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Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Sarah Palin Have One Thing in Common

Sexism cost them their shot at high office. But I’m hopeful for women in politics

In the summer of 2016, I was living in Washington, DC, and working at The Atlantic, both places that were consumed with the presidential election later that year. The conventional wisdom—backed up by polling, news coverage, and rationality—was that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump. At a work happy hour one evening, I remember talking with one of my then bosses about what might actually change under a Clinton administration. Pragmatically, the answer was: nothing much. Emotionally, though, the stakes felt astronomical. I can remember arguing that Clinton’s inauguration would upend the way America thought about women—that seeing a woman elevated to the most powerful job in the world would overwrite decades of conditioning about who was allowed to have authority and what might be possible. The shifts would be seismic, I argued, even if they weren’t immediately obvious. This was a moment when progress still felt inevitable.

All I can think now is, How stupid. That July, I’d written a piece about the reaction to Paul Feig’s all-female adaptation of Ghostbusters, in which a swamp of aggrieved online commenters directed organized ire at the movie and misogynistic and racist abuse at one of its stars, Leslie Jones. If America wasn’t ready to even temporarily cede a fictional world of hearse-driving, ectoplasm-dodging paranormal investigators to women, it could hardly have been expected to give one of us the nuclear codes. The signs of what was about to happen were all there in our cultural macrocosm. I just didn’t want to see them.

Our culture teaches us everything. And what I keep coming back to now is how few cultural representations there still are of women seeking and wielding power. The author Tom Perrotta once told me that when he wrote Election in 1998, he had no idea that Tracy Flick would go on to become an archetype for earnest female ambition. What he came to realize, especially after Reese Witherspoon’s indelible turn in the movie adaptation, was that Tracy stuck in people’s minds because there were just no other meaningful fictional representations of women politicians. Tracy—intelligent, worthy, hugely unpopular—became the dominant stereotype for any woman in politics, from Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope all the way up to Clinton herself. Until Veep debuted on HBO in 2012, Tracy stood virtually alone.

There are obviously reasons why people didn’t want to vote for Clinton that had nothing or little to do with her gender. But given the dearth of other women who’ve managed to make it to the top of the ticket, her trajectory is worth revisiting, especially given the cultural backdrop it played out against.

In his 2002 book Striptease Culture, which examines the mass proliferation during the late 1990s of sex and sexual imagery in modern life, the academic Brian McNair argued that Clinton’s election to the United States Senate in 2000 demonstrated how little this kind of cultural shift had hurt feminism. In that moment, he argued, “the idea of a female U.S. president no longer seemed outlandish.” Never mind that women still made up just 13 percent of senators at the time. Clinton, and her success, was to be our token of what was possible.

In 2007, the year Clinton announced she was running for president, popular culture was mostly engaged in a frenzied race to the tabloid bottom. Everywhere you looked, beautiful, vacuous women were falling apart, melting down, selling out, going off the rails. It’s not difficult to interpret that this might have influenced how voters my age felt about a potential woman president—about her gravitas, her professionalism, her capacity for ethical decision making and tough negotiation.

“Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Rush Limbaugh asked on his radio show in 2007. In 2015, when Clinton took a bathroom break during a televised Democratic debate, Trump told a rally that her doing so was “disgusting.” During his own debate with her a year later, he referred to her as “such a nasty woman.”

It’s no longer at all surprising to me that a capable and experienced woman lost to a reality TV character and a virulent misogynist in 2016 (to say nothing of 2024). Every single cultural message Americans had absorbed during the decades leading up to the first race was enshrining the idea that women fundamentally lacked the qualities required to gain and exercise authority: intelligence, morality, dignity. (It’s worth noting here that men don’t have to meet all these barriers to entry because they have always been powerful and thus have nothing to prove.)

On film throughout the aughts, female characters were presented as ancillary objects, shrewish and vacuous at very best. And the new medium of reality television, virtually from its inception, propagated the idea that women were hysterical, money-grubbing idiots, scratching each other’s eyes out for a prize none of them seemed to even want. The world of shows such as The Bachelor and Flavor of Love was one where women’s only form of power was sexual and where,........

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