IT WAS AN early fall night, and a couple dozen women in their twenties were gathered around a portable fire pit, chatting over wine and Trader Joe’s appetizers in a concrete backyard in San Francisco. The conversation careened back and forth from tech start-ups and coding trainings to the upcoming midterm elections and global feminism. Cold gusts of wind whipped smoke from the haphazardly built fire first this way, then that. There were no tongs or poker in sight. Apparently the roommates hosting the monthly meeting of Women Get It Done had never been Girl Scouts.
I had joined them to gauge how young women felt about politics in general and a woman president in particular. When talk turned to women’s status in politics, several chimed in that women were better at compromise and collaboration and getting things done, not just in politics but across the board. “It’s abysmal. Women only hold 25 percent of offices in this country. We are 50 percent of the population. That’s not equal representation in any way, shape, or form,” a twenty-three-year-old who worked in politics said. “Do I think more women need to be in office? Yes. A wonderful example of why was the birth control hearings that the House held. I personally do not think that a bunch of old, conservative, white men know what it’s like to be a young woman in her twenties who is trying to focus on her career and not have a family immediately. That’s not to say that I don’t want a family eventually!”
That afternoon I had met the group’s cofounder, Kate Maeder, at her office, where the self-described data geek specialized in data analysis and microtargeting for a progressive political firm. Precinct maps and campaign posters covered the walls and a plastic basketball hoop hung on the door. Maeder is tall with wavy shoulder-length hair, hazel eyes, and a smile with a touch of mystery about it. Maeder recalled the genesis of Women Get It Done. In May 2012, she met friends on a Saturday afternoon for a picnic at Dolores Park and got to talking with two other women. “We were all pissed. No one was mentoring us in the workplace. There were no groups we felt we could belong to. I’m an organizer at heart, and I realized there was a real void. Young women felt so much discontent and frustration,” she said.
It was striking that a group of go-getter, young, progressive women in San Francisco felt they had no group to belong to. If any city in America has an old boys’ and old girls’ progressive club, it is San Francisco. The new lean-in brand had been created nearby. Quickly the three turned to six, and then grew more, and they started holding salon-style gatherings. They named their group Women Get It Done and gave it a tagline: More of a fight club than a sorority. “To my surprise, a lot of people wanted to join. We grew and grew,” Maeder went on. “And then in July 2013 Ready for Hillary reached out to us. They had been a DC-based group up to that time. They asked, ‘Can you help us throw our first grassroots fundraiser?’ I want to dedicate my life to empowering women and getting more women elected to office, so it was right in line with my passion.” They came up with the idea of asking for a $20.16 donation, which was then replicated throughout the country. By the summer of 2015, WGID had formed a board, and groups were meeting in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Washington, DC.
At the meeting that night, Maeder was leading the discussion, and she brought it around to Hillary. Were they excited about her running for president? Did they support her? Applause and a chorus of voices went up, it seemed from nearly everyone. “I’m so fucking ready for her to get shit done,” twenty-five-year-old Emma Gibbens said. “Hillary Clinton is our patron saint. She’s our patroness,” a Wellesley graduate said, which everyone loved. (Clinton’s first step into the national spotlight was from the Wellesley stage. Chosen as the first student commencement speaker at the prestigious women’s college, she had given a powerful political protest speech and had been profiled in Life magazine as a voice of her generation.)
When Maeder asked if there were any other women they looked up to or would support if Clinton didn’t run, six or so voices went up for Elizabeth Warren. Four or five Kirsten Gillibrand fans drowned them out. Still, about three-quarters of the women said they would volunteer on Clinton’s campaign, and several talked about quitting their jobs to join it.
“I want a woman president for so many reasons,” Danielle Mulein told me later. Mulein, a political junkie and marketing manager at a firm that worked with women corporate executives, had volunteered for a congressman in high school and, after college, had worked in Colorado for Obama’s 2012 campaign. She jokingly called herself a professional feminist. “I think that there is a real search and a hunger for more women in political office and particularly for a woman president. I find that people feel like what we’re doing now isn’t working. They’re beginning to get fed up with the fact that all of these white guys, all these older men, are running the show in Washington. That doesn’t correspond with the general public. I think there is this idea that having a woman would break down so many barriers for other people, for those who are minorities. There are so many different avenues that will be opened once we have a female president that I do find that a lot of people have that hunger. They want a change.”
