Women can win elections

Women can win elections

Don’t let exaggerated fears stand in the way of nominating them

SlowBoring.com

May 13, 2021

Matthew Yglesias

Democratic U.S. Vice Presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) speak prior to a memorial service in honor of the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Statuary Hall of the US Capitol, on September 25, 2020 in Washington, DC. 

(Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the memoirs of working politicians to be searchingly accurate, so the self-serving aspects of Elizabeth Warren’s new book didn’t bother me as much as they did Jonathan Chait.

What did bother me, though, is the specific time she takes in the book to attribute her defeat to sexism, because the problem there isn’t just literal accuracy but what impact it has down the line. Broadly speaking, I think Warren overstates this problem. But I also don’t think she’s 100% mistaken. Hillary Clinton and her senior staff also put a lot of weight on sexism in their accounts of her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in 2016. Most Democrats like and admire Hillary Clinton, and they take what she says seriously. And she had two big statements during Trump’s first term that I think made an impression on people:

Donald Trump is a uniquely dangerous person and we need to end his presidency by any means necessary.

Sexism makes it hard for a woman to defeat Donald Trump.

It’s very natural for rank-and-file Democrats to respond to that with a negative assessment of the electability of women who are running for president.

And it’s pretty important to pull out of that spiral in which women running for office face a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. Most Democrats are women, so if Democrats shy away from tapping female talent, they are going to handicap themselves in a serious way. And I also think it’s just analytically wrong — if you factor out the specific salting of the earth done in the wake of Clinton’s defeat, there’s no real reason to believe that a woman nominee couldn’t be very strong.

Gross vs net sexism

When Al Smith ran for president in 1928, he was very clearly hampered by anti-Catholic bigotry. By contrast, by the time JFK ran for president in 1960 he not only won, but he plausibly benefitted on the net from his Catholic identity because he scored a staggering 80% of the Catholic vote which, by that time, was quite large.

Importantly, though, that doesn’t mean there was no anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States in 1960! It just means that on net, JFK probably gained more votes from pro-Catholic sentiment than he lost from anti-Catholic sentiment.

By the same token, there’s a theory that anti-Black racism cost Obama three to five percentage points in 2008. Nate Cohn argues that’s probably an overestimate, and I think he’s pretty persuasive. But clearly, he did lose some votes due to racial identity. At the same time, it also seems pretty clear that Obama gained some votes from being Black — 2008 and 2012 saw record Black turnout and record Democratic Party Black vote share. Unfortunately for Democrats, the population demographics of the United States are such that even record turnout still leaves the African American share of the electorate peaking at 13% in 2012.

JFK was luckier — the United States was 25% Catholic back in 1960. If the Black population share doubled, Obama’s odds of benefitting on the net from racial identity would have been a lot higher.

All that throat-clearing is to say that nothing in my argument should be taken to deny that women in politics face sexist and misogynistic attacks. Prominent politicians get attacked by their opponents. They get attacked unfairly by their opponents. And people say sexist things to and about women. So when a woman is in the political arena, she will face unfair sexist attacks. But many people (especially women) also find the idea of voting for a woman to be unusually exciting — Clinton’s campaign and Warren’s campaign were both unusually important to many women I know because of what putting a woman in the White House would mean to them, to the world, and to the country. Several men I know who are the parents of daughters felt the same way. They voted for Joe Biden, but they wanted to show their girls that a woman could be president. I remember standing in line to vote in 2016 and the excitement from some of my neighbors was palpable and very reminiscent of the vibe in 2008 — people felt they were about to be part of making history.

That’s just all to level-set. The question isn’t “do women in politics face sexism?” it’s “are women in politics at some crippling disadvantage?” and I think the evidence points to no.

Women who win nominations do well

It is obviously difficult to prove anything about this definitively.

But here are some studies that I have seen that influence my thinking.

Lefteris Anastasopoulos used “to assess whether chance nomination of female candidates to run in the general election affected the amount of campaign funds raised, general election vote share and probability of victory in House elections between 1982 and 2012” and found that conditional on being nominated, women do just as well as men.

Jennifer Lawless and Katherine Pearson find that women who run for House win both primaries and general elections at the same rate as men. But, women are less likely to be nominated because women face more competition in primaries.

