The withdrawal yesterday of Elizabeth Warren from the race — leaving only two old white men in the running — led a number of women commentators and activists lamenting that America has not yet evolved to the point where a woman can be elected President.
They pointed to how the race began with a handful of highly capable women on the debate stage, but that one-by-one they all fell away (Kirsten Gillebrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and finally Elizabeth Warren). All this was interpreted as showing that a woman can still not break that glass ceiling.
The pain that caused those women was quite clear: “heart-breaking” was a word that several people used to express their deep disappointment.
But I believe the news is not as bad as they seemed to think: what has happened this time around is only partially an indication of “the state of the nation” with regard to Americans electing a woman to be president, but perhaps mainly an indication of the very special nature of this particular presidential election.
Never in our lifetimes has it been so profoundly and urgently necessary for the Democrats to win the presidency. That’s because never in American history has a President posed such a profound threat to so much that is basic about the nation— including the Constitution and the rule of law. That’s why 2/3 of Democrats have said that their over-riding priority in choosing a candidate is Electability (i.e. the answer to the question, “Who is the best bet to defeat Donald Trump?”).
In this extraordinary situation — with the stakes so high, and winning so essential -- the rational course is to adopt an election strategy that minimizes risk.
Elizabeth Warren has been my favorite candidate throughout the past year because I thought she would be the best President. I also thought that, if her campaign gathered the necessary momentum to get the nomination, she would be quite electable.
But I also worried: how many Americans might vote for Trump instead of Warren because she was a woman? Might that be enough of a loss --2%? 3%? — to condemn the United States to the national disaster of a second term for Donald Trump?
I came to the judgment that the votes lost because of a sexist element in the electorate would be smaller than the votes to be gained by how capable and appealing I thought she’d be. (I also judged that Hillary Clinton’s loss was enough about things particular to her — like a quarter-century of right-wing demonization — that would not drag down some other woman nominee.)
That was the conclusion that I came to, but I wasn’t sure I was right. I knew that I might be underestimating how many votes the Democrats might forfeit because of voters not ready to see a woman President.
And therefore I can readily imagine that a lot of other Democrats — for whom winning is the over-riding priority — might well have come to a different conclusion about risk. I can see, that is, that it would not be unreasonable for Democrats wanting to minimize the risk of defeat to decide thatin this particular election, nominating a woman entails an unnecessary risk.
In that interpretation, the emergence of another while male as the choice of the Democratic electorate signifies less than those broken-hearted women were lamenting last night.
My best is that in a more normal election, where the risk of losing the election doesn’t entail the risk of losing American democracy, the Democratic Party would be readier to elevate a woman to the top of the ticket and make the bet that the American people are ready to put a woman in the White House.
