Washington Week with The Atlantic

Good evening and welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I'm Yamiche Alcindor 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw his historic number of women by for the nomination, yet none of them made it across the finish line. Still, there have been history making moments in 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, though she lost the election to former President Donald Trump. A record number of women are also serving in Congress. And now we have the first ever female vice president and Kamala Harris. But the glass ceiling blocking the Oval Office still remains intact. Meanwhile, about 70 of the world's in 195 patients have had a female head of state or governor or governors, their head of government. So why hasn't the us elected a woman president and what factors are at play in this country? ABC, ABC, NBC News correspondent, My colleague Ali Vitali had a front row seat covering the 2020 election embedded with Senator Elizabeth Warren's campaign. Her new book, Electable, Dill delved into these questions. I'm sure ABC would be happy to have you but you are with NBC. Something else? Um, So thank you so much. For being here, So I want to just jump into your book. Of course, I want to read a little bit of it. You say the glass ceiling, the ceiling will not be broken in one shot. It will be chipped away at bit by bit shattered, cracked by crack. It will look like voters going to the ballot box and just voting for the person they think will be best. I think that's really powerful. So with that in mind, why hasn't the us elected a woman? Yet as I often joke, If the answer we're just simply misogyny, this would be a lot shorter of a book. But the real answer is actually that structural We just the way that we have our presidential systems, the very system of the electoral college the way that we do our primaries but also just the ways that voters assess who's qualified, who's likable and Yeah, who's electable? All of that has gender swirling within the pot, and I think sometimes in our daily political coverage, we sometimes gloss over gender because it can't be quantified in a poll necessarily, and it's a lens that I bring to this book over moments that all of us covered and reported on together in 2020, because that primary field had more women in it than any of Their primary field before it So it provided the opportunity to look at gender in a whole bunch of different ways with a whole bunch of different candidates, And ultimately, the result for all of the six women who ran was the same and that none of them got the nomination and you talk. Of course, as you say, a lot about electability. I want to pull up another graphic this second graphic, Um when voters are pundits or operatives wondered about elected about likability or viability. What they were really asking about was electability. Can this person win and gender informed those those answers in an Evil but substantive way, especially in 2020. When the question wasn't wasn't the question wasn't about just winning. It was about beating Donald Trump and I heard I'm on the campaign trail over and over again. People saying, Well, we just have to figure out who can beat Trump. So talk a little bit about how that has impacted women running two pronged question in 2020. But the thing that always blew my mind was there was electability on its face, which is a fair thing. I think for all of us to ask of our candidates and voters, especially want to pick someone who can win period. The concept of electability, though. Can actually be proven by anyone male or female? Until after the polls closed, and voters have voted. It's an unproven concept. And so the question really is. Who are you giving the benefit of the doubt, too? And I think more often than not, we see that male candidates were being given the benefit of doubt, despite the fact that those women who were running especially the last two standing Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar had winning records had receipts legislatively of the things that they had done. Warren was running on plans. And then there was the Trump of it all in the 2016 and the Hillary hangover and voters. Assessed the fact that even though Hillary was supposed to win that election, everyone thought she was the most qualified person to ever run. The polls had told them at least Democratic voters that she was going to be the next president when they saw that she had lost to Trump. It manifested in their minds as well. One woman lost once to this man. And so it's an unsafe or risky choice. Never mind the fact that Trump beat 15 men on his path to the Republican nomination, and no one ever asked the men. Well, do you think a man can beat Trump? Wow. Um, no one asked that question that I can that I can remember was which man can beat Trump. Exactly. That was what I heard. I want to tell you also say one of the most jarring pieces of research that you reference was in Chapter seven. And it's the 2021 Stanford University study on Gender Dynamics. What struck you most about that study? This study was amazing to me, not least of all because it came three weeks before I actually submitted the final manuscript and I was so thankful for it because it would It bared out with something that I had seen in real time in the primary, which was in the primary journalism. Warren's polling surge. There was a poll done where Elizabeth Warren one if voters could wave a magic wand and pick whoever they wanted to win to win, And then they did a horse race poll in that same poll and Joe Biden wanted and voters were asked, What could the Magic Wand candidate change to be seen as the horse race candidate? The person who could actually win and respondents said gender what this Stanford Pole then did