Vice President Kamala Harris is gaining support to become the Democratic nominee for president.
Before she vaulted to the national stage, Kamala Harris served as California’s top prosecutor — state Attorney General — and was raised by immigrant parents in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In speeches and in her memoir, the 59-year-old Harris has often cast herself as a prosecutor who fought from the inside for progressive change. Some, however, have criticized her for upholding the status quo, saying she remained silent on state initiatives to legalize marijuana and reduce penalties for certain crimes.
Despite this, in 2016, Harris was elected as California’s U.S. Senator just four years before she was picked as Joe Biden’s vice president. She made history as the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve in the position.
If she’s selected as the Democratic nominee and beats former President Donald Trump in November, she would be the first female president.
CapRadio’s Politics Editor Chris Nichols spoke with Kelly Dittmar of the nonpartisan Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University about the significance of Harris’ rise in national politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Tell me a little bit about what CAWP does.
We’re a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, research institution, based at Rutgers University that has been tracking and analyzing women's participation in politics for over 50 years. That includes not only tracking the numbers of women in office, the numbers of women running and winning, [and] women as voters, but also doing research to understand why the numbers are where they are and how we can best identify a path to increasing women's political power and yielding greater gender equality in American politics.
How significant is this moment?
If Kamala Harris goes on to earn the nomination, she'll be just the second woman to ever do that in U.S. history for a major political party. She will also be the first Black woman and South Asian woman not only to potentially be president, but also to simply win a major party nomination. So there's lots of different ways in which history can be made in the coming weeks and months. We'll be monitoring that, not just because it is a milestone for women in American politics, but also because there are real substantive impacts of that. In other words, we know that having women at the highest levels of political leadership both as candidates and as office holders can help to disrupt expectations of what it looks like and what it means to be an elected leader. And in this case, a presidential leader in the U.S., an office that has obviously, until this, has been dominantly male and dominantly white.
Does this moment come after greater participation of women in politics in general? What has the trend been in recent decades?
Women have been increasing their political participation at all levels — not only as candidates and office holders, but they’ve been the most reliable voters. Women outnumber and outvote men and have done so for over 40 years in elections. We've seen more and more of that type of participation, whether it be in voting [or] in advocacy, translate into candidacy and office-holding. 2018 was a particular record year for women running and winning on the Democratic side of the aisle. We also saw a record year in 2020 across all levels of office with more Republican women trying to close that gap. So this just takes it to the next level. Obviously Kamala Harris has already been a trailblazer in becoming the first woman vice president and she will be pursuing an office that a woman has never held. It could be absolutely a continuance of this kind of progress, to see women in these spaces of political power where not only have they not been [included] at all, but even in recent years, continued to be underrepresented.
Has your organization looked at how open voters are, nationwide, to voting for a woman as president?
When the generic question is asked, “would you vote for a woman,” nearly all voters say that they will. So that kind of explicit bias — the type of bias of somebody saying “a woman can't do this job” — at least in polling, we see that has largely gone away.
In practice, we do see that folks raise different questions when women run for office about their capacity to do the job. So much of that is based on the fact that they just haven't seen a woman in that role. People raise doubts about “electability,” whether a woman can even win. So you're going to hear — if you haven't already — in the coming days [people] say, “I like Kamala, but I don't know that a woman can win the presidency,” or “I like Kamala, but I don't know that a Black woman could win in this country.” That's what we call the electability bias. And that's more pervasive than the simple kind of I don't want a woman to win.
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