DOES AMERICA’S RECENT fascination with women’s leadership—seen everywhere in pop culture from best-selling books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to the TV hits Scandal and Veep to Beyoncé’s feminist MTV Video Music Awards performance—extend to the political realm? If women are not punished at the ballot box for being women, as we have seen, are they rewarded? Are women especially attracted to women candidates?
“We did polling right after the 2012 election to find out what independent women were thinking about the election,” EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock told me. “One question we asked was, I’m paraphrasing, ‘Did you know a record number of women were elected, and do you think it matters?’ Really for the first time in our polling they said yes by a large majority. It does matter. It’s going to make things better. That was a huge change.”
In America’s last presidential election, as we saw, women favored Barack Obama by 11 points and women’s votes were decisive in his reelection. The gender gap—the difference between women and men’s vote—was near a historic high at 10 points. Moreover, women made up 53 percent of all voters in 2012. (Women have cast a greater number of votes than men in every presidential election since 1964.)
Women’s votes matter, and as long as women outnumber men at the polls, they matter disproportionately. So what do women want? What are their hopes and their fears, their ambitions and their frustrations? Does it matter to American women that the nation elects a woman president?
A bevy of public opinion surveys and academic research indicates that women voters do care. Sixty-nine percent of Democratic women hoped to see a woman president in their lifetime, according to a large-scale Pew Research Center 2014 survey on women in leadership. In an earlier poll by ABC, 69 percent of Democratic women said that electing more women to Congress would be “a good thing.” In the Pew survey, four in ten women said that having more women in top positions in government would do a lot to improve the quality of life for all women. The academic scholarship confirms that women are motivated by and enthusiastic about women in political leadership. Various studies on the United States and other countries, for example, have shown that women candidates and lawmakers inspire women to participate more in political life, to vote at higher levels, and to feel more confidence and trust in government. If anything, the effect is stronger in the United States than it is in other countries. In a large study comparing democratic nations, the United States was one of only two nations where girls showed a statistically higher rate than boys of anticipated involvement in politics as adults. When Gallup asked for open-ended responses regarding “the best or most positive thing about a Hillary Clinton presidency,” one in three Democrats and one in six independents volunteered that it would be that she would be the “first woman president.”
“In 2016, we will have the most pro-woman-candidate electorate we have ever had,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said.
Advancing women’s political leadership has been one of Lake’s passions since she began her career fresh out of graduate school on the 1984 Mondale-Ferraro presidential campaign. “I love polling. I love learning people’s opinions on why they think about things and I have a lot of affection and respect for the voters,” Lake, a legendary workaholic, said about her motivations for doing this work. “I’m very motivated by social change. I want to see more women and people of color represented in the political system.”
I met Lake at her company’s office just off of K Street in Washington, DC, one evening two months before the 2014 election. Lake was wearing a loose-fitting bohemian blue dress and a striking silver and turquoise necklace. She seemed to be hardwired to her iPad. Lake grew up in Montana—like Stephanie Schriock. When I asked her what was in the air out there, she said, “I’ll show you what is in the air.” Above uncountable stacks of papers and books, photos and professional awards, sculptures and knickknacks from her many travels, hung what she called her “most inspiring” poster—a faded black-and-white photograph of a few dozen women in cowboy hats on horseback, captioned: Cowgirls at the Round-Up, 1911. To Lake, it was no coincidence that women from the West were so prominent among today’s champions of women in politics. “I do think there was something in the West,” she said. “In Montana we had the first woman in Congress. Many of the western states gave women the franchise earlier. I do think in general women in the West have played an important role.”
So what were voters thinking about the next presidential contest, I asked, especially regarding the possibility of electing a woman president?
“I think the context of 2016 is kind of a harmonic convergence,” she said. “The groups of voters who want women candidates will be the most dominant that they have ever been. People who vote for women candidates tend to be college-educated women, unmarried women under fifty-five, women of color, and they’ll all be at their biggest proportions ever in the electorate.” Also, she continued, “I think people are very eager for someone who can bring people together, who can compromise, who says, ‘Let’s get things done.’ And that’s a trait traditionally associated with women.” Voters were looking for leaders who understood their lives, and women had an advantage there too. “People think that current politicians are very much out of touch.”
