Harris’s Rise Comes Amid New Political
Vice President Harris is staring down the political reality that she could be the nation’s first female president, and her rapid rise is posing new challenges for Republicans and Democrats on how to approach gender-related issues when seeking to appeal to voters.
While she would not be the first woman to lead Democrats at the top of the ticket, her emergence comes against a different political backdrop, eight years after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran against former President Trump.Since 2016, women have been in large part responsible for Democratic gains up and down the ballot, while the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion at the federal level, has played a major role in galvanizing women.
“Kamala Harris, unlike Hillary Clinton, has a little bit more of a roadmap about what it means to run for president of the United States, particularly against Donald Trump, because she watched it as we all did, in 2016,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. “Trump was a bit of an unknown in 2016.”
Trump’s election led to a massive reaction from women, particularly left-leaning women voters. The day after Trump was inaugurated, millions of women took to the streets of major U.S. cities, including Washington, to protest Trump. Two years later, a wave of Democratic women was elected to Congress in the 2018 midterm elections, which were largely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s first two years in office. “The loss of Hillary Clinton motivated a lot of women,” Walsh said. “We saw record numbers of women running and winning for Congress. We have record numbers of women now serving in Congress. And then in 2020, we saw for the first time multiple women on a debate stage.”
Two years after Trump was ousted from office, his nominated Supreme Court justices played a pivotal role in overturning Roe v. Wave in 2022. That same year, Democrats were able to blunt a nationwide red wave in the midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats were also able to make inroads in Virginia’s off-year elections.
Source:thehill.com