Lawless and Denny Hayes find in their book “Women on the Run” that male and female candidates fare equally well, but that women are much less likely to run for office. There are many reasons for this, but they find that one reason is that women believe they will face an electoral penalty due to their gender.

Presidential races are not legislative races, and it’s not certain that these findings — which are mostly drawn from the much-more-numerous pool of legislative races — hold for the presidency.

But “Women on the Run” came out in 2016 and made a big impression on me. Due to its findings, I worried that when Clinton and her team started putting heavy weight on sexism in their account of the election outcome, they would be creating a problem for potential future contenders. And it does seem possible to me that Warren was hampered by some Lawless-esque effects — she was reluctant to jump into the 2016 race and when she did run in 2020, she faced competition from Bernie Sanders in her ideological lane1 and from Pete Buttigieg in her demographic lane that made it hard to get a clean shot at Joe Biden.

In defense of voters who doubted Warren’s electability, I really did think she was a very risky choice who would have underperformed. But that’s not because she was a woman; it’s because her electoral track record in Massachusetts was genuinely bad.

The woman who I think very genuinely suffered from the Clinton effect was instead Amy Klobuchar.

Amy Klobuchar is good at winning elections

Here’s some statewide elections that happened in Minnesota in 2018:

Keith Ellison won the attorney general race by 4 points.

Tim Walz won the gubernatorial race by 11 points.

Tina Smith won the Senate special election by 10.5 points.

Amy Klobuchar won her Senate race by 24 points. 

I think the basic story you see here is that Ellison suffered due to scandal and the perception that he’s unusually left-wing. Walz and Smith both did very well because 2018 was a great year for Democrats and Minnesota is a blueish state. And Klobuchar just crushed it, because Klobuchar is very good at winning elections.

In 2012, she ran 12 points ahead of Obama in Minnesota. Back in 2006 when she first won her Senate seat, she beat her Republican opponent by 20 points in a year when a Republican got re-elected governor. People like Amy Klobuchar!

The electability case for Joe Biden made sense to me, but Klobuchar always seemed like the real electability choice. All the Biden stuff applied to her. But her electoral record was much more recent and relevant. And she did well specifically in the Midwest, which is important to the Electoral College. Biden actually came surprisingly close to losing thanks to a massive Electoral College penalty that Klobuchar could potentially have reduced. She was also younger, didn’t have past positions on Iraq or NAFTA to disavow, and I thought she would be more “exciting” while still being moderate.

Now it turns out she might have gotten tripped up by the fact that she was Hennepin County DA during an incident when Derek Chauvin shot someone and didn’t get charged. But this isn’t something people were thinking about during the primary. I do think it’s very plausible that people had in their head “if you care about electability, go for the man.” But based on what was known at the time, it seemed to me that she was a formidable contender and that in the future, Democrats should be eager to nominate moderate women with strong electoral track records.

Women do well in foreign elections

Michelle Goldberg wrote a column titled “There Could Never Be a Female Andrew Yang” with a subtitle of “No woman with his résumé would have a chance of becoming New York’s mayor” that spoke to a frustration that I know is widely shared.

There’s a sense that women in politics are often reduced to a kind of earnest striver role, as with Yang repeatedly indicating that he’d hire Katherine Garcia as Deputy Mayor while she’s out there saying that if you want to hire her to run the city, you should elect her mayor. Hillary Clinton seems to have, in many ways, been penalized for her vast experience — it marked her as an “insider” and part of the “political establishment.” But could a woman possibly win without exemplary qualifications and extensive experience?

I think it’s notable that the prime minister of Denmark is a woman who was born in 1977; the prime minister of New Zealand is a woman who was born in 1980; and the prime minister of Finland is a woman who was born in 1985. This is not a large sample, but there simply aren’t that many center-left heads of government on the world stage today. It’s those three plus Canada, the United States, Spain, and maybe France. Meaning that three out of six or seven currently-serving center-left heads of government are not just women, but specifically young women.

Annalena Baerbock, born in 1980, is a Green Party member of parliament in Germany from the state of Brandenberg and has been for the past eight years. She’s never served in a federal or state cabinet. But she is the Green Party candidate for chancellor despite this relatively scant experience. Is she really qualified? Well, I’d vote for her, and according to the polls so may the people of Germany who are currently putting her in first place and on track to be the first-ever Green chancellor.

