y grandmother used to live in an all-brown house in upstate New York. The living room was brown, the bathroom was brown, the bedroom was brown. It was brown because my grandfather decided things, and brown paint was on sale. My grandmother remembers wearing gloves to go to the bank to write a check in the 1950s, and being asked if she was married before she could access the account. Even though the money in the bank account was hers.
Now she is 90, her home is various shades of lime green and tangerine, and she writes plenty of checks. But when I called her recently to ask if she ever thought she would see a woman President in her lifetime, she paused before answering: “No.”
My grandma was born roughly 10 years after women got the right to vote. Her lifetime has spanned the popularization of the washing machine, the invention of the birth-control pill, the sexual revolution, and women’s entrance into the workforce. Now, she may live long enough to see a woman be elected President of the United States.
As Election Day 2024 dawns, Kamala Harris is on the cusp of history. Polls show the race between the Vice President and Donald Trump is more or less a dead heat across the seven key battleground states. Either candidate could win. But in the final hours of the race, Harris’ campaign has come to believe she has the advantage.
For Democrats, and especially those who tried and failed to elect Hillary Clinton the first woman President in 2016, it is a moment of terrifying optimism, with Harris’ supporters vacillating between exuberant hope and abject fear, depending on the time of day and the disposition of the latest poll. In these final hours, most of the women I spoke with had settled into a kind of emotional defensive crouch: they hoped, but they were afraid to hope.
“This makes me want to vomit,” says one person who has worked for years to elect Democratic women to office. “I’m gonna cry again, huh?” says another who worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
One of the central ironies of Harris’s brief campaign is that she almost never mentions that she would be the first woman ever elected President of the United States. It is so far outside her campaign’s messaging and strategy that it can sometimes seem as if she wants to avoid emphasizing her gender altogether. Breaking what Clinton once called that “highest, hardest glass ceiling” seems to be the last thing the Harris campaign wants to talk about.
“I think a lot about Election Night in 2016, and the overarching feeling of being like: Oh, little girls will see that they never get to be president,” says Amanda Litman, who worked on the Clinton campaign before launching Run for Something, which helps elect young people to office. “And little boys will see that they get to act like him and still be president.”
Litman recalls thinking after 2016 that Democrats would never elect a woman President, or at least not anytime soon. “If Hillary Clinton couldn’t win—the most accomplished, qualified candidate for President, basically ever—in what world would we get another chance?” she says. “Because people were going to blame her loss on her gender, and they did.”
But a lot has changed since 2016. Clinton’s loss—and Trump’s win—ushered in a new era for American women. They marched in the streets and formed resistance groups. They helped elect a record number of women to Congress in 2018. They forced a social reckoning about sex and power with the #MeToo movement. They made billion-dollar movies and launched pop tours that sustained small economies. They lost their abortion rights with the Dobbs decision, then organized a show of force that has helped Democrats have over-perform in elections ever since. Harris is on the brink of history in large part because legions of women have lifted her there.
“Electing a woman means even more now than in 2016,” says Jenna Lowenstein, who was Clinton’s digital director on that campaign. “There’s more on the line post-Dobbs, and the reality of a Trump presidency is a vivid memory.”
For the Democratic women who have spent their lives trying to get other women elected to office, Harris’ win would be the final vindication of what once seemed like an improbable goal. It’s not just that Harris is a woman, they say. It’s that she has elevated issues like reproductive freedom, the care economy, and maternal mortality, making them central to her economic vision.
“It’s not an accident that we have a woman leading on that,” says EMILYs List spokeswoman Christina Reynolds, who notes that Harris focused on maternal mortality as a Senator and on abortion rights as Vice President. “She has always been someone who viewed these things that are seen as ‘women’s issues’ as broad economic issues that impact our entire way of life.”
Whatever happens, the fact that Harris is so close to the presidency means something has changed in America already. “The door has opened,” my grandma says, talking to me from her home in suburban Illinois, where she sat on her polka-dotted couch, in her bubblegum-pink living room, surrounded by folk paintings by women artists. “And it’s never gonna close again. Never.”
