Not Ready for a Female President?
Michelle Obama thinks so.
WaPo (“Michelle Obama says America is ‘not ready’ for a female president”):
Former first lady Michelle Obama thinks that the United States is “not ready” for a female president and has “a lot of growing up to do” to reach that point.
“Don’t even look at me about running because you all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not. So don’t waste my time,” said Obama, who is an often-discussed potential presidential candidate, though she’s previously said she doesn’t want to run.
On her side of the argument is the fact that Democrats nominated a woman in 2016 and again in 2024 and lost both elections to Donald J. Trump, the least popular major party nominee of all time. Further, they ran a man in the intervening election, also against Trump, and won. QED.
But, of course, Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, a two percent margin. Trump won because of the weirdness of our electoral system, which overweights low-population states in 51* winner-take-all contests.
Kamala Harris’ loss last year was, well, overdetermined. Her 11th-hour replacement of Joe Biden on the ticket was highly controversial. The economy was in bad shape. There was a global anti-incumbent sentiment.
Regardless, Obama blames men for the results:
“There’s still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman. And we saw it,” Obama said.
[…]
Obama stumped for Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential race, and called for men to consider the effects a Trump victory would have on reproductive health care and rights.
“Fellas,” Obama said at one event on the campaign trail, “before you cast your votes, ask yourselves, what side of history do you want to be on?”
This claim is very hard to test.
A recent American University poll found that 82% “Would be open to voting for a qualified woman as president.” [slide 26] That 18% percent admit they would not is problematic, for sure. But men and woman over 50 were equally open to the possibility, with 87% in the affirmative. Men under 50 were only 80% affirmative—but women under 50 were only 75% positive.
Comparing the demographic breakdown of the three contests is highly problematic. We can only make an educated guess, using notoriously unrepresentative exit polls. And the sex of the candidates is surely not the only factor determining turnout. Still, Pew has produced rather detailed breakdowns of all three contests. [2016, 2020, 2024] Here’s what they found:
| TRUMP | CLINTON | TRUMP | BIDEN | TRUMP | HARRIS | |
| MEN | 52 | 41 | 50 | 48 | 55 | 43 |
| WOMEN | 39 | 54 | 44 | 55 | 46 | 53 |
Indeed, a considerably higher percentage of men voted for Biden than for the two female candidates, whereas the percentage of women voting for the Democrat remained remarkably stable. Then again, the percentage of women voting for Trump has gone up every cycle.
Further, I’ve increasingly seen 2020 as an outlier. The COVID crisis wildly impacted the contest, both in terms of voter attitudes and in the way it was conducted. Trump almost certainly depressed his own turnout with his bizarre campaign against mail-in and other early voting. So, while it’s possible that men preferred Biden over Clinton and Harris primarily because of his sex, it’s likely that we’re simply seeing a very different male sample.
Additionally, while the women’s vote for the Democratic candidate was almost exactly the same throughout the three contests, it’s worth noting that Harris would have won if women voted for Trump at 2016 levels.
*Maine and Nebraska, with 3 and 5 electoral votes, respectively, award two electors to the statewide winner and one elector per House district. The impact on the races in question was nonexistent.
Sorry, but need to correct you on something, by nearly all measures, the economy was good under Biden. Alas the one measure that it wasn’t, inflation, is the measure that most voters feel in an, otherwise good economy.
My thought on Obama’s statement is that she’s wrong, but the first woman prez will be an R, not a Dem.
She is absolutely correct. And it’s only hard to test because there are plenty of men (and women!) who do not realize they have a bias against female leadership.
Unconscious bias is hard but not impossible to test for, but there are plenty of examples out in the wild. Women in tech who can’t get interviews until they de-gender their resumes by doing things like removing references to having played women’s sports in college, or replacing their names with initials. I remember reading about one man’s experience in the UK at a travel agency. He jumped in to help out a colleague, using her login and was astonished at how rude people were to her…obviously anecdotal, but there are plenty of us with real-life experience for whom this sort of thing rings true.
The Matilda effect is live and established and exists well outside the boundaries of science and invention. I am not usually a cynic, but I don’t see this changing. I’ve heard far too many “I’d vote for a woman but not HER” over the years to believe anything different.
I’d love to be proven wrong, but I think the country’s best chance at having a woman president would have been if Biden had decided to step down after the midterms. Next-best will be the next female VP.