Of course, the election isn’t until September and she may fall back.

But for now, it seems like a fourth example of the general model in which a younger woman comes across as both an honest, fresh-faced outsider but also a competent non-radical person.

America is different

What Goldberg said to me about this is that we are seeing the difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system.

In a parliamentary system, you can be promoted by your colleagues without needing to put yourself forward in the kind of way that could mark a woman as excessively ambitious or power-hungry. And stereotypically feminine virtues like collaborating well with others are rewarded in that kind of process.

That seems insightful to me.

But it is also true that America’s wide-open nominating process nonetheless has opportunities for elite actors to try to elevate people if they want to. The New York Times editorial board, certainly, was trying to say the same thing as me about Klobuchar vs Biden in their endorsement. But then they got weird about it by also endorsing Elizabeth Warren when an unequivocal Times endorsement of the not-so-well-known Klobuchar would have been a big deal for her.

Klobuchar also just didn’t win support from other potential elite constituencies like Midwestern Elected Officials (Gretchen Whitmer, Tony Evers, Sherrod Brown), Moderate African American Politicians (who went for Biden), or Women Who Like Elizabeth Warren But Think She’s Too Left Wing (Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, Kyrsten Sinema, Jackie Rosen).

Maybe everyone was just mad about the salad/comb thing or who knows what else. It just looks to me like there are in fact potential opportunities for people to do the parliamentary-style thing of trying to elevate a highly electable woman leader, and the elite coordination just didn’t happen.

An operative’s take on this is that the relevant difference between the American and foreign systems is the way campaign finance works. In America’s decentralized, entrepreneurial fundraising system, what you get is successful, professional women wanting to donate to candidates who speak to them. So you get a lot of love for women with impressive credentials who tend to center progressive social values, rather than just random reasonably charismatic people who say popular stuff. The question is, in other words, would EMILY’s List be excited about a woman with Andrew Yang’s resume?

I put a pin in all these international differences as known-unknowns. What I’d like people to take away is that donors and other elites should emphasize electability more, with electability specifically meaning “takes popular positions and talks about popular stuff” rather than “white men.” On the presidential level, meanwhile, these considerations are probably a little moot in the short-term just because Kamala Harris will have such a leg up against any opponent in 2028.

Kamala Harris should try to be very popular

Despite Harris being the odds-on favorite, I still do think it’s important to talk about the assumption that electability is just code for “nominate a man,” because I think everyone should worry a little about Harris’ electability. Polls consistently show her favorability to be markedly lower than Biden’s.

She’s very smart and it’s really hard to rise from District Attorney of San Francisco (which is, after all, only the 12th largest county in the state) to California Attorney General and then U.S. Senator and thence to Vice President. But she often comes across to me as a little dug-in on the stuff that helped her achieve those goals — adding her to the ticket really helped Biden impress West Coast donors, for example — rather than the upcoming goal of “win a general election against a Republican in the key midwestern swing states.”

It’s not all bad, either. I would just ask that you run everything through a filter of “does this help win in Wisconsin?”

Tweeting about the troops is probably better than using the acronym AANHPI, which I am pretty sure is not how any actual human being identifies.

The main thing is you don’t want to get into a mindset where any critique is read as sexist or any shortfall in results is the outcome of sexism. The natural state of Democratic Party politics is for all the staffers to be young college graduates living in a coastal city in a way that biases your operation. If the candidate is as old as Joe Biden with personal memories of George H.W. Bush winning Delaware in a landslide, then he can provide a corrective. But most politicians (thankfully!) are not that old and need to work at it.

Harris just needs to remember that her odds of winning the nomination are very high, and will only be strengthened by her being broadly popular and thus looking highly electable. She should talk a lot to Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer and Tammy Baldwin and Tina Smith and Dana Nessel about women who win elections in the Midwest, and she should do what they say. And if donors or staffers or whatever don’t like it, tell them that when they win statewide in Michigan and Wisconsin, they can give her advice. But we have lots of examples of women being electable, and the important thing is to promote them and copy them.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/women-electable