The Endless, Maddening Wait for a Woman President
https://newrepublic.com/article/213744/america-first-woman-president-endless-maddening-wait
The Endless, Maddening Wait for a Woman President
Why does the prospect of a female president just seem to get further and further away?
I was sitting at the bar of a coffee shop in South Austin, researching the suffragist movement.
“Those are old newspaper articles?” the guy next to me asked. He might have been in his thirties. He had a loose hipster haircut and expensive sneakers. “Very cool.”
I told him I was reading news stories speculating about the possibility of a female president. The furthest back I’d traced the dream was to suffragist Tennie Claflin, who, a newspaper reported, predicted that “a mixed Presidential ticket” would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election.
“Oh, wow,” the guy marveled. “That’s … a long time ago.”
We talked for a couple of minutes about the recent past, and Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s near misses. “How long do you think it will take?” I asked him.
He thought a bit. “For sure in the next 50 years,” he said. Then he saw my face. “Maybe 20?” He amended: “Soon.”
The country’s next chance to turn “soon” into now is 2028, and without a doubt it is the Democrats’ opportunity, should they choose to embrace it. Karen Finney, a longtime Democratic political consultant, told me her colleagues on the other side of the aisle had no real prospects of a female nominee—not the way the party is now. The Democrats’ field, meanwhile, is unformed. Three women swirl in the mix: Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Harris, who has put out the strongest signals of the three. (We might add a fourth, Amy Klobuchar, who is running for governor of Minnesota this year; if she wins, that’s a fine perch from which to seek the presidency.) Because we have no firm sense of which specific women might be up for consideration, now is exactly the time to consider the Democrats’ current attitude toward nominating any woman at all—and what it means if they don’t.
Most of the party faithful I spoke to seemed to go only so far as to obliquely acknowledge the existence of skittishness around nominating a woman: Usually, I gathered some version of “I’m hearing it, too.” In January, New York magazine asked, “Will Democrats Dare Nominate a Woman for President in 2028?” MS NOW wondered whether, for Democrats, a female candidate at the top of the ticket would be “radioactive.” The most public declamation of the reality Democrats must contend with came from Michelle Obama, who has twice explained her refusal to entertain her own entry into the race as a function of knowing she’d lose: “You all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not.” Indeed, we’ve run A/B tests on the subject, and the results have been heartbreaking: two eminently qualified women against a buffoonish serial sex pest; one qualified but rather boring man against the same tyrant. You can point to a thousand different variables at play, but there was one inarguable constant. The women lost; the man won.
There are obvious reasons for leaders to avoid publicly quashing the hope that a woman might once again top the ticket. One is their obligation to their constituents. For years, Democratic voters have told pollsters that they would like to see a female president elected in their lifetime: 89 percent of them, according to a YouGov poll in October 2025. But partisans are not immune to arguments about electability, and certainly electability—generally pitched as a concern about ideology and not gender—played an enormous role in Joe Biden’s taking the nomination in 2020, when he ran against a record number of female candidates.
For those who are anxious about winning in 2028, it makes gut-level sense to minimize the various specific reasons Harris—and before her, Clinton—lost, and fixate on their gender as a liability. After all, the stakes are so high. Run a woman and fail, and more than the presidency could be lost—democracy, women’s rights, everyone’s rights. “Soon” could become “never.” This is a genuine concern.
And yet it’s also true that if the Democrats nominate a man, the choice would not be neutral. You can insist that any particular female candidate is not the one for you; certainly, I have found myself supporting a man when a woman was in the field. But women have been running for president since before we won the vote, and our chance to lead the country has always been just around the corner. Every time it’s a man at the top of the ticket—even in the days before women could “credibly” run—the choice of candidate has sent a message to voters about who is worthy of consideration and whose voices deserve to be heard. The Harris and Clinton losses were devastating, no doubt. But in 2028, being robbed of even the chance to make a woman president would hurt, too.
The history of people telling women they will not become president is rage-bait. “Never” is always “never.” But a march through the history of “soon” leaves a mark on the heart. Over one hundred years of “someday” makes each next chance feel even further away, not closer. Certainly, women are not the only group that hasn’t had their turn in the Oval Office; our grief is not unique—or rather each intersectionality can claim its own particular shade of mourning. What all women can share is the familiar sense of a promise just a little too far away to be kept.
Tennie Claflin’s prediction that a mixed ticket would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election came after defiant campaigns by her sister Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884 and 1888. That highest, hardest glass ceiling has more cracks than most people know. The hope that it will give is older yet. “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in March 1776. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” (“I cannot but laugh,” John wrote back.)