It seems well established that people tend to give pollsters what they feel is the approved answer. And they certainly aren’t sufficiently self-aware to recognize that they want a father figure for prez.
Were you to ask me if I would vote for a Republican if it* were clearly the better qualified candidate, honesty would require I say yes. But I would regard it as highly unlikely o occur and would be very skeptical of such a claim.
* When speaking of Republicans, “it” seems an appropriate solution to the need for a gender-neutral pronoun.
It’s hard to say…overall, it’s quite possible that a woman will go onto succeed a Jamie Dimond. An investment bank is not a woke paradise. But plenty of men, whatever their hangups, have done well enough that they’re not losing their minds at the thought of an intelligent woman.
But with politics, Trump has solidified a craven and whining type of masculinity where everything is a hysterical threat, and any type of crime conducted to enforce this ideology is okay. In general, women will have trouble against American men as a whole. But they’re also not going to bother with American-shithole politics, and focus on building a wall between them and the dying herd.
@Jen: I fully concur that people tend to give pollsters the answer they think they’re supposed to give, so the results likely understate the opposition. But, again, nearly 3 million more voters preferred the woman to the man in 2016.
@gVOR10:
OMG. Somebody else at this forum says what I been saying about polls for years. In my case, polls understating the amount of voters who support Trump.
@James Joyner: But that doesn’t matter, because of the way in which we elect a president. If we’re just talking about raw vote totals, sure. But that’s not how someone becomes president in this country.
It’s both true that Clinton got more votes than Trump, and that she wasn’t elected president.
America being “ready for” a female president cannot rest solely on more people voting for the woman. Those voters have to be distributed in the correct places as well. And those folks aren’t ready.
An alternate measurement: women in state legislatures. There are now nine state legislative chambers where women hold 50% or more of the seats. All nine are in western states.
The polling assessment is another case of people saying one thing and doing another. Come push-to-shove, women have to clear a higher bar to succeed against vestigial patriarchy.
With 18% of the registered voters saying ‘no’ to being “open to voting for a qualified woman as president,” how many would say ‘no’ to being open to voting for a qualified man? Maybe also a double-digit percentage? And who are these ‘no’ people by demographics and party? Not asking for answers — just wondering.
With elections being won on the margins, I don’t see a reason to handicap a campaign with a big, known, obvious electoral drag. Whether it’s people hesitating over a candidate not having a presidential schlong, or a candidate with a Nazi tattoo, or being a sex pest former office holder who resigned in disgrace — it just seems irresponsible to risk throwing away a potential victory on a deeply flawed candidate.
The first woman Presidential nominee to win is going to have to be exceptional, to pave the way for the mediocre one that follow. And not exceptional at policy or background, but as communicating in a way that Americans — even male Americans — will be able to hear.
And I don’t know what that will look like, since for me it’s Elizabeth Warren, and most people find her too lecturey or something. (I would like a President who can explain policy rather than just spout a slogan, but I’m weird)
Maybe Harris will shock everyone in a few years when it’s revealed that she has taken acting classes and improv classes, studied the speeches and styles of first woman presidents from 12 different countries and developed that skill.
I will say that Hillary Clinton did a mini version of that, altering so much of her public persona during her first Senate campaign to come from behind and “too cold”. She obviously hated it, and didn’t keep it up during her presidential campaign. But, it’s a learnable skill.
@Jen:
It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from a small sample size, three elections, each of which has a lot of confounding factors. That said, IMO James is right that at least once the majority of the US electorate voted for a woman, even if she didn’t win the presidency.
Counterfactuals can’t be falsified. Just the same, if Biden* had run and gotten the nomination in 2016, El Taco would likely be rotting in prison now or living in Moscow.
I do tend to agree the hypocritical feeling of “I’d certainly vote for a woman for president, just not that woman,” means any woman who’s running for president.
The best chance the US has to put a woman in the oval office is for either a female VP to succeed a male president, or for the two parties to nominate a woman (as happened in Mexico in 2024; and I never thought we’d get a woman in the presidency before you did).
*Or maybe any generic male Democrat.
@Jen: I think the questions “Are the American people ready for a woman to be President?” and “Can a female Democratic nominee easily win the presidency?” are very different. One is a majoritarian issue, the other is a distributional/systemic one.