was after the primary was over. It did that whole study again effectively and it found that the idea of electability not being able to trust that a woman can win actually impacts her electoral body. Online because people were actively switching their votes not from the person who they wanted to vote for, but to the person who they thought could win. And in that thinking, who could win is a lot of gendered undertones. And where there was there any encouraging part of that data? Was there anything that left you thinking? Okay, Maybe this is this feels a little bit better for women, even if it's going to be harder. Thank God yes, because what they showed in that study is that if voters are presented with disruptions of those gender narratives that in some cases, a percentage of them will stick to the candidate who is female. Male or the candidate who they like in that instance, and so what it means is being aggressive, both on the part of female candidates but also in media narratives, and I talk about the role that the media plays in. All of this is helping to disrupt narratives that are unlevel for the playing field for female candidates, and that's on media that's on candidates, but it requires a strategy of being able to say women win. Here's why, and it's a question that all the candidates in 2020 were asked. They all gave answers, and ultimately, none of those actors, those answers were apparently satisfactory. Enough for voters. Wow. I want to also put up one like the one Last excerpt from your book, It says emotion Do you write a motion remains one of the most gendered and risky mess tricks in politics, all the women whether their campaigns, overtly said, so we're not. We're challenged by this invisible, unpredictable dynamic to emote but not too much to attack but not too harshly to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack, but not to offend someone while doing so. I mean so many women. Read that. And they can, Of course, if you're talking about presidential politics, But you could be talking about lawyers, doctors, teachers tell me a little bit about about your writing that but also the universality of all of this. I think everyone that I talked to for this, whether they're in politics or not in politics, just people I come across, understand that double edged sword for women of being aggressive of being ambitious of saying what you want and going for it. Certainly being president is not a job that anyone falls into by accident, and there was a really great op ed that was written during 2020 primary about the ideal or perfect female candidate and I referenced it in the book, and they conclude with the idea that she wants to be president. But she'll never tell you how badly she wants to be president because she can't and we saw women at each level of this process dinged in many cases for being aggressive for showing ambition. It was aggressive under aggression on debate stages that even in winning moments made it seem like they were somehow losing or being criticized for it. And then in the veepstakes itself, all of these women self advocating talking about what they could bring to the Table on this ticket, And then there were still operatives and open narratives in the press about Oh, these women are being too overt in their ambition for the vice presidency. Never mind the fact that multiple men have been vice president before and no one has knocked them for saying that they want that job. Veepstakes. Of course, we should ask about the Vice President Kamala Harris. You write about the sparkly jacket remind people about what that is, and also why you wanted to include it. Sparkly jacket was a day where I was on the campaign trail with several other female reporters. All of us had covered president. Election cycles before veteran journalists out with Kamala Harris as she was campaigning on Lady Street in South Carolina, the perfect place for a female presidential candidate to be she tried on a sparkly jacket and conservative white men on media on Twitter started reacting very badly to this idea of a woman doing a retail campaign politics stop which you and I have covered hundreds of times with male candidates before it's the bread and butter of campaigning for president. And yet when she did it, she went shopping a stereotypically female task. She did it with. Female reporters. There was an air of unserious nous, apparently, and it was a reminder to me that even in just doing the job of being a presidential candidate, there are invisible pitfalls for these women that we are only just now still being reminded of last question. In the couple of seconds we have left after writing this. Do you think it's inevitable that we're finally going to get at some point a woman who's president, or do you think that it's going to take a long time? And maybe we might not see it in our lifetime? Really leaning on that yet there in the title because I do think that we are coming closer? The pipeline It is full on both sides. I think it means that you're not going to see primaries where there are no women running, and that is a big piece of this battle, even just to make sure that the field has women in it. And then, of course, the fact that the country would be ready, which, by the way in 2016 Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, so it's not that they're not ready. It's just that the moment has not arrived yet. Well, congratulations on this book. I don't know how you got it done running around Congress and doing all this stuff. But you've got it done, right? Hopefully the book, of course, is electable. Everyone should pick it up, of course. And I look forward to to hearing what you all think of it at home. We'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much Ali for joining us. Goodnight from Washington.