Finally, there were two groups who were especially invested in electing a woman president and viewed 2016 as a historic opportunity. “I think there is a growing pool of people,” Lake continued, “of baby boomer women, who worry they’ll never see a woman president in their lifetime, and younger women, who think it’s about time we had more women in leadership.” She added, “I think Hillary Clinton is a unique iconic figure. She is particularly well suited to the moment—she has all the strengths of women candidates and doesn’t have the weaknesses.”
Discontent with the nation’s political dysfunction was one of the key background facts in Lake’s analysis of 2016 as a “harmonic convergence.” Lisa Grove, another prominent Democratic pollster, also believed that women candidates had an advantage in this context. Voters had hoped for change in 2008 and 2012, Grove said. “They’re frustrated that things seemed to stay the same. Yet they’re more inspired and have more optimism when they think about women candidates running. In female voters’ minds, women tend to be running for the right reasons.”
Grove and her firm had worked with EMILY’s List on polling and focus groups of independent women during the 2014 cycle. As part of the study, participants were asked, “When you think of our nation’s leaders—specifically the people in Congress—what is the first image that comes to mind?” One woman sent in a photo showing a sloth hanging upside down off a leafy tree branch. Another said she pictured “a bunch of old men with their arms crossed and grouchy looks on their faces.” Still another offered an image of a young, clean-shaven, white professional, his hands cupped in front of his face, chomping on a pile of $100 bills.
“People looked at Congress and other legislative bodies, and they said three things,” Grove told me. “They’re old, they’re white, and they’re gendered—they’re old white guys. So women, by virtue of their gender, are change agents. I think women are just better at the ‘I feel your pain’ message and can do it in a way that is more authentic. It’s an important part of the psychological connection that needs to be made between a voter and a candidate.”
On the one hand, in recent years women voters have shown enthusiasm for Democratic women candidates (when the candidate’s values lined up with their own and the candidate ran a good campaign—by no means a given in all cases). Women wanted more women in government and they were frustrated at the lack of parity. But like most political operatives, Grove believed it was a bad idea for candidates to appeal to women as women too explicitly. Instead, she thought women candidates should highlight the assumptions voters already held about women leaders. “Women have these bios of service. What that says is, ‘You get what life is like for me.’ Even if they don’t have these bios, the default for women is, ‘You understand what my life is like.’ You don’t have to be Patty Murray wearing tennis shoes for people to think you’ve walked in my shoes.” Murray, one of the Democratic women senators elected in 1992’s Year of the Woman and a onetime preschool teacher, had campaigned as “a mom in tennis shoes.”
Likewise, Grove believed that progressive policies on women’s issues, such as on equal pay, raising the minimum wage, and paid family leave resonated with women—with independents as well as Democrats. “They say, ‘Okay, you know what? I’m willing to buy into these candidates and believe that there are people who get what life is like for me and want to make it better,” she said. It showed that Democrats were in touch, she thought, and that they understood what women needed to be able to determine their own destiny, both on health and economic well-being.
“On the left, the idea of electing the first woman president right after the first African American president would be something great. It certainly plays a factor among Democrats,” Robert Jones, the head of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), said, putting Grove and Lake’s admittedly partisan interpretation in perspective. “On the right, the biggest baggage Hillary has is not that she is a woman but that she’s Bill Clinton’s wife.”
Political scientist Ronnee Schreiber, whose specialty is women on the right, agreed. When I asked her how they viewed the possibility of a woman president, she said with a laugh, “Their main goal will be to make sure that Hillary Clinton does not become president!” She added that they would love to see women like Kelly Ayotte, Nikki Haley, or Cathy McMorris Rodgers run in the future.
Still, Republican women universally said they looked forward to a Republican woman presidential candidate. “I think if there were somebody that was eminently qualified and capable of being president that was running, women on the Republican side would be just as excited,” Republican consultant Katie Packer Gage told me. “I don’t think women on the Republican side are as willing to overlook other shortcomings just to have a woman.”
I asked if that meant she thought Democrats were willing to overlook shortcomings in their candidates.
“Sometimes, yeah,” she chuckled.
“What about the case of Sarah Palin?” I asked.
