CHICAGO – Delegates wore Suffragette white; Vice President Kamala Harris wore black.
Actress Eva Longoria led the crowd with the slogan “.he is evil” and other speakers raised the possibility of putting a woman in the White House, but Harris never acknowledged that she would be the first female president in American history. acceptance speech Thursday to the Democratic National Convention.
During the four nights of the congress, the word “representation” was barely heard from the stage.
Eight years after Hillary Clinton chanted “I’m with her” and built her campaign around “breaking the highest, toughest glass ceiling,” Harris let the history-making potential of her candidacy speak for itself. fairy tale: Show, don’t tell.
“I don’t think she needs to remind people that she’s a black woman,” said former Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, who is now a top White House official in President Joe Biden.
According to a party strategist, one look at Harris is enough to know she’s about to break with 235 years of white men in the White House, so there’s no need to expose that fact at a time when former President Donald Trump and his allies have so much going on. Harris”DEI to work” which did not earn its spot on the ballot.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during an event at the University of Chicago this week with former Obama strategist David Axelrod that Harris became the first female president “brought tears to my eyes, but she didn’t vote at the ballot box.”
“There is icing on this cake. This is not a cake,” Pelosi added.
Harris rarely hides her gender or race and often talks about being a woman—one of her first steps after becoming the party’s presumptive nominee was to reach out to her Black sorority—and the need to “kick that f—ing door down” when it is not open to women and people of color.
But he doesn’t talk about what it means to have a black woman president in his speeches or TV ads.
During the convention the most direct emphasis Harris’ history-making potential came from Clinton herself, the first woman to run for the leadership of a major party.
On Monday, dressed as a white suffragette, Clinton positioned Harris and herself in the nation’s long struggle for gender equality.
“We’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. And tonight [we’re] it is very close to being overcome once and for all,” said Clinton. “On the other side of this glass ceiling, Kamala Harris raises her hand and is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.”
In a way, Harris’ approach is actually a reversal of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, when she didn’t draw attention to her gender (until her campaign began to unravel).
That was his strategy pretend to be tough to quell voters’ implicit bias against women in executive power.
When Clinton ran again in 2016, she changed course highlighting her gender and saying it’s time to put a woman in the White House.
Toughness has also been a key theme for Harris, with the campaign touting her record as a “fighting” former prosecutor, as her husband Doug Emoff calls it.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer developed a no-nonsense “Big Grech” image of herself, calling Harris a “tough, tried and completely badass leader.”
Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016 was a crushing defeat for many women, but it also marked the beginning of the #MeToo movement, the Women’s March and wave of women running for office.
This helped bridge the imagination gap for female presidential candidates, as Clinton won a majority of the popular vote. Harris did not face Clinton’s questions about whether Americans would vote for a woman president, as nearly 66 million Americans have already voted.
And 82 million Americans voted for Harris to be vice president in 2020.
Women also increase their ranks in other elected offices with almost every election, with 25 women currently serving in the Senate, 125 in the House of Representatives, and 99 in state executive offices. according to To the Center for Women in Politics.
They are still underrepresented in the halls of power compared to the general population, but women in power are no longer a novelty.
Moreover, Clinton, Trump, and Roe v. The electorate has changed thanks to Wade’s downfall.
For example, Donald Trump won white women in both 2016 and 2020, but polls currently show the date gender difference between the parties The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Since Wade’s decision, Harris has opted to win the women’s in November.
Much of the vote Harris won over Biden came from women who didn’t need him to “first” express his potential to rally behind him.
After the 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee conducted extensive focus group and survey research to try to understand what was going on. One key finding was that women didn’t believe Democrats’ claims that Trump would be bad for women and dismissed it as Trump’s hot air trying to overturn Roe.
“Women who say it’s just noise now know it’s not confusion,” Perez said.