Kamala Harris and the testicle deficit

Even in 2024, can a woman be US president?

In our heart of hearts we all know what will decide this election. It won’t be debates or speeches or experience or fitness to serve. Saving external catastrophe it’ll be whether a critical part of the US electorate can really imagine - even almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century - a woman being president. If they manage that hurdle, Harris ought to win. But if they can’t and find enough excuses for not liking her, then she may well lose.

There’s a reason why there has been no woman president in the 104 years since the ratification of the constitutional amendment enshrining female suffrage in the US. It took 60 years for the first major party woman vice presidential candidate, another 24 years before the second and a further 12 years before the third - and the first to be elected - Kamala Harris. In 2016 Hillary Clinton became the first ever major party candidate for the presidency.

It isn’t because they have been insufficiently qualified - Clinton must have been one of the best qualified presidential candidates in US history, but was passed over by the Democrats in 2008 and defeated (despite winning 2 million more votes) by Donald Trump eight years later. There have been some impressive women state governors (one of my favourites was Ann Richards, Texas governor from 1991 to 1995, who liked to repeat the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards, wearing high heels), senators and congresswomen. All overlooked. In my journalistic lifetime vice presidents and vice president candidates have included such male liabilities as Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew and nonentities such as Paul Ryan.

So how come? Partly, I think, because of the calculation that Americans were less likely elect a woman than a man or that a man as VP candidate would be an asset that a woman would not. Not that people will own up to such a prejudice directly. Almost everyone will tell pollsters that the sex of a candidate makes no difference to them. But at the end of 2022 USA TODAY commissioned a poll from Suffolk University asking respondents about the characteristics of their ideal president. 55% said that gender was of no account. But for that large percentage for whom there was a preference, a man was preferred to woman by more than 2 to 1 - 28% to 12%. The ideal president would be male, according to 50% of Republicans (2% female), Democrats chose a woman by 24% to 11%. Among independents those men expressing a preference chose a male president by 32% to 4% and women also backed a male president by 25% to 19%.

But that’s just the what. How about the why?