“I don’t think you saw Republican women jumping all over that thing, ‘Let’s go. She’s a woman. Vote for her.’ I think that there were a lot of Republican women who held their nose and did not think she was particularly qualified. That’s part of why we lost,” Gage said. “I don’t think that there was this big outcry from Republican women saying, ‘Support Sarah Palin because she’s a woman.’ She just happened to be a woman. I’d like to see the day where we have a woman candidate, somebody like a Joni Ernst—I don’t mean her for president now. But in her case, when she was running for the Senate in Iowa, the fact that she was a woman was the fourth or fifth thing that qualified her.”
“I think we’ve got a pretty good bench,” Chriss Winston said. “Do I think Fiorina’s going anywhere? No, I don’t. I like her, and so on, and wish she’d won that Senate race in California, but she didn’t. Which is not helpful as a stepping-stone for the presidency.”
The GOP’s apparent woman problem at the presidential level, as Gage and Winston observed, was partly because none of the party’s top-tier women officeholders chose to run for president in 2016. Moreover, as Gage’s remark suggested, Republican women seemed to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which Palin had set the party back. Margaret Hoover praised women who she believed had presidential potential. “Kelly Ayotte is just as qualified as Scott Walker. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are far more savvy in the ways of Washington and how to get things done than half the Republican contenders on the right.” But she emphasized that someone like New Mexico governor Susana Martinez, whom she admired, needed more experience. “She is an incredibly capable governor. But there’s a long way to go from being a small western state governor to being a leader of the free world, to use a term from the Cold War. We saw that with Sarah Palin, right? You’re really not ready to be a good president if you’re just a governor of a small western state—you’re really not. You’re not versed in the issues, you’re not speaking about national politics, and you’re not going to be effective at working with Congress. There are just a hundred thousand reasons why Susana Martinez probably isn’t ready to run for president. Truly, I think she would say that. And I think she should be a national figure. She should be heralded by the party. She should go work in the cabinet and really get exposure into national and international issues. I think that she has a great future.”
But there was more to it than the absence of candidates or the Palin hangover. Public opinion surveys suggested that Republicans had only a marginal interest in promoting women’s political leadership in general. Only 20 percent of Republican women were excited about electing a woman president, compared to 69 percent of Democratic women, according to a Pew analysis. The Pew report’s authors noted, however, that for many Republicans “this view may be more about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency than about a major milestone for women.” Two-thirds of Democratic women thought electing more women to Congress would be “a good thing,” but only a quarter of Republicans—women and men—thought so.
As we saw, Republicans labored after 2012 to improve their standing with women. But as in 2008, when enthusiasm to elect the first black president helped power the momentum of Obama’s presidential bid, the GOP was likely going to find itself again on the wrong side of a potential historic milestone: the election of America’s first woman president.
“I THINK GENDER is to Hillary Clinton’s advantage but I don’t think she has to say much. She shows up with the right body parts, people get it,” Grove said. “Generally speaking, we get all our partisans and we get some independent women, and we’ve got enough to get across the finish line. I do believe that she may have to do some persuading with certain types of men, independent and very light blue male voters, to make it clear that she is the right candidate. That has to do with more Clinton-residue, perhaps, than her gender.”
Grove raised an important concern, one that has bedeviled women candidates in recent years, especially as they aim for the highest offices. If women draw too much attention to the fact that they are women, do they risk alienating men?
Women win elections at rates similar to men, as we’ve seen. That would be impossible if men, in aggregate, did not support women candidates. Still, since the 1990s, the gender gap in voting and party identification has widened. The most recent large-scale analysis, by Pew, showed women identifying or leaning Democratic by a 16-point margin, while men were evenly split. In every demographic group—ethnic, racial, religious, age—women vote and identify more pro-Democratic than men. And there is substantial evidence from public opinion surveys and academic research that men do not view women’s economic or social equality as a priority. In recent polling, half as many men as women said that having more women in top leadership positions in government would do a lot to improve the quality of life for all women. Although a majority of Democratic men said they wanted to see more women in Congress, they did so by 15 percentage points less than Democratic women. And in a striking example of persisting gender bias, in Pew’s survey on women’s leadership, 27 percent of Republican men said that men make better political leaders than women. (Only 11 percent of Democratic men said men made better leaders, less than those who said women made better leaders.)
