Hillary's Gender Gap
She wants to avoid a re-run of 2008, but emphasizing women's issues this time around isn't a sure ticket to the White House.
In June 2008, Hillary Clinton announced the end of her campaign for president and conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. “Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it,” said Mrs. Clinton, referencing the number of primary votes that she won. “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”
It was the type of rhetoric that some of her advisers had wanted to hear more often in those 22 debates with Mr. Obama. The advisers had pressured Mrs. Clinton to stress that her victory would have been every bit as historic as his. But instead of making her gender a campaign theme, she played up her experience and stature in the party.
“On a personal note, when I was asked what it means to be a woman running for president, I always gave the same answer, that I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I'd be the best president,” said Mrs. Clinton in her concession remarks. “But I am a woman and, like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us.”
The conventional wisdom is that it was a mistake for Mrs. Clinton to downplay her sex. And given her public statements in recent years and in the run-up to last week's launch of her second presidential bid, she agrees. “When women participate in politics, the effects ripple out across all of society,” she told an audience in Chicago in 2013, adding that “the great unfinished business of this century” is increasing opportunities for women and girls. At an Emily's List gala last month, she was even blunter: “Don't you someday want to see a woman president of the United States?”
The reality is that Hillary Clinton lost the nomination in 2008 to a more talented politician. Mr. Obama out-hustled her in caucus states that she thought she wouldn't need, and he repeatedly out-performed her in the televised debates. Her biggest mistake may have been underestimating him, though even if she hadn't, it's not clear that she would have prevailed.
Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster not affiliated with any of the current GOP presidential prospects, questions whether Mrs. Clinton will be able to replicate Mr. Obama's success by campaigning on more gender-specific themes—pay equity, contraception, abortion and the like—that could cost her support among men.
“Hillary was denied her party's nomination by a Democratic primary electorate that was 58% female,” Ms. Conway told me. “If even the Democratic women in 2008 favored Obama over Hillary, how will she convince independents, moderates, pro-choice Republican woman to vote for her?”
Mr. Obama won 95% of black votes and 67% of Latino votes, compared with 88% and 53%, respectively, for John Kerry in 2004. Mr. Obama also narrowly outperformed Mr. Kerry among white voters, 43% to 41%, yet it was his minority support that made the difference. If blacks and Latinos had voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004, John McCain would have won.
Assuming no serious rivals emerge and she wins the nomination this time, Mrs. Clinton probably can't match Mr. Obama's showing with racial and ethnic minorities, but trying to compensate with more support from the sisterhood will be a challenge. “When it comes to women's support of women candidates, in-group favoritism is less universal and more conditional,” wrote Leonie Huddy and Tony Carey of Stony Brook University in their analysis of the 2008 Democratic primaries. “As a general rule, women show considerably less political cohesion than do African Americans—they do not uniformly support the Democratic Party, are as supportive as men of most women's issues, and evince modest gender gaps across a range of policy issues.”
Hillary Clinton's gender no more qualifies her to be president than it disqualifies her, but she'll have to make voters understand that the election is about more than the unfinished business of making her the first woman to occupy the Oval Office.
In 2008 Obama was fresh and new. His “hope and change” theme was vapid, and his political resume was thin, but nothing could lessen his appeal as a symbol of racial progress. Mrs. Clinton, a Washington insider for the past quarter-century, is not fresh and new. She doesn't represent generational change. She isn't the future. And she most fears the Republican presidential candidate who can make all of that obvious just by standing next to her on a stage.
This piece originally appeared in Wall Street Journal
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal