By Christine Matthews and Celinda Lake, USA Today Opinion Contributors
This article first appeared in USA Today on August 13, 2024

Is 2024 the year a woman will be elected president of the United States? A majority say America is ready for a woman president, but will it finally happen? People have doubts. Last year, just one-in-four American adults surveyed by Pew Research said it is extremely or very likely they will see a woman president in their lifetime.  Of course, last year’s thought experiment has turned into a real-life contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris is not only a woman, but she is also of Black and Indian descent. So, the question becomes: Is America ready not only for a woman, but for a woman of color to serve as president? The hurdles are seen as significantly higher for Black women than for white women according to a Pew Research survey. Many a think piece has been devoted to the idea that our first woman president would be a white Republican woman but that opportunity for 2024 was extinguished with Nikki Haley’s primary loss to Donald Trump. Instead, the possibility exists for a Black Democratic woman to break that final gender barrier, but it won’t be easy.

We’ve studied attitudes toward women candidates for decades and are honored to be the pollsters behind much of the ground-breaking research on this topic conducted by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. This research has covered a wide range of themes including – how women candidates can rebound from a loss, demonstrate competency in a crisis, run for the top job as the second in command, and how to address many of the implicit and explicit expectations put on women candidates. Simply put, women have to do more than men to prove they are qualified and are held to a higher standard of likeability. If a woman candidate doesn’t have children, she might be subject to criticism that she is a “childless cat lady,” but if she has young children at home, there will still be questions about her ability to manage both her family and her job. If you have ever noticed that Kamala Harris has a uniform similar in style to the Hillary Clinton pantsuit, it is because women don’t have the luxury of looking like Bernie Sanders with mittens.  Voters expect women to be pulled-together on the campaign trail and in office.

While Bernie Sanders can get away with mittens and an aura of curmudgeon, voters also need to find women candidates likeable. In focus groups, one of the kiss-of-death comments we would hear about Hillary Clinton – often from women - was that she was “smart.” And then there would be a pause and what would be implied or sometimes said was that she wasn’t relatable or likeable.  

Kamala Harris’s favorability ratings as Vice President haven’t been great – but since Biden’s endorsement of her as the nominee polls have shown her image to be on a more positive trajectory.

The Trump campaign’s early assault on her laugh as a point of ridicule largely missed the mark although more personal attacks can be expected from a candidate who seems to revel in them. How she reacts will be key.  As a candidate, Barack Obama was highly attuned to the need to not come off as an “angry Black man,” and this is something that undoubtedly is on the minds of the Harris campaign. Black women – even more than white women – walk a tightrope with voters when it comes to expressing anger. That may be why when Trump said Kamala Harris had “turned Black” just recently, she came out with an even-keeled response focused on the larger picture not herself, “Americans deserve better than Donald Trump’s divisiveness and disrespect.” 

More than anything, though, Harris will need to demonstrate that she has the qualifications to be president and to show tangible evidence of what she has done in office.  We have been a little taken aback by the number of voters who say to us, “what has she done?”  It feels like this question is coming up more for Harris because she is a woman. What do they think Mike Pence did as Vice President? What did Al Gore do besides invent the internet?

 In our research examining how a female Lt Governor could successfully run for Governor in her state, we found that voters wanted to hear what she had achieved and what problems she had solved independently from the governor. They needed to see her leadership abilities, not just her ability to stand in for or help the governor with his goals. It will be important for Kamala Harris to identify some things she has owned and successfully championed apart from President Biden. She took on a more prominent role in speaking out for abortion rights after the Dobbs decision and she appears more comfortable than Biden asserting a leading role for restoring abortion rights. Harris was highly visible during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late July visit to Washington, undoubtedly to address questions about her ability to manage foreign relations as commander-in-chief.

And while Donald Trump has said if Kamala Harris is elected, she would be a “play toy” to world leaders, a majority of voters disagree that a president’s gender would impact the world’s respect for the United States. Americans haven’t seen a woman in the role of commander-in-chief which makes it more difficult for them to visualize it but it’s not impossible. Hillary Clinton came close in 2016 and, as Margaret Thatcher said, “Sometimes you have to fight a battle more than once to win.”