Democrats Should Still Nominate Women for President

Has nominating men really turned out that well?

Representative Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez is currently engaged in a nationwide series of rallies against oligarchy with Senator Bernie Sanders. The tour seems designed as a kind of passing of the torch; Sanders has been the leader of the left wing of the Democrats for the past decade, but he’s now 83, and is encouraging his followers to embrace AOC as his successor.

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One of the ways in which Sanders led the left, of course, was by running for president—and the rallies are hard not to read as the kick-off for an AOC 2028 presidential nomination campaign.

I’m happy to see AOC running because I think she’d be a good president. There are some people who think she would be a bad president. I’m not going to address them in this piece.

The people I am going to address are those are who think AOC might do a good job in office, but are worried that she can’t win because she’s a woman. Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016; Kamala Harris lost to Trump in 2024. The conclusion a certain number of Democratic partisans have come to is that the electorate is hopelessly misogynist and will simply never vote for a woman. Therefore, the Democrats need to just keep nominating men (and maybe even white men) for the next few decades until the Star Trek future comes and we reach a more enlightened time.

I understand the fear and the anxiety; losing to Trump was disastrous. But I think the evidence that the losses were because his opponents were women is weak. In addition, the last D effort to beat Trump through white male identity politics didn’t go great, and we should maybe consider not doing that again.

Women can win

It’s hard to isolate any single reason for candidate losses. But we have a lot of data points suggesting that women can be successful in national elections.

First, Clinton won more votes than Trump in 2016. The Electoral College handed Trump the victory because God hates us. But when the woman candidate gets more votes, it’s just difficult to argue that people won’t vote for a woman.

Second Harris won the Vice-Presidency. Obviously she wasn’t at the top of the ticket, but her name was still on the ballot, and people voted for her. If people will vote for a woman Vice-President, it seems likely they’ll vote for a woman president.

Third, while Harris lost outright in 2024, her approval and polling was significantly better than Joe Biden’s before he dropped out of the race. We can’t be sure how another candidate would have done, obviously, but the two candidates we tried against Trump in 2024 were a man and a woman, and the woman appears to have done better.

Fourth, if it was true that women couldn’t win presidential elections, you’d expect that to be reflected in statewide races, and perhaps particularly in swing state races. But we know that women regularly win statewide elections in swing states. Elissa Slotkin, for example, won the Senate seat in Michigan in 2024; Tina Smith won the Senate seat in Minnesota in 2020; Kyrsten Sinema won in Arizona in 2018. Katie Hobbs won the governor’s race in Arizona in 2022; Gretchen Whitmer won the governor’s race in Michigan in 2018; Janet Mills won the governor’s race in Maine that same year. Democrat Laura Kelly won a 2022 governor’s race in Kansas (!)

Sexism works in other ways

Again, women (from both parties) win statewide races with some regularity. That doesn’t mean women and men are treated equally though. On the contrary, misogyny is a major problem in the US (as in most places) and strongly affects politics and political candidates. It just does so in complicated ways and doesn’t necessarily mean that people won’t vote for women.

As evidence of sexism, you can look at the substantial gender gap in who votes for which party. Men in every age cohort voted for Trump; women in every age cohort voted for Harris. This isn’t surprising, since Republican policies are consistently sexist and misogynist; they work to deny women reproductive health care, they are opposed to subsidizing child care; they are currently under Trump committed to the view that any woman who achieves anything must have done so through “DEI”, which is the same as saying that men are always more intelligent and more competent than women.

In short, the two parties are already very gendered. Sexists (who are disproportionately men) are already motivated to vote for Republicans; if you have animus towards women and women candidates, you’re probably pulling the lever for the GOP anyway. The animus shows up in Republican candidate recruitment; the GOP has trouble fielding and retaining women, while Democratic women actually overperformed in primaries in 2024.

Another way in which sexism shows up is…well, in this conversation. When a man loses a run for president, people don’t say, “well, no man can ever win the presidency.” With male candidates, people generally recognize that there’s a range of factors at play, such as identity, ideology, approval ratings, the economy, fundamentals, and so on. When women lose, though, it gets reduced to one thing.

Defaulting to candidates who feel safe isn’t always safe

It’s worth remembering that we’ve been here before. After Clinton lost in 2016, Democrats had a broad range of candidates to choose from in 2020, many of whom were women, many of whom weren’t white. But in the end the electorate decided to play it safe and go with old white male centrist-y party stalwart Joe Biden.

That choice seemed to pay off with the victory in 2020, and with a presidency that (especially on the economy) was remarkably successful.

But. The same factors that made Biden seem safe in 2020—his identity, his impulse not to rock the boat—made him seem boring and out of touch when he ran for reelection in 2024. His age and his Zionism, neither of which were much discussed in his first race, dominated coverage in his second. His institutionalism—and his choice of old white male centrist Merrick Garland as AG—ended up kneecapping his ability to hold Trump accountable. Given where we are, it’s hard not to see his nomination as a disaster.

I’m not saying Democrats can never nominate a white guy again—I quite like J.B. Pritzker and Tim Walz, who both seem to be campaigning for 2028 now. What I am saying is that litmus tests for identity don’t make sense based on the evidence.

It’s hard to know where we’ll be in 3 years, but there seems like a very good chance we’ll still be facing fascism, and that we will need Democrats to be the party of multi-racial democracy more than ever. And you can’t credibly be the party of multi-racial, diverse democracy if you’re ruling out candidates on the basis that they aren’t white men. AOC will certainly have a lot of competition if she enters the primaries in 2028, and that’s how it should be. But we shouldn’t preemptively disqualify her, or any woman. On principle and pragmatically, we need to find the best candidate possible, of whatever gender.