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As Democrats gather in Chicago, the most remarkable of the storylines is going strangely unremarked: America in 2024 might finally elect a woman president. The personal differences between Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is so stark that it will overwhelm the issues. She needs to use this week's Democratic National Convention in Chicago to win hearts far more than minds.
One could argue, of course, that politics should be gender-blind, and that only policy and competence should matter to the voters. But that argument would be hard to sustain considering that no woman has ever been elected to the highest office. And it would also require having never met the voters.
Human beings are not so gender blind. No women anywhere could even vote before about a century ago—meaning there were no true democracies. The first country to extend the vote to women was New Zealand in 1893 (and even there they were barred from running for office until 1919). In the U.S., women were only were awarded the vote in 1920, sadly lagging after key countries in Europe.
Moreover, many countries are way ahead of America in electing women as well. We lag behind Britain (leading the pack with three, all from the Conservative party), Germany (Angela Merkel served as chancellor for 16 years, until 2021), India (Indira Gandhi actually governed twice), Italy, Israel, Argentina, Brazil and now Mexico.
I am the father of two daughters, and I recall their joy at the prospect of the U.S. finally catching up in 2016; it felt like a breakthrough moment, whatever one thought of the candidates otherwise (we forgot about the Electoral College, which rendered Hilary Clinton's 3-million-vote margin irrelevant).
This time around, the election is personal even beyond the gender issue—because of the singularity of Trump. The importance of the particular candidate is evident in the swing that followed Biden's departure (perhaps 5 percent nationally in an average of the polls).
How could this be, in a supposedly deliberative democracy? Are the people simpletons, simply swayed by shiny things? Some yes, but far from most. It's just that on the matter of the issues, people's positions are mostly set, and there is no clear advantage to either side. Let's take a moment to examine.
The Democratic side is far more closely aligned with public opinion on several key issues, to be sure: Health care (Pew finds most Americans favor some version of Medicare for all), gun policy (Gallup says most Americans favor stricter gun control and understand the connection between laxness and America's insane gun death rates), and abortion (by 2-to-1 Americans want abortion to be legal in all or most cases). Most Americans also do not approve of the authoritarian direction Trump wants to drag the country toward (less than a third say they want "a strong leader").
But the Republicans have certain advantages of their own. At least as regards public perceptions, the Republicans are aligned with a national impatience with the perceived tolerance of illegal immigration—in the U.S. exactly as in Western Europe. They also find a willing audience for their claim that the inflation of recent years was fueled by public spending, especially the Covid stimulus package of 2021. Their tough talk on crime also resonates with many (perhaps the one issue where Harris, a former prosecutor, might offer a measure of surprise).
And although most Americans approve of DEI programs, the Republicans' cultural wars don't fall on deaf ears in the critical political middle, and even across broader population there is unease with the Woke movement (Pew finds 57 percent of Americans agreeing that people today are too easily offended by what others say).
Other issues also break even. On the question of free trade versus tariffs, Americans still lean slightly toward the former, which might help the Democrats—but not necessarily so in the swing states where elections are won. On truly huge questions like what to do about artificial intelligence upending the labor market, or about Big Tech gaining too much power, all is confusion on all sides of politics.
In short, the issues are confounding and largely balance out. It is a wash.
What is not a wash is that Americans seem to understand quite well the fundamentally warped nature of Trump. Less than a third believe his lies about the supposed theft of the 2020 election (shockingly high, but a clear minority nonetheless) and according to Pew, 64 percent consider him mean-spirited and few see him as honest in any way (PolitiFact locates three-quarters of his public statements on the range from "mostly false" to "pants on fire").
Twice impeached and now a convicted felon, the increasingly incoherent and genuinely preposterous Trump is simply implausible for governing the world's indispensable country. Biden's advantage in 2020 was not much more than that he was not implausible. That's his 7-million vote advantage right there (which sufficed only barely, again due to the Electoral College).
This year, Biden was revealed to have an implausibility of his own—the product of an additional four years of superannuation. Most voters concluded he was simply way too old—a less reprehensible implausibility than Trump's, but a more devastating one nonetheless. His advantage was wiped out, and so he had to go.
Harris has turned that around merely by not being implausible. And it may finally be the moment when being a woman is advantageous. Pew finds that 53 percent of American adults and almost two-thirds of women want more women in public office. That, at a moment when the issues offer no real advantage, may be the crucial tipping point.
But for all the talk of Democratic euphoria in recent weeks, Harris is not widely loved. She is somehow reminiscent of the last Democratic nominee to come out of a Chicago convention, Hubert Humphrey: a former local official, senator and veep who was still something of an enigma. That is Harris' real challenge at the convention: It's a tremendous spotlight under which to win over hearts much more than minds.
If it works, that will leave France as one of the few major Western powers to have never been governed by a woman: liberty and equality still take a back seat to fraternity there, it seems. If the United States finally takes the plunge, the cry will resound across the globe: Vive l'Amerique!
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, the author of two books—and a voter in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