The verdict is mixed about how men feel about women candidates and respond to campaigning that highlights women’s issues. On the one hand, men vote for women and generally hold the same views on social issues and gender equality. Political scientist Brian F. Schaffner found in a 2005 paper that there was no tradeoff when candidates—male or female—appealed explicitly to women. Campaigning on women’s issues made women more likely to vote for a Democratic Senate candidate and had no effect on how men voted. Early polls by major news outlets on the 2016 election consistently showed Democratic men supporting Hillary Clinton by a 40- to 60-point margin. Before Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren definitively made it clear she would not run, and before Vermont independent senator Bernie Sanders entered the Democratic primary, Warren consistently polled second or third, ahead of Martin O’Malley and about even with Vice President Joe Biden. True, once Sanders rose into second place in the polls, he showed disproportionate support from white men. But men overall still preferred Clinton. In sum, the polls indicated that Democratic men had no qualms about electing women. Rather, party identification and ideology were the determining factors in their choice.
On the other hand, men historically have been less supportive than women of women candidates. Differing views on two areas are thought to be the main sources of the gender gap. One, men are generally less supportive of social welfare policies and more conservative on the role of government. Two, although men broadly share women’s liberalism on reproductive rights and gender equality, they place less importance on these issues, and so don’t tend to vote on them.
The most recent findings in public opinion, however, powerfully suggest that how men feel about women leaders and gender equality is in flux.
According to Lake, there are notable age, ethnic, and racial gaps among men themselves. Latino, African American, unmarried, and young men—members of what Lake calls the Rising American Electorate—tended to view women candidates positively. There were a number of reasons for that, Lake said, “The Rising American men are younger, so they’re less into traditional gender roles. They’re less religious and they’re unmarried, so they don’t have this traditional view of the role of women. They’re people of color, so they’re used to women’s leadership in their communities.” Likewise, in Grove’s polling for the EMILY’s List Madam President campaign, she found that these same groups showed enthusiasm for a woman presidential candidate. When asked if a woman running for president would make them more likely to pay attention to the campaign, 60 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of African Americans said yes.
Lake and Grove are Democrats, granted, but their conclusions about age and ethnic differences among men were consistent with those of nonpartisan public opinion surveys. In ABC’s survey on women in Congress, which we saw above, 54 percent of nonwhites said it would be good to elect more women, but only 38 percent of whites did. (That survey also indicated that so-called identity politics was not at the root of the enthusiasm, as a far lower share—29 percent—of nonwhites said it would be good to elect more non-whites to Congress.) Pew’s annual report on party identification supported Lake’s portrait of the Democratic leanings of various demographic groups: African Americans were pro-Democratic by 69 points; Asian Americans by 42 points; Hispanics by 30 points; the religiously unaffiliated by 36 points; unmarried men by 17 points; and millennials by 16 points. A majority of all these groups identified or leaned Democratic. By contrast, 55 percent of white men without college degrees identified or leaned Republican, and only 33 percent identified or leaned Democratic. Mormons and white evangelical Protestants constituted the only demographic groups less Democratic than these less educated white men.
In short, not all men. As it turned out, the only men who appeared as if they would be cool to a potential Democratic woman presidential candidate were non-college-educated, older white men. But of course, white men had been unenthusiastic about Democratic presidential candidates for decades. The last Democrat to do well with them was the southern evangelical Jimmy Carter, who won 47 percent of their vote. Since 1988, Democrats have averaged just 38 percent of the white male vote—and they won the White House in four of those seven elections.
“HILLARY RUNNING IS just like a dream come true,” WGID member Emma Gibbens told me. “I feel like to my generation and my mother’s generation, Hillary is our icon. Me and my mother bonded over Hillary. We bonded over seeing a really intelligent woman at these higher levels. She was like the true trailblazer.” Gibbens grew up in small towns in Alaska and Northern Minnesota and first got active in politics as a teenager, volunteering on Al Franken’s 2008 Senate election campaign. As a college student and member of the College Democrats in Madison, Wisconsin, she had helped lead the massive demonstrations and sit-ins protesting Republican governor Scott Walker’s policies. After graduation, Gibbens worked on local election campaigns in Wisconsin, before moving to California in 2012, where she was now working for a tech company on digital field canvassing tools. She was a progressive, so she was sympathetic to those who felt more enthusiasm for Democrats other than Clinton. “I understand where some people are coming from when they want Elizabeth Warren to run and they’re not super invested in Hillary,” she continued. “But that aside, Hillary still is completely one of the most intelligent, best situated women to run the country, so I’m absolutely ecstatic for her to run.”