It was after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 that talk of “soon” took the shape it has today, a respectable guessing game to fill up feature wells when the right news hook comes along: Women have come so far. The presidency is next.
Less than three months after suffrage, newspapers ran a syndicated column evaluating the chances of possible female candidates for president. Women had led a grassroots movement that wrought a change to the Constitution—two movements, if you count how many women had been key to pushing the prohibition amendment through. The White House was the logical next step.
The column’s analysis was as sober and considered as any panel discussion today, perhaps more so. The article quoted Martha Corman, who theorized the front-runner to be suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, “a stateswoman of broad and generous vision, a student of international affairs” who commanded “an organization the like of which no man running for president ever had to support him.” Or perhaps it would be the more radical Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, who might release the same “hunger strikers and prison martyrs” who won the right to vote “on persons who are blocking the way to some other goal of progress the pickets hope to reach.” (Donald Trump is the only candidate in modern times who has seen supporters’ prison martyrdom work in his favor.)
From here, the trail of “soon” winds its way through the American conversation, intersecting with actual campaigns but more often taking place in the space between them. A specific campaign squeezes the question into the shape of a specific person. The mainstream media has been entertaining the idea of electing a woman for more than 100 years; the actual women running have had more trouble finding consideration.
By 1934, the argument that a woman could become president reached the exact same point we remain at today, which is to say that women had by then been elected to every other office. As an Associated Press story that year observed, “The presidency and vice-presidency is the only high government executive office this country has not already accorded women.”
In 1945, a columnist opined that somewhere in the country “is a girl … who may succeed in being elected President of the United States”—after all, that year saw a record number of women serving in Congress: 11.
In 1949, a Gallup poll on willingness to vote for a woman saw the respondents split, 48 percent for and 48 percent against. A poll write-up summarized the state of affairs: “A ‘Madam President’ is as inevitable for the United States as the return of short skirts.” That same year, Harry S. Truman told the delegates of Girls Nation that by the time “all of us old people will be out of the way … you might have this terrible job which I have.”
In 1959, John F. Kennedy wrote that it would happen “during this generation.”
Meanwhile, more and more women tested this theory in the major parties, including Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democrats Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink in 1972. Smaller parties with longer odds took the biggest chances—most of the women who have run for president in the United States have led third-party tickets, and almost half have been women of color.
In 1976, Betty Ford thought it might happen by 1996.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter said it would happen by the time his daughter Amy came of age (and maybe she’d have the job).
In 1984, the same year the Democrat Geraldine Ferraro stepped into place as a vice presidential candidate and lost, Ronald Reagan assured a group of female Republican leaders that they’d see a woman in the office “one of these days,” and four years later added that a woman president was “inevitable.”
In 1990, Ferraro herself said she thought that “we have a real shot at having a woman president in this next decade” because the sexist nature of her coverage—“How I did my hair, where I bought my clothes. Dumb things”—would be put away. “Because I was the first woman, people were caught up in a lot of other things besides my brain,” she told McCall’s. “People got it out of their system in 1984.”
In 1991, 65-year-old Barbara Bush said she planned “to be around” for it. (She died in 2018.)
In 1992, Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” saw more women than ever run for office and more women win. Patricia Aburdene, the co-author of Megatrends for Women, confidently asserted that “male-dominated institutions, from religious fundamentalism to the Senate Judiciary Committee to the Supreme Court, will be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.”
In 1993, in a television interview, Bill Clinton—as his wife stood straight-faced beside him—guessed that it would be “not long,” adding, “probably within my lifetime.”
In February 1999, pollster Larry Sabato, self-proclaimed possessor of a political “crystal ball,” said, “It’s going to happen sooner than anyone expects,” and predicted that if there were four male candidates in the 2000 presidential election, one would be a minority. “People are going to be stunned at how quickly the white male power structure falls.”
In 2006, Laura Bush guessed it was imminent: “I think it will happen probably in the next few terms.”
In 2010, George H.W. Bush saw it on the horizon: “I don’t know who, or when, but I would say fairly soon.”
In 2016—you remember.
In 2017, Hillary Clinton softly echoed her husband’s timeline: “Will we ever have a female president? We will. I hope I’m around to vote for her.”
Then 2024. You remember.
Bill Clinton, two weeks after Harris’s loss in 2024: “Pretty soon.”
Nancy Pelosi, 2025: “Within this next generation.”
Barack Obama, 2026: “Sometime soon,” he told People magazine in June. “In my lifetime.”
