After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election by a slim electoral margin (she won the popular vote), I vividly remember one of the post-mortems, wherein one of Clinton’s top advisors expressed regret at not leaning into the straight-forward identity politics of “we get to vote for a woman at the top of the ticket, we could have our first woman president.” There was a reluctance to make it about the historical nature of Hillary’s candidacy and the joy/enthusiasm many women felt about voting for Hillary. We got a do-over in 2024 with Kamala Harris where there was joy and urgency all mixed together. And it still didn’t work. We’ve now spent the past seventeen months in a fascist quagmire where the political post-mortems just keep getting worse and worse. As a long-time Democrat, I don’t think the answer is “voting for the guy with Nazi tattoos” nor do I think the answer is knifing people like Joe Biden and Jim Clyburn in the back. But I’m also realistic enough to know that the next Democratic presidential candidate should probably be a white, heterosexual man. Most Democratic strategists agree.
Some top Democrats are quietly debating a fraught question: whether the party’s best bet for winning back the presidency in 2028 is to nominate a man — perhaps a straight, white, Christian man. Their fear, divulged with dismay in group chats, at cocktail parties and increasingly in public, is that parts of the electorate are too biased to support a woman or other diverse candidate for president.
Former first lady Michelle Obama fueled such talk recently, saying the U.S. is “not ready for a woman.” Democratic strategists have put it bluntly, with several saying a version of “It has to be a white guy.”
The Democratic Party takes pride in being a champion of women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and religious minorities. Electing Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was the high point for the party’s goal of boosting diversity in the executive branch. But falling short twice to President Trump — both times with women on the ticket — has left some Democratic leaders, donors and strategists deeply pessimistic about what voters will accept now.
“There is a fear — and I actually don’t think this is just a grass-tops fear, I think you’d hear it from voters, too — that a woman has now lost twice,” a national Democratic strategist told Axios. “So not discounting the hundreds of other times men have lost … but is it the right thing to nominate a woman?”
Most of these conversations have unfolded behind closed doors, but a striking number of Democrats have begun voicing their concerns more openly, exposing a larger debate within the party over electability. Michelle Obama pushed the discussion into public view in November, saying the U.S. has “got a lot of growing up to do, and there’s still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman.”
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn told NBC the former first lady was “absolutely correct,” adding that women should keep running anyway.
The one asterisk I’ll add is that I believe Kamala Harris’s candidacy would have been successful had she not been forced into watering down her historic candidacy and if she had been able to actually run a real campaign for longer than 107 days. Another asterisk to this discussion: if Kamala runs again, I will absolutely vote for her in the Virginia primary and the general. But if she’s not running, then yes, I do think that the next Democratic candidate should be a straight white guy with rizz and a deep hatred for Nazis, Republicans and fascists.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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