College students Denai Joseph, Andrea Chu, and Jordan Long had lined up at three in the morning at Clinton’s Los Angeles book signing. “I love her,” Joseph said. “She’s a feminist. She’s someone who has broken barriers for many people. And as someone who is a political science major and tries to venture into the world of politics, I want to know that is something that is feasible. She’s an inspiration to me in that sense.” Chu struck a similar note. “I think she’s done a lot of groundbreaking work, especially as a woman in politics. She’s such a great example for other young women who want to do this same kind of work,” she said. Long, who was still wrapped in his UCLA Bruins blanket from their night camping out on the sidewalk, said, “Why has it taken us so long to have a female president? Other countries have done it, so why should the United States be in the background of that? We should be leading.”
Tiffany and Chloe Majdipour, sisters aged nineteen and twenty who were University of California students and gender studies majors, woke up at 4:00 AM to come to Clinton’s book signing. “We’re really big fans of Hillary. She’s an amazing woman. I’m inspired by her,” Tiffany said. “Our mom loved her, so we loved her. I think it’s just like the parents loved her when she was the First Lady and they just passed that on to their kids. I think the younger generation can relate to her. As you can see here, there’s so much diversity here. You just can’t help but love her. “Her sister Chloe added, “She’s so qualified. She’s ready and we’re ready!”
The testimony of these millennial women and men about how Clinton inspired them was at odds with a commonly held assumption going into the 2016 election. Namely, that Clinton was too old, familiar, and boring to excite millennials. “Mrs. Clinton would love for young trendsetters to champion her cause and to replicate Mr. Obama’s success at converting his cultural currency among young voters into hard votes,” journalist Jason Horowitz wrote. “The question is then whether she can get young people excited about her candidacy. A temperature-taking in Washington Square Park was not promising,” he concluded, in an unintentionally self-parodic tone, after six interviews conducted for a New York Times style section piece headlined “HILLARY CLINTON AIMS TO CAPTURE THE COOL.”
How young people would vote was no joke. Once feted for sweeping Obama into the White House with their enthusiasm and optimism, after 2010, they were blamed for the Democrats’ resounding defeats in the Congressional midterm elections during Obama’s presidency. Certainly these impatient—read immature—kids would yawn at Hillary Clinton. The disenchantment and apathy of millennials, the media narrative went, endangered the Democrats’ hold on the White House going forward.
Nothing generated more passion among Women Get It Done members than when I asked them if they thought the media accurately portrayed their generation.
“I wasn’t eighteen at the time Hillary Clinton was in the primaries in California, unfortunately, so I could not vote for her then,” Abby Ellis, a junior staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, said. But she was able to vote by November. “The 2008 campaign was just the most revolutionizing experience. Part of that was seeing how dysfunctional the government was, plus growing up in a conservative family in Southern California, all I wanted to do was change it. I did vote for President Obama in 2008 largely because I believed in change, and that he could change the government. Discrediting millennials is really doing a disservice to our generation—”
“—We’re an optimistic generation,” Kate Maeder interjected.
“—We are, we’re very hopeful,” Ellis continued. “Millennials aren’t the ones who messed it up.”
Moreover, they were under no illusions about how difficult it was to make change, and they were far less naive than pundits assumed. Like many Americans old and young, Gibbens felt frustrated about the nation’s political dysfunction. “Everyone is pretty disgusted with the gridlock in Washington. It’s just at a complete standstill—like, pass any freaking bill, my God!” she said. She believed that Clinton was the best person to tackle the problem. “I think that Hillary would be really instrumental in getting the country moving again—passing actual legislation. This is real and relevant and affects people’s lives. I think that she would be able to reach across the aisle and also maybe get our own party in line. I mean she will get shit done when she is in office as the president.”
Still, both Democrats and Republicans believed with good cause that the 2016 election could hinge on millennials. Feminist Majority Foundation president and Clinton supporter Eleanor Smeal was confident the results would be favorable. “They’re idealistic, yet more savvy. They understand politics at what I would call a retail level, as well as at a theoretical level,” she said. “They were trained well by Obama’s campaigns. They know more because of the Rachel Maddows, Twitter, the blogs. They’re far more knowledgeable about what is happening. We are going to have a groundswell, I can tell you right now!”
