The Memo: Can Harris succeed where Hillary failed against Trump?

Vice President Harris has the chance to succeed where Hillary Clinton failed — in the quest to defeat former President Trump and become the first female president.

Right now, it looks like she has about a 50-50 shot.

There is plenty of Democratic excitement around Harris’s rise to become the presumptive nominee following President Biden’s July 21 decision to stand aside. But Trump leads Harris in national polling averages and in most of the swing states — albeit by much narrower margins than he enjoyed over Biden.

Some prominent Democratic women feel a mixture of hope and trepidation as they look at the months ahead.

Patti Solis Doyle, who served as campaign manager for Clinton’s first presidential quest in 2008, said she believed Harris holds some advantages that the former senator did not enjoy.

Even in 2008, Solis Doyle noted, Clinton “had been on the national political stage for more than a decade. She was someone the public knew very well and someone who was very polarizing. You either loved Hillary Clinton or you hated Hillary Clinton and it was cemented.”

Harris “does not have that same burden. While she has been on the national stage, it has been for a much shorter period of time.”

Even so, asked whether Harris would have to overcome some voter biases simply by virtue of being a woman, Solis Doyle responded: “Sure, of course.” 

“While we have come a long way, there is still work to do. It is 2024 and this country has not elected a woman president. I find that astonishing,” she said.

Other voices agree that Harris, or indeed any female nominee, has particular advantages in a race against Trump.

Some of those are demographic, such as a presumed greater appeal to female voters. Some are issue-based, such as the idea that Harris can put an even sharper point on Democratic arguments about reproductive rights. 

And some are specific to Trump — the sense that a Black, female former prosecutor is especially well-suited to challenging a Republican nominee who was found liable for the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case last year, and who has a history of boorish comments aimed at prominent women such as Rosie O’Donnell and Megyn Kelly.

Yet, against all that, there is a worry that some voters will retreat once again from voting for a female president. 

Women have risen to many of the most influential positions in politics. But the top job has always eluded them and, beyond Clinton, some notable female candidates have unperformed expectations. 

Harris herself and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) both fell into this category in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Outside observers are bracing for a vicious campaign, one way or another.

“I think the campaign rhetoric is going to be really ugly around gender and race,” said Kristy Sheeler, a professor of communication studies at Indiana University Indianapolis and the author of a 2013 book about political culture called “Woman President.”

Having Harris as the nominee “provides tremendous opportunity, and at the same time, it’s not a safe choice,” said Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky. “We are still a very misogynistic country. Unlike Britain or India or Pakistan, the United States has never had a woman lead it.”

Republicans and conservatives, of course, push back against the whole framing of the issue of Harris’s gender.

They contend that such a focus amounts to identity politics and is irrelevant to her capacity to do the job. 

The charge from some in the GOP that Harris is a “DEI hire” — a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programs — aims to give the impression that the vice president’s race and gender have helped, not hindered, her career. 

Trump appeared to be making a similar case in his onstage interview on Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago. The former president alleged, incorrectly, that Harris had only embraced a Black identity — or “happened to turn Black,” as he put it — in recent years.

“Race and gender have nothing to do with why Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told this column. “Kamala failed at her job as Border Czar, supported all of Joe Biden’s disastrous policies, and lied to the American people about Biden’s cognitive decline. She is weak, dishonest, and dangerously liberal.”

Leavitt also contended that “the media’s negative portrayal of President Trump and his treatment of women is entirely false. President Trump is loved by millions of women across the country, and those who know him personally, myself included, will tell you he’s supportive, generous, and kind.”

In terms of policies, Leavitt asserted that Trump’s first term had economically “uplifted” women, and that he had made expanding childcare and paid family leave “top priorities in his administration.” In a second term, she said, “President Trump will make America strong, safe, and prosperous again for all women.”

The dynamics around female candidates and elections are, to be sure, complicated.

In 2016, for example, exit polls showed white women favoring Trump by nine points over Clinton, despite the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape having emerged in the campaign’s closing weeks. Black and Latino women voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

Even on the topic of abortion, male and female views aren’t as vastly different as is sometimes portrayed. 

A CBS News/YouGov poll in June, commissioned to mark the second anniversary of the striking down of Roe v. Wade, found 37 percent of women believing abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. 43 percent of men held the same belief.

Democrats — women especially — fervently hope Harris will be the one to finally shatter the glass ceiling. 

But she’ll have to surmount plenty of resistance to do it.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.