Ask a political scientist about women’s representation in American politics and one of the first things you’ll hear is, “When women run, they win.” This is true as far as it goes, which is to say: They win until they get to the presidency. That women succeed in downballot races has, in fact, been true since the 1990s. A 1997 study of more than 60,000 candidates stated unequivocally that “a candidate’s sex does not affect his or her chances of winning an election…. Winning elections has nothing to do with the sex of the candidate,” and no major studies since have found otherwise. A 2016 study of congressional races from 1982 through 2012 found “no evidence of a gender penalty” in “general election vote share [or] probability of victory.” In 2021, a meta-analysis of 67 papers looking at candidate choice concluded that being a woman actually increased support from voters by just under 2 percent, and found “only a modest difference in the effect of gender for white and black candidates.”
Women have run for office in larger and larger numbers, and their proportions have continued to increase—but their representation has moved only incrementally over time, far out of step with their participation as voters (women’s turnout is consistently higher than men’s), as community volunteers (women are 30 percent more likely to volunteer than men), and as political donors (women give less money overall, but tend to make up half of overall unique donors). Women hold about a third of state and federal offices across the United States: 27 percent of senators, 28 percent of the House, and 33.6 percent of state legislators. At the executive level, 25.4 percent of U.S. mayors are women, and 28 percent of governors. Then there’s the presidency, standing still at 0 percent overall. There’s just something different about it.
The discrepancy between “when women run, they win” and the lack of diversity in political leadership was largely framed as a “pipeline problem” through the 1990s, and activists sought to address the issue with amped-up recruitment and candidate workshops. A 2005 study by researchers Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox reframed the debate. Surveying the rise of women in professions that typically generate candidates (including education, law, and business), they documented what they called an “ambition gap.” Lawless and Fox indicated that women didn’t show the same interest in running for office as men, but to describe it as simply a problem of “ambition” disguises a more troubling disconnect. Women were interested in politics at the same rates as men, but they didn’t see themselves as potential candidates. They were also less likely to see themselves as qualified and less likely to have taken steps to run. Lawless and Fox found these gaps to be consistent across demographics. Their book on the subject became a cornerstone of the field, and its title is a bit of a rallying cry: It Takes a Candidate.
The two researchers remained on the case throughout the decades, returning to the original sample in 2008 to find the gap unchanged and the implied solution the same as well: It Still Takes a Candidate came out in 2012. Their 2014 research on young people’s interest in politics found the ambition gap in college students to be just as significant, despite, again, interest in politics being basically equal among genders.
In 2023, these intrepid researchers sallied once more into the surveys, with a paper whose exhaustion bleeds through every line: “It Takes More Than a Candidate: The Invincible Gender Gap in Political Ambition.” The paper is a bleak tour of how little has changed in 20 years, and how women’s prospects have, in some ways, gotten worse. The gap between men who had “ever considered running for office” and women who had ever considered it increased from 16 points in 2001 and 2011 to 18 in 2021. In 2001, there was a 12-point difference between men and women who self-identified as “very qualified” to run for office. In 2011, it was 13, and in 2021, 14. The gap between men and women being approached about running for office has remained constant as well. To be clear, there have been gains in women’s representation—each cycle seems to bring a new record. What Lawless and Fox and other researchers emphasize, however, is that those gains aren’t nearly enough.
Lawless and Fox offer a hypothesis to explain the stasis despite 20 years of enormous change in so many other respects. They call it “the representation paradox.” More women are seeking office than ever before, which means even more women are put through the meat grinder of increasingly more toxic elections. (If you want a vivid example of just how personal and wretched campaigning for women in the modern age has become, search “CANDIDATE NAME + PORN” and notice how the results differ for women and men.) Specifically, when it comes to women taking on the most visible race in the country, if not the world, they may run, but they mostly lose—and these campaigns are particularly nasty.
There’s no doubt that something has made Americans, especially women, who have witnessed these candidacies more discouraged about their role in the political process than they once were. A survey in 2015 by YouGov showed that 67 percent of Americans believed the country to be ready for a female president. Ahead of the 2024 election, 57 percent said the country was ready. YouGov’s October 2025 poll showed support for that belief dropping to just 48 percent. A similarly timed survey by the American University School of Public Affairs found an even more precipitous decline: Just 38 percent of respondents agreed that the “men of America are ready to elect more women to political office” in general. Only 20 percent of women under 50 thought this was the case—consistent with 2018 Pew polling that shows women have led the shift in pessimism about America’s readiness. In 2014, 41 percent said that voters had a problem electing women to high office, and in 2018, 57 percent did, while men’s assessment stayed essentially the same (at 31 and then 32 percent).
These numbers fly in the face of Gallup’s poll, which generally shows upwards of 90 percent of all Americans saying that they, personally, are ready to vote for a female president, a number that has remained more or less constant for years. Others have found less stellar results, but all sorts of polling show Americans portraying themselves as willing to vote for some hypothetical woman, while their guesses as to other people’s willingness to do that are less rosy.
