Less than a decade separates Kamala Harris’s candidacy and Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 bid to become the first woman elected president of the United States, but it feels as though a generation lies between them.
I was struck by this as I was teaching a class at Northeastern University in Boston the day after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump. My students included many gen Z women who would be voting for the first time and were not at all surprised that she had thoroughly dominated. When I asked them if there was a danger that Harris might have come off as aggressive or shrill—words often applied to Clinton in 2008 and 2016—they looked at me as if I were crazy. “She rocked it” was their collective judgement.
This is the group that is powering the Harris campaign. Among gen Z women, she is 30 points ahead, and young men like her too—though she’s only ahead by 4 points with them. This support is not, in itself, surprising: more women than men have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1980. (They’ve also registered to vote—and have actually voted—in greater numbers in each of these contests.) A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed Harris is currently beating Trump with women voters by a commanding 13 per cent.
Harris is, however, stylistically a very different type of candidate to her predecessors. Compared with Clinton, too, she offers a marked change in the way she campaigns, and in the issues she chooses to champion and those she doesn’t.
Eight years ago, Gloria Steinem and other leaders of the feminist movement were among the most passionate and visible supporters of Clinton, though she also had impressive support from black women—91 per cent backed her. At the Brooklyn rally that celebrated her winning the Democratic nomination, I interviewed women who had brought their daughters and granddaughters with them to see history being made. Clinton wore all white, the Suffragists’ chosen colour, and paid tribute to the women who had come before her.
“Tonight’s victory is not about one person, it belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible,” she said, noting, “It started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.” She uses the same language in her new book, Something Lost, Something Gained. If Harris wins, she asks, “Could we...finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling?”
Harris, however, has likely realised that the traditional barriers to women entering the professions aren’t the top concern of gen Z women. They are far more racially diverse than earlier generations, and many are LGBT+. Although they do share some of the same concerns as the Hillary generation on issues such as equal pay and affordable childcare, they are more urgently concerned with abortion and problems such as high rents, rising healthcare costs and finding a job that pays a liveable wage. They are focused on the future, not the past—and Harris has clearly tailored her message to them. She has promised to fight for a national law that codifies abortion; as a senator, she opposed legislation that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“These women were raised by a post-feminist generation,” explains Lauren Leader, co-founder of All In Together, a non-partisan civic group for women in politics and business. “They’ve been raised being told that all doors are open to them.” What matters is not who Harris is, but what she would do in the White House.
It is striking how quickly this generational change has happened; the issues of Harris’s gender and race have receded as potential barriers to her election. The shift has been personally thrilling for me to watch. I’ve noticed the change in my own speaking engagements at colleges and universities over the past decade. Where I was once asked what it was like to be the first woman executive editor of the New York Times and what gender barriers I’d faced in my career, this year, students have other questions about journalism. Chief among them: “Why isn’t the press tougher on Donald Trump?”
Harris could still lose, of course. Any victory will depend in large part on women and young voters turning out in historic numbers in swing states, and often young people don’t. But the signs so far are positive—more than one million people have reportedly registered to vote during this election cycle, of whom 17 per cent are in swing states and 79 per cent are young people. In class, some of my students from battleground states such as Georgia and Michigan have shared stories about the arguments they’ve had with their Trump-supporting grandfathers who are glued to Fox News all day.
Young voters, and gen Z women in particular, realise that this will be a close election—“a knife fight in a telephone booth” as one longtime observer of American politics, the journalist John Ellis, aptly described it. Many are excited to cast their votes for Harris. But if they do vote—and I hope they will—they will not be coming to the polls to shatter the glass ceiling.
