The question burning at the center of American public opinion since the first presidential debate: If President Joe Biden steps down, who will replace him as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States? The most obvious answer appears to be the nation’s second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But her candidacy would face nearly insurmountable odds of success, if American history and recent voter polls are any indication.
It’s not because she isn’t qualified; as the president asserted Thursday in a press conference, she is, undoubtedly. And, being decades younger than Biden and accustomed to the demands of public office, she’d likely have the energy and stamina to campaign and serve out four years of the presidency. She’s also a history maker, as the first woman, African American and South Asian American person elected vice president. There’s the rub.
Poll after poll show only mere percentage points separating Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Reflect on that: A huge chunk of American voters want Trump, a convicted felon whose racist, sexist, violent rhetoric went beyond bombast before, during and after his time in the White House and was frequently reflected in his policies.
If that many voters are seriously considering voting for him, then does Harris — representing so much of what Trump stands against — even stand a chance?
“I think that she does not,” Jatia Wrighten, PhD, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me this week.
“In this political climate, and historically in the country’s political climate, Americans have been hesitant to put support behind Black women at the national level,” Wrighten said.
assistant professor of political science at VCU. (provided photo)
Enter Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and, in 1972, the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s nomination for President of the United States. Despite her track record of success representing New York’s 12th congressional district — including sponsoring legislation that expanded food assistance programs for low-income single mothers and drawing from her experience as an early childhood educator and authority to further Head Start and school lunch programs — her candidacy was largely viewed as a joke.
Media members, mostly white men, picked apart her appearance and dismissed her presidential run as “female meddling.” Those who seemed most likely to support Chisholm — like feminist leader Gloria Steinem and civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson — instead supported her opponent, George McGovern. In the end, she clinched just 152 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention that year and the party deemed McGovern their nominee.
More recently there was Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who, though seeking her state’s highest office and not the country’s, experienced many of the same obstacles Chisholm did by daring to seek public office while existing as a Black person and woman, at the same time.
Perhaps as much as supporters and the media covered her work to root out voter suppression in the Peach State, Abrams’ opponents and the media zoomed in on all the wrong things, betraying a double standard, which subjects Black woman political candidates to scrutiny that white candidates, male or female, just aren’t.
“They talked about [Abrams] being single, her weight, how dark she was, on top of examining the things we look at with any candidate, like how qualified she was, her education, how well spoken she was,” Wrighten said. Heightening all of this is the fact that dark-skinned, kinky-haired Chisholm and Abrams don’t mirror classic American beauty standards, derived from European ideals of fair skin, straight hair, a narrow nose and a thin physique.
Concerning Black women in American politics, Wrighten posited, “Being overweight matters, having darker skin matters, having natural hair matters…and it shouldn’t. Black women candidates are faced with this standard of beauty that others don’t have to contend with.”
The same sentiments that poisoned Chisholm’s candidacy and Abrams’ governor’s race still exist in America and would pose a serious hurdle to Harris’ victory, said Wrighten.
“At the national level, there’s a lot of media attention that works against Black women. There’s a lot of bias, there are stereotypes at play that hurt Black women especially. There’s still a sense that women are unfit for the office.”
Another obstacle Harris could encounter if she tried to make the leap from VP to commander-in-chief: “I think established Democrats would have an issue with [Harris] running; there’s this sense of, you have to put your time in, pay your dues,” Wrighten said.
That dynamic is familiar is Virginia state politics, too, evidenced by the establishment Dems putting their weight behind Terry McAuliffe’s 2021 run for governor — a role he’d already held, in addition to chairing the Democratic National Committee 2001-2005 and Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 and co-chairing former President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign — instead of the Jennifers, McClellan and Carol Foy. Both Black women — with their bold ideas, statehouse experience and lots of public support — had the potential to be Virginia’s first Black woman governor. Instead, McClellan and Carol Foy’s prospects were blunted because their party’s heavy hitters backed McAuliffe (who then lost to Gov. Glenn Youngkin).
There’s also the lingering effects from the Obama era that would likely damage Harris’ chance to be commander-in-chief. The election of the country’s first Black president ushered in a double-edged sword: a “post-racial era” (yeah right) marked by more opportunities and tangible progress for historically oppressed, disenfranchised groups, most notably Black Americans. The flipside was a seething resentment of that progress mostly expressed by the historically powerful group that orchestrated the oppression and disenfranchisement, white Americans.
“From the tea party’s racially tinged attacks on the president’s policy agenda to the ‘birther’ movement’s more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American citizen, the national racial climate grew more, and not less, fraught” after Obama’s presidency, wrote historian Peniel Joseph, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, in a 2016 Washington Post series on Obama’s legacy.
Obama’s presidency, flesh-and-blood proof of the nation’s shifting demographics and values, fueled a public sentiment held by many white Americans “that Black people were getting perks they didn’t deserve,” Wrighten said. “So we see this pushback against that.”
All of this consideration may be for nought, as Biden again reiterated Thursday that he intends to stay in the race, despite any voter polling indicating Harris would fare better against Trump than he would. But should Harris come to the forefront as the nominee, she’ll have a tough time ahead of her.
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“I think she’ll continue to be sexualized,” Wrighten said, referring to the unfounded rumors that emerged almost as soon as Biden announced Harris as his VP in 2020. “There will continue to be this idea that she didn’t earn what she has.”
There are 59 countries of the United Nations’ 193 member states who have elected women heads of government, a number that has “risen steadily” since 1990. It doesn’t seem likely that November’s presidential election will put America on that list; since George Washington’s election in 1789, America’s presidents have always been men.
“I think that the U.S. should take a long hard look at itself when we’re thinking about who can be a leader and what they look like,” Wrighten said.
I also think there’s ample evidence to suggest that some serious self-examination is in order, on a national scale. The reality is, only Americans can transform the nation into one that would actually support and enable Harris, or any other woman or woman of color, becoming president. But it doesn’t appear we’re in a particularly reflective mood.
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