There’s an argument that asking about what your neighbors think and not what you would do is a sneaky way around social desirability bias—the tendency people have to answer questions in ways they think are more socially acceptable. Contra Michelle Obama, I think it’s a little more complicated than the country simply lying about its readiness. People are correctly surveying the environment as it is rather than trying to figure out what others might “really” believe. If the world seems sexist and racist on its face, why might you think some people feel differently, deep inside?
This type of misjudgment of others is called “pluralistic ignorance.” According to one review of the literature, this sociological phenomenon explains “the lag between a society’s perception of itself and actual changes in people’s private beliefs and values” in all sorts of areas, particularly race and gender. A landmark study in 1931 showed that white fraternity members consistently said that they themselves were willing to admit racial minorities but just as consistently voted against doing so—because they believed their fraternity brothers were against it. Other studies have shown that men understate other men’s support of parental leave relative to their own and that men and women underestimate men’s concerns about gender bias in STEM contexts. Without intervention, ignorance of this type perpetuates the problem.
This is the loop of “soon.” As long as women perceive that the path to the presidency is all misery and no glory, as long as they believe they are running uphill only to hit a brick wall, there is going to be a lid on the number of women willing to run.
In fact, according to Lawless and Fox, women under 40 aren’t just pessimistic about women’s chances in politics, they are most likely to see the political environment as particularly hostile to women. Over a third agree strongly that “women face more scrutiny and challenges when they run for office than men do,” compared to over a quarter of women over 60. They are also somewhat more likely to doubt that they have thick enough skin to endure a campaign: 66 percent compared to 61 percent. This is the next generation of potential female candidates, and they don’t want the job. Or to put a finer point on it: They don’t want to go through the painful experience of running only to fail in the end. Once again, the truism of “When women run, they win” cannot break through what’s on the news and in their social media feed: Lawless and Fox found that only 23 percent of women think women are just as likely as men to win their races.
As Lawless and Fox observe, “to the degree that the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, or Kamala Harris serve as a civic education project about women who run for office, they appear to reinforce, or perhaps exacerbate, women’s doubts. Thus, for many well-qualified women, dismissing the idea of running for office is a rational response.” This is an incomplete hypothesis. The problem is not so much that these candidates, Clinton and Harris in particular, faced disparagement and ridicule and even more subtle forms of bias. The problem is that they faced those hurdles and it was for naught.
Even worse: Look who they lost to.
I was a reluctant Hillary Clinton supporter. I was not especially taken with her 2008 campaign. I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. But on Election Day of that year, I felt the surge of hope that many did. My mother died in 2012, and I found myself thinking of her as I walked to my office, how tickled she’d be. My immediate grief that night was as much for the happiness I thought her victory would have meant for my mom as it was for the general state of the country.
Thousands—hundreds of thousands—of women shared that grief. It mobilized the Women’s March on Washington and the hundreds of satellite marches around it. On election night in 2024, that same pang pieced many of the same hearts. We got the message: You are not wanted here.
The desire for a female candidate isn’t universal among women, or at least it doesn’t always trump women’s other desires and concerns. Harris won the lowest support among women of any recent Democratic nominee. White women without college degrees voted against the female presidential candidates in significant numbers in the general election when they got the chance; women in the Republican primary in 2024 were cool toward Nikki Haley. But is unconcern about women’s representation proof that you’re immune to the message that women aren’t suited for the job? No. In fact, it means you’ve internalized the message more completely. Women made up around 45 percent of Democratic congressional nominees in 2024 and 16 percent of Republican hopefuls, despite persistent and progressively more alarmed calls for candidate recruitment. They make up just 15 percent of Republicans serving. Representative Elise Stefanik called the situation a “crisis” in 2018, and while it’s no longer a crisis, Republican women’s representation lags far behind that of Democrats. You could argue that’s because Stefanik’s crusade is dwarfed by the GOP’s larger project. But what’s happening in their party is just a more dramatic version of what we’re all living through.
When I asked Betsy Hodges, the former mayor of Minneapolis, what she thought of the Democrats nominating a woman in 2028, she interjected: “If there’s an election in 2028.” Whether or not the nominee is female, she pointed out, doesn’t matter if elections aren’t fair and free. But if it does seem like the election will proceed, she said, a male candidate would at least mean “less noise in the process, fewer think pieces about whatever.”
