A stubborn historical problem is standing in her way.
Let’s just come out and say it: The prospect of the vice president replacing Joe Biden on the 2024 ticket would be much easier if the vice president were a white guy.
This fact is foundationally, fundamentally unfair and deeply enraging. As much as conservatives are branding Harris a “DEI candidate,” the truth is that, in electoral politics, race and gender work overwhelmingly to the benefit of white men. The United States has had 235 years of unbroken male rule. In that same time, we have had one Black president—a man of outstanding, once-in-a-generation political talents. Kamala Harris is the first female vice president, and the first female vice president of color, in a country where both houses of Congress remain largely white and largely male. A Harris win would usher the first woman, and the first woman of color, into the presidency—a history-making possibility, and a deeply exciting one.
But then: 2016.
Those of us who were sure Hillary Clinton would smoke Donald Trump may be uniquely ill-situated to evaluate Harris’ potential candidacy. Here is a truly horrifying and humiliating admission: I was equal parts appalled and relieved when the Republican Party chose Donald Trump as their candidate, because while I thought selecting him certainly signaled a deep rot in the GOP base, I also thought he was the weakest, most beatable candidate the party had run in my lifetime. In other words, he was a uniquely helpful one to pit against a highly competent feminist woman. Coming at the tail end of the Obama years, I genuinely believed that Americans would watch Trump sputter incoherent nonsense, go on racist and misogynist rants, and demean his female rival, and they would watch Clinton put forward lucid, reasoned policy proposals and approach the office of the presidency with the dignity and respect it deserved, and that victory would be easy for her. Sure, lots of conservative voters didn’t like her, and I was under no illusions that America had somehow solved sexism by electing a Black man and then seeing Democrats run a white woman. But Trump was such an obvious con man who said such disgusting things and comported himself like such an all-out bozo that I simply could not imagine a critical mass of Americans, no matter their politics, listening to him and concluding: This is the guy who should have the nuclear codes.