@Jen:
The latest: Winsome Earl-Sears — entrepreneur, former USMC corporal, VA’s first woman lt. gov., first WOC elected statewide in VA, former member VA House of Delegates, former vice-chair of the VA Board of Ed. — lost so badly because she was a bad candidate. Her intelligence has even questioned.
Up in Jersey, Jack Ciatterelli is a former CPA. No military experience (unlike Sears, Spanberger, and Sherrill). He served on a city council, a county board, and in the NJ general assembly. Never won statewide.
Ciaterelli lost just as badly as Winsome Sears did. But somehow we’re not hearing “He was a bad candidate and kinda dumb” about this underwhelming white guy.
Still it’s hard to say the US isn’t ready for a woman president when Hillary won the popular vote by millions and likely would’ve won the EC but not for coward Comey’s abnormal October surprise letter. Or had she had the good sense to pull a JFK and pick her rival Bernie as VP, not the tactically useless Tim Kaine. Or had complacent swing state women not sat out the election, assuming she would win, like Comey did. Or any number of 20/20 hindsight acts that might’ve won her 1-2 more votes per precinct in WI, PA, and MI.
It is an indictment of American sexism that Hillary vs. Trump was close enough that any one error could tip the EC to an incompetent racist who would’ve been dismissed as an unqualified whackjob were he not a white male. Running against an Epstein-bestie pedo, Hillary should’ve won the popular vote by 9+ million.
She was a generational unicorn, uniquely qualified, uniquely positioned for electoral success. Having blown that opportunity by failing to support her strongly enough, liberals who want a lady in the Oval might need to make peace with her being a handmaiden for the patriarchy. American voters aren’t mature enough to elect an Angela Merkel. Our first woman president will prolly be a sellout who makes American men feel good about our misogyny and our denial thereof. Nikki Haley, perhaps?
@DK:
This is what I’m thinking. And then this presidential gender conversation would be much different.
As for the NJ and VA governors races, the national political currents may have overwhelmed the gender, race, and background of the candidates. Ciattarelli hadn’t won statewide office before, but he was well known as a close 2nd in the previous NJ governors election. Looking at the election differences by year, the NJ Democrat went from +3 in 2021 to +14 in 2025, a change of +11. The VA Democrat went from -2 in 2021 to +15 in 2025, a change of +17. Not sure what to make of that.
Is America ready for a female president?
This is not a question to be answered. Rather, it is a topic to be approached from different perspectives, worldviews, biases, advocacy positions, etc. Hence, people will spend a lot of time talking past one another, answering adjacent questions, etc.
Does sexism exist in contemporary USA? Has it declined/worsened over time?
Have women been voted into high level positions (eg, senators, representatives, governors)? Does sexism impact voting? Is its impact moderated by the political position being voted for?
Was America ready to elect a Black man president in 2007? Was it ready in 2008? Is it ready today?
As an analogy, is [player/team X] ready to win a championship in [sport Y]? Does the outcome determine the readiness?
It is a given that a black female running for office will have her intelligence questioned. Trump has been going there for years, repeatedly calling black women “low IQ”. And Charlie Kirk, racist piece of trash that he was, had no problem parroting those type of comments:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
I always wonder which was more of a handicap to Harris — being a woman or being black? I think it was being black. I know that Obama won, but he was a very, very good candidate and McCain was a so-so candidate who chose an idiot as his running mate.
I think it is silly to say a woman cannot be elected, or “we were not ready” for a woman President. We elected one in 2016. I am sorry, but everywhere else in the goddamn world, we did. Silly to hem and haw over the possibility. The possibility is there. It is all candidate and circumstance, which can be said exactly the same for two men running against each other.
@DK: I paid scant attention to the NJ race but live in VA. Earle-Sears was likely going to lose in this race, regardless, but she was indeed a bad candidate. Some of her comments in the debate, notably that infamous “that’s not discrimination!” refrain, came across as rather ignorant. I’m honestly not sure that three years as an electrician in the Marines is a major qualification for governor. And, of course, her opponent was also a woman.
As to Merkel, I’m not sure we’d elect a male version of her here. Woodrow Wilson was the only president to have a PhD. It’s noteworthy that she led the CDU, the closest analog to the pre-MAGA Republican Party in the German system.
There’s an understatement.
If a pollster were to ask “Would you be open to voting for a qualified man as president” the respondents would look at them in bafflement. It isn’t even a question. The fact that it still IS a question for women, and that some people are even sufficiently unselfconscious about it to admit it to a stranger, says volumes.