Others were less sanguine, because historically young voters have a disturbing tendency to sit out elections. When young adults vote at high levels, elections since the 1990s showed, Democrats won. When instead the young stayed home, older men and women made up a larger share of the electorate and tipped elections to the GOP. (Americans older than sixty-eight were the only age cohort that did not lean Democratic in 2014, according to Pew.) Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both inspired a voter surge among men and women under thirty; the youth vote was unusually low in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush narrowly defeated Democrat Al Gore. Most agreed that low turnout among young people was a significant factor in the GOP’s victories in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. According to Pew, “Over the past decade, younger Americans have been the Democratic Party’s strongest supporters in both vote preferences and partisanship, while older Americans have been the most reliably Republican.”
The unique ethnic diversity of millennials—they were 40 percent nonwhite—and their progressive views on social issues combined to make them the most Democratic generation. Given that only the Democrats were poised to nominate a woman for president and that two out of three women in Congress were Democrats, the fate of women political leaders was anchored to millennials also.
So Democrats were right to worry how motivated millennials felt about the party and its candidates. Yet despite Republican efforts to attract millennials, Democrats and Hillary Clinton continued to hold a large advantage ahead of 2016. According to Pew, millennials identified or leaned Democratic by 16 percentage points. According to a large survey of millennials conducted in October 2014 for Fusion Media, 50 percent said they would likely vote for Clinton in the general election against any Republican, while only 33 percent said they were likely to vote for the Republican nominee. Moreover, 58 percent of the Democratic millennials surveyed favored Clinton in their party’s primary, compared to 9 percent who favored Warren and 2 percent for O’Malley. (Sanders was not polled, as he had not yet declared his candidacy.) Clinton did particularly well among the groups Lake identified as part of the rising American electorate; she won the support of 72 percent of young black voters, 63 percent of young Hispanic voters, and 54 percent of young women voters.
Millennials were a very Democratic generation, but beyond that, Clinton had unseen advantages with them—particularly with women. As Gibbens and the Majdipours described it, mothers and daughters had bonded as they witnessed Clinton’s rise and her resilience. It was a story I heard in different varieties again and again.
When you think about it, it wasn’t at all surprising. The oldest millennials were just on the cusp of adolescence when Clinton gave her historic speech on women’s rights in Beijing. The youngest millennials were just starting their first American history classes in elementary school when Clinton put her first 18 million cracks in the highest glass ceiling. All millennials were too young to have witnessed firsthand the searing anti-feminism of the 1992 campaign, or Hillary’s Icarus-like rise and fall over the Clinton effort at health care reform, or the endless hearings over Whitewater and other manufactured scandals. Not once in two years of interviewing did anyone under forty mention the name Monica Lewinsky to me. As they packed up for college and entered their first jobs, Clinton was America’s top diplomat, serving in the cabinet of a president for whom they had enormous respect.
In short, millennial women admired Clinton, were excited about her presidential candidacy, and often felt personally inspired by Hillary Clinton as an individual. To them she was an “icon”—a word many women used to describe her. Even more powerfully, Clinton embodied their hopes for themselves as women and their generation of women. Clinton was a model of their American dream, their burning impatience as young women to share equally in the highest offices and honors the nation had to offer.
Once again, as she was when she was a trailblazing First Lady in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton served as a Rorschach test for ideas about women’s place in the nation. This time, however, the hopes seemed to overpower the fears. More “yes, we can” than “how dare she.”
“THERE’S A BIG gap for women in political roles. I think that having Hillary in office as president would both inspire a lot of women and give us a role model to see, ‘Oh hey, we can do it. This is where we can go. This is how we get there.’ Just having that image up there makes a world of difference, because you can see something and aspire to see it,” Gibbens said. “I hope the ripple effect would be many more women running, and that we would reach equal parity in Congress way before 2121.” She was referring to a recent study that calculated that at the current slow growth rate, women would not hold 50 percent of the seats in Congress for more than 100 years. She continued, “I think electing a woman president would absolutely make a huge difference.”
“We desperately need a woman as a president. It’s a sad statement but it’s very true. We need somebody who is going to show kids and young women that this is something that they can accomplish,” Danielle Mulein said. “Thus far it’s really hard to tell a young girl, ‘Hey, you can be president,’ if there has never been a female president before. How is she going to be able to say, ‘Yes, I can totally do this one day,’ if all of the people who have been president before don’t match up with what she looks like and who she is?”