“I don’t know,” she went on. “I’m kind of agnostic on the idea of whether or not a woman can win.” At the moment, she said, people are making decisions about the nomination and the presidency based on the devastating disappointments of the Trump Era. “The chances of people fully healing from the trauma of the last 10 years by November of 2028—the chances are pretty slim.”
Hodges isn’t wrong to be cynical. Her agnosticism about running a woman—the wish for less noise, the acknowledgment that people will be making decisions under stress—fits the pattern Lawless and Fox describe. “I think a lot of women, having been disappointed twice now … are reverting back to their disappointment as well,” Hodges told me. This is the discouragement loop, working as designed.
The loop can be interrupted. In 2020, researchers surveying potential Democratic primary voters found that presenting “when women run, they win” data caused a measurable shift in intentions to vote for a woman. Suggestively, showing primary voters polls about America’s “readiness” to vote for a woman did little to shift behavior. As the study notes, neutralizing electability concerns “may require more than merely correcting perceptions of others’ attitudes; it may require shifting perceptions of others’ likely behavior.” Perhaps not enough primary voters got the memo; most assuredly, what primary voters actually did in 2020 is the more meaningful statement on likely behavior than what you’d read in a survey.
Optimistic observers might argue that a woman who survives a truly bruising primary might fare better than Clinton or Harris in the general election. After all, however unique their paths to the nomination, both were tarred with the same undermining allegation: They didn’t really earn it. Harris, obviously, suffered because of Biden’s selfish decision to run for reelection. His delayed exit from the race made Harris’s coronation a matter about which the party had little choice. In 2016, the field was basically cleared for Clinton; then, once she was challenged by Sanders, the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly put a finger or two on the scale for her. And all this came trailing decades of accusations that she was only in the public eye at all because of Bill anyway.
Those analyses may be accurate. It’s also true that allegations of not having earned something are especially damaging to women candidates, who come into positions of power having to defend their right to be there. Biden certainly benefited from the Democratic establishment’s backing of him. He was unquestionably the candidate who had waited his “turn,” and he didn’t suffer from the same sorts of whispers. That these narratives cling to Clinton and Harris as explanations for their losses doesn’t suggest that all the next female nominee has to do is win a “normal” nomination—rather, it suggests just how durable the narrative of deservingness is. I want to believe that all it would take to shed this suspicion is a decisive-enough win, but everything I’ve ever seen tells me that the bar for “deserving” is always set in retrospect, and women never fully surpass it. This isn’t an argument against voting for a woman in the primary; it’s just a warning against the inevitable.
Sending another woman into the maw of 2028 is a risk. A brutal enough campaign and another loss for the Democrats could continue to suppress women’s interest in running—if (as Hodges worried) there’s ever another election again, that is. Democratic primary voters are not wrong to believe that democracy is on the ballot. A Republican win could endanger women beyond their mere presence on the ticket or their absence from the Oval Office, not to mention what might befall other vulnerable groups. The whole architecture of the country is wobbling—do you want to gamble that sexism (conscious or not) won’t move a couple of ten thousand votes somewhere in the Upper Midwest?
But waiting to give a woman a chance to win is a risk, too. It creates the circumstances for another generation of women to mostly absent themselves from the process.
This is the cost of “soon.”
Should a woman not get the Democratic nomination, the best-case scenario—barring a surprise such as a dynastic intervention putting Ivanka on the throne, say—would move the prospect of a female nominee or even president to 2032.
So, eight more years, or even just four.
Things are getting better, and it feels churlish to argue with that. Yes, there are more and more women in Congress, on the bench, and in city hall. But breathless headlines and raised-arm celebrations can hide the pace of change. Balancing hope, which is necessary, against reality, which is just as essential, is a trick for anyone without power. If I’ve come down hard on the side of reality, it because I’m so sick of “soon.”
In my tour of “soon” I also found truth-tellers, women who sized up the country’s intransigence and spelled out the double standards. In 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt, often spoken of as a presidential candidate herself, slyly drew out the double standard: “We certainly will not have a woman president until some woman worthy of being president appears on the horizon. In the meantime, men both worthy and unworthy will probably fill that office.” And Gloria Steinem in 1983, calling the shot: “Most categories of men will precede any category of women.… We are likely to have a Jewish male president, a black male president, Hispanic male president before we elect any women.” Even Shirley Chisholm reflected in 1972, “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.”
These women weren’t being pessimistic. They were being honest. Their honesty didn’t change the outcome then, and honesty alone won’t change it now. Only action can.
You are not sexist for wanting the candidate to be a man or supporting a man. At the same time, you get to decide if a hundred years of “soon” might now add up to something. To wait longer is to reinforce the exact system that’s brought us here. A hundred years of “soon” is not a promise. It’s a pattern.
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