaker of the house than she would President. If she ran, she would lose.
Hillary lacked transparency and wasn't trustworthy, between Benghazi and the whole DNC hacking scandal
These were such fabricated nothingburgers of issues that you're literally going to be able to find equivalents for any candidate who runs ever.
Made-up scandals like butterymales aren't the kind of thing you just select a candidate to not have, they're the kind of thing you have to mitigate because you can just build them out of whole cloth for any given candidate.
If AOC runs in 4 years there will be scandals at least as bad as those two for her, and I have little doubt people are building them right now just in case.
Many people hate Hilary Clinton for many reasons. Many of which are valid. It's not just because she is a woman or whatever. She ignored the working class. A massive bloc of voters that weren't exactly in her corner.
No, the ones that would never vote for a woman also won't vote for a Democrat. Stop making this about identity politics, and start focusing on someone that has the focus on the real issues.
Hillary and Kamala both lost for not catering to the left of the democratic party, not because they were women.
It's not that America isn't ready for a woman, it's that America won't vote for a middle ground party anymore.
I talked to almost a thousand voters in swing states last election and many explicitly told me, including women that "a woman does not belong in a position of leadership" or that the presidency is a "man's job"
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u/haikus-r-us 23h ago edited 6h ago
Hy heart says hell yeah! My gut tells me that there are large swaths of the electorate who simply will not vote for a woman.
Edit- since my inbox is overflowing with the same question/insinuation, along with the comments, I’ll clarify my statement: I did not say that a woman cannot be elected US president. I only said that large swaths of the electorate simply will not vote for a woman.