“I have younger siblings, and I think the most important thing for us is to get a woman president, because of the ripples throughout the country,” Maeder said. She is the oldest daughter in a family of thirteen. “That would be the most empowering thing we can do for young girls.”
The “role model effect” is real and powerful, according to research by political scientists David Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht. In a 2006 study, they found that teenage girls were significantly more likely to see themselves as potentially running for election as adults in places where viable women candidates ran for election. Campbell and Wolbrecht even discovered how the role model effect in these cases worked: Parents of daughters talked about politics more when they could point to specific examples of successful women politicians. In other words, what parents literally saw as possible for girls powerfully shaped what girls conceived as possible for themselves. In a companion study, Wolbrecht and Campbell analyzed data from more than twenty nations and discovered similar results. The greater number of women who held political office, the more that adolescent girls envisioned themselves as politically active adults. “A highly visible woman politician in the future—perhaps even at the top of a major party presidential ticket,” they speculated in 2006, “has the potential to generate significant interest in political activity among adolescent girls with possible long-term effects on the political engagement of women.”
Many women who have held political office report that girls, their parents, and young women look to them to see what opportunities are in fact open to women. Amy Klobuchar served as Minnesota’s first woman attorney general and then its first woman senator. “While you had women in the Senate already, there was the whole state, Minnesota, with 5 million people, and I never saw a woman in either of those jobs,” she recalled. “I was the first woman in those jobs. When you do that, it makes other women—and especially girls—think anything is possible. That is something that is intangible, but it matters. If people see that we can have a woman president, then why can’t a woman be CEO of a certain company? Or why can’t we have more women on a corporate board? You’re using more talent that way, and I think nothing would encourage that more in America than having a woman president.”
Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is the first Hindu American to have been elected to Congress, told me, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met these young girls who are nine or ten years old, who come up to me and say that they want to be the president of the United States.” The relative dearth of role models means that women politicians attract a specific kind of attention from girls and young women, even when the identification might be a stretch. “I am so inspired every time, for example, I meet a young Indian girl. I have no Indian heritage or ethnicity in my family.” Gabbard was born in American Samoa and moved to Hawaii as a child. “But there is an affinity and a sense of connection between many Hindus and Indian Americans here in the United States. These girls’ parents tell me that their ambition has been inspired by seeing someone who they can connect with, who they can relate to, who they feel understands them.”
It’s not just impressionable girls and their doting parents who are hungry for models of women’s political leadership. “America is seen as a premier country, both economically and in terms of its democracy, and to have a woman leading that Number One entity is a big deal,” Irene Natividad, president of the Global Summit of Women, said. In her travels around the world while Clinton was running in 2008, women leaders would press her for news. “The vice president of Vietnam, she would say to me, ‘So how’s Hillary doing?’ Or I would see Ursula von der Leyen,” a German cabinet minister, “and she would ask, ‘How’s Hillary?’ It was as if they had something riding on her candidacy,” Natividad recalled. Ironically, even though the U.S. lagged far behind many advanced democracies on women’s political leadership, women around the world looked to us to set an example.
“I travel a great deal, and anybody who knows I have had any relationship to Hillary Clinton, they all say to me, ‘We’re praying. We’re hoping she’s going to be president. Because if she wins, we all win,’” Melanne Verveer, head of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security and former U.S. ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, said. “There is a sense that if she makes it, we make it. I don’t know how to put it differently. There’s this transference of, ‘My God, if a woman could be president of the United States, that will lift all of the rest of us up.’ And it is true. Madeleine Albright broke ground, just by virtue of being secretary of state. And then Condi broke ground. And then Hillary Clinton followed. That role modeling comes across.”
Verveer continued, “If you’re a woman and you never see yourself in that position, you almost don’t even aspire to get there because you don’t think it’s possible. Madeleine Albright tells a story about her granddaughter. They were sitting around the table and talking about how she was secretary of state, and the kid looks up and says, ‘I don’t understand what the big deal is. It’s a girl’s job.’” Verveer laughed. “Well, not that many years ago, nobody dreamed it possible a girl could be in that job. So yes, it has a profound impact.
“I think young women have less of a doubt that they will see one of their contemporaries in the presidency. So I think they’re feeling much spunkier about the prospects, which is a good thing.”