There was the “cackle.” The daily musings about the color of her pantsuits. The grossly sexist complaints that her very candidacy—or even her very being—was somehow an assault on masculinity. Donald Trump may have been a threat to mankind, but Hillary Clinton in 2016 was cast as a threat to men. “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs,” cable news personality Tucker Carlson said on MSNBC at the time, a fear marketed with Hillary Clinton–figured nutcrackers. Sex scandals that once had politically hurt the cheater somehow were used as a weapon against Clinton, who was seen as both too domineering (no wonder he strayed!) and too weak to leave her philandering husband. In her first run for president in 2008, fellow Democrat Barack Obama damned her with the faintest of praise during a New Hampshire primary debate, telling his Senate colleague that she was “likable enough.”
Even before she lost the 2016 election to Trump, Hillary Clinton couldn’t win. Her femaleness—even when it was used as a rallying cry for women tired of being a majority that had never been awarded the job as leader of the country—infused her every event, every message. Her effort to own the sexist tropes was almost painfully awkward: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” Clinton told reporters in New Hampshire in November 2007, insisting she was ready for a hot fight for the 2008 nomination. “And I’m very comfortable in the kitchen.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, trying to accomplish what Clinton could not, has not been spared the sexist gauntlet every female candidate must run. But the attacks are just not landing in the same way they did with Clinton. Embracing or just ignoring the gender-based commentary, Harris has redefined what it means to be a female candidate for high office in the United States.
She lambastes Trump without being labeled “shrill.” She wears pantsuits, but no one mentions her clothes, let alone reads some hidden meaning into them. She calls out hecklers but sounds less like a scolding schoolmarm and more like a mother telling a teenager: You can do better than this. Her laugh—ineffectively ridiculed by the GOP—is a selling point for a candidate who says she wants to bring back joy. Female candidates have long had to explain their family situations: If they had children, voters wondered who’d be taking care of them while their mother was in elected office; those without were asked why they didn’t have any (or are dismissed as angry, cat-obsessed subcitizens). “Momala,” with her two stepchildren, unapologetically represents a common American family dynamic.
The Clinton campaign–era days of painting women in unflattering caricatures is not over; witness the descriptions of Senator Elizabeth Warren as hectoring and lecturing, Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, told me. But Harris “is pulling something off here that feels quite different,” she said.
Part of it is the times; part of it is an electorate more used to female leaders, and much of it is the candidate herself. Harris has managed to assert her authority on the trail without appearing too aggressive (also an easier balance to achieve this year given her opponent’s bombastic personality).
“You have to show strength, and you also have to show compassion, empathy, and kindness,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me, explaining the tremendous political success women have had in the Wolverine State, where the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general are also female. Notably, Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot, while Benson herself recently was twice “swatted” with false police calls to her home. Those threats to female leaders in Michigan “are efforts to diminish our power as women,” Benson said. But neither public servant has backed down, with Benson saying definitively that “I will not be intimidated.”
When a protester interrupted her at a rally in Michigan, Harris took control. “I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters,” Harris said. “But I am speaking now. I am speaking now.” And when the protesters tested her by continuing to chant about Gaza, Harris got more insistent. “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” Harris said, getting the crowd on her side as they drowned out the protester with chants of “Kamala!” Next, one might have expected her to threaten to Turn. This Rally. Around. if people didn’t behave.
Trump creepily hovered around Clinton during their 2016 town hall–style debate, pacing behind her as she walked around the stage. She did not confront him—something she regrets, she wrote in her 2017 memoir, What Happened. Trump this year seems to have delegated the stalking role to his running mate, J.D. Vance. He has followed Harris to cities where she was campaigning—but the shadowing hasn’t worked. Vance, saying he was having “a bit of fun,” approached Air Force Two on the tarmac in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, earlier this month, saying he had hoped to speak to her. He didn’t. And the comparison of his events and hers merely underscored the early excitement her campaign is generating.
Nor does Harris talk much about the potentially historic outcome of the race. Instead, it’s more of an understood, underlying fact she doesn’t have to say out loud. When she talks about reproductive rights, voters know it’s personal to her as a woman. When she talks about prosecuting sexual predators, there’s no need to say that women are more often the victims. And her tone, in talking about issues important to women, is different—largely because of her age. While technically a late baby boomer (she’ll turn 60 in October), Harris comes across as a newer-age feminist.
Clinton’s presentation of power “reads to me as ’70s feminist,” unrelatable to younger women, Wayne State University associate professor Janine Lanza, an expert on gender and politics, told me. Women at the forefront of that second wave of feminism fought for very basic rights (such as not being fired for getting pregnant) and tangled with how to be seen as equal to men at work (ask any woman who wore the floppy bows around their necks, meant to be the feminine equivalent to a man’s necktie). Harris, whose feminist message is Beyoncé-era, approaches a female quest for political power in a more modern way. She’s neither constantly reminding voters that she could be a historic first female president nor concealing her unabashed ambition to become the most powerful woman in the world.
Harris has Clinton to thank, however, for paving the way. Clinton may not have won, but she did prove—by getting a popular-vote majority—that Americans are indeed “ready” for a woman president, University of Virginia professor Jennifer Lawless, author of several books on women and elections, told me. And since she was first, Clinton “took bullets for the woman who came after her,” Walsh said. “Kamala Harris has a road map that Hillary Clinton never had.” This time the road map may actually lead to the Oval Office.
