In just two weeks, Kamala Harris could make history as America’s first female president. You don’t hear her talk about it much.
“The experience that I am having is one in which it is clear that regardless of someone’s gender, [voters] want to know that their president has a plan to lower costs, that their president has a plan to secure America in the context of our position around the world,” the vice president told NBC News in an interview Tuesday.
But while Harris isn’t talking about it, everyone else is.
First, there are all the ways that former President Donald Trump himself has gone after Harris using gendered slights, calling her “weak” and “dumb as a rock.” Then, there are the “Trump or the Tramp“ shirts. There were also the social media jokes that after Trump went to McDonald’s, Harris would then “do Five Guys.” And there was the man who, at a recent Trump rally in Reno, Nevada, yelled, “That hoe’s got to go” — and then quickly apologized to the woman by his side.
On the other side are the Harris supporters who are excited about being part of history. Anne Landers, who is over 70 years old and from Decatur, Georgia, said she was supporting Harris for her mother and “all the women” in her family who were immigrants. Ruby Smalls, 57, from Savannah, Georgia, said the presidency needed “the touch of a woman.” And there is the loose-knit network of women placing sticky notes in places like restrooms and locker rooms, urging them to support Harris.
Gender remains an inescapable part of the 2024 election, the topic underlying much of the race. It’s in the background when the candidates talk about hot-button issues like abortion, in vitro fertilization, child care and transgender rights. The campaigns have carefully chosen where to place ads and do interviews, looking for ways to reach certain demographic groups — with men, particularly Black men, getting special attention in the final days, as polling shows big gender gaps cleaving the electorate, like the gap of 30-plus points between Harris’ margin among young women and the virtual tie among young men in the latest NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll.
And in May 2023, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s — a verdict delivered while he was running for president.
“Race and gender have nothing to do with why Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history — Kamala failed at her job as Border Czar, supported all of Joe Biden’s disastrous policies, and lied to the American people about Biden’s cognitive decline,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Kamala is weak, dishonest, and dangerously liberal, and that’s why the American people will reject her on November 5th.”
The Harris campaign declined to comment for this article.
Harris has taken a very different approach to potentially shattering the highest, hardest glass ceiling than Hillary Clinton did eight years ago.
In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris never talked about how she’d be the first female president, and few other speakers focused on the issue of representation. After all, no one needs to be reminded that Harris would be a break from the past.
“Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News in her interview Tuesday. “The point that most people really care about is can you do the job and do you have a plan to actually focus on them.”
Carol Moseley Braun was the first Black woman to become a U.S. senator when she was elected in Illinois in 1992. She said sexism in politics has gotten better since she ran for office, but there’s still far more “foolishness” than she would have hoped.
“She’s done a brilliant job of handling an overarching issue, which, of course, is the patriarchy,” Moseley Braun said. “She’s up against some hideous odds, not to mention her opponent. … I just hope she can hang in there and not let her cage get rattled at all, and just do what she’s got to do and win this election.”
Questions about qualifications
From the moment Harris took over the top of the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden, she faced sexism, with gender- and race-based attacks from the right.
In multiple NBC News polls since she became the nominee, voters have said they see Harris as better than Trump on several presidential qualities, including temperament, honesty and competence. But Trump’s allies quickly suggested that Harris has risen to high political offices only because she is a woman of color. Within days, a conservative media figure said Harris was the Democratic nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color,” referring to workplace policies that promote diversity, equity and inclusion that conservatives have maligned.
Trump later said that if Harris is elected, foreign leaders will treat her “like a play toy“ because of her appearance; he said they will “look at her” and say “we can’t believe we got so lucky.”
Female candidates have long faced attacks that they’re unable to be capable leaders, essentially because they don’t fit the traditional (male) mold of politicians. They have to answer questions about whether they look like a leader or are strong enough to deal with crises.
These are all criticisms that Clinton faced against Trump when she ran for president in 2016. Then, for example, Trump repeatedly accused her of playing the “woman’s card” to rise in politics, going after her “strength” and “stamina” and mocking her voice.
This election, Trump has made fun of Harris’ laugh, saying it makes her sound “crazy.”
The idea that Harris isn’t qualified to be president is pervasive at Trump rallies.
Before becoming vice president, Harris was elected three times statewide in California, first as attorney general and then as a U.S. senator. Before that, she was the district attorney in San Francisco.
Trump had never held elected office before becoming president.
But many Trump supporters have other ideas on how she rose to being a step away from the Oval Office.
“It was her connections and her hiking up her skirt,” said Patricia Kipp-Funaro, 55, who attended an Oct. 13 Trump rally in Prescott, Arizona.
Another attendee, Tyler Hammond, 31, laughed and said “doing a lot of favors” when asked how Harris made it into positions of power. Meanwhile, his wife, Taylor Hammond, pushed her tongue against her cheek, mimicking a sexual act.
On Tuesday, at a campaign event in Peoria, Arizona, featuring Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Neil Rubin, 64, joked that he thinks Harris actually is smart.
“I mean, she did get her start in politics by sleeping her way into a job, so maybe that takes some smarts,” he said.
And at a Log Cabin Republicans event in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, talked about how hard it was to imagine Harris “walking across” the demilitarized zone in North Korea. Someone in the audience made a lewd comment about her doing so on her knees.
“Y’all said it!” Lara Trump said with a wide smile on her face. “I didn’t say it!”
Aside from the blatant instances of sexism, some voters have concerns that are more coded.
In September, NBC News’ Deciders Focus Group series talked to men under age 30 in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who are leaning toward Trump. One man brought up Harris’ laugh unprompted.
Brandon S., a 28-year-old from Pennsylvania, said “Trump” when asked the age-old question of which candidate he’d rather have a beer with.
“He was an accomplished businessman before he joined politics, so I think there’s a lot to learn there from a business perspective and how to build wealth,” he said. “I feel that a conversation with Harris would just be met with the inappropriate and misplaced laughter that just coats everything she says and would seem very disingenuine.”
Sharmen C., a 36-year-old woman who participated in a separate NBC News focus group conducted in October, didn’t vote in 2020 but is leaning toward Trump. She said she felt like he was “more powerful.”
“I don’t know how much she would do,” Sharmen said. “So it’s like, you can win that seat, but what are you going to do once you get into it? Are you going to be strong enough to make a change?”
A battle over masculinity
With Harris trying to prove that the nation is ready for a woman in the Oval Office, Trump and his campaign have tried to strike a more traditional image of strength — someone who will get crime under control, single-handedly end the war in Ukraine, go face-to-face with the world’s toughest leaders and stop illegal immigration.
“I don’t want to be nice. Somebody said, ‘You should be nice, sir. Women won’t like it,’” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania this month. “The women want safety.”
Essentially, in the world that Trump presents, the job still requires a man. And what manhood — and masculinity — look like right now has been a current running through the 2024 race.
In the final weeks of the election, former President Barack Obama has been a key surrogate for the Harris campaign to reach Black men, a group of voters it is trying to keep from moving toward Trump. Polling shows younger Black men, while still backing Harris overall, have shown historic interest in the Republican candidate this election cycle.
At a rally in Pittsburgh this month, Obama took issue with the notion that Trump was seen as strong.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen, I’ve noticed this especially with some men who seem to think some of Trump’s behavior — the bullying and the putting people down — is a sign of strength. And I am here to tell you: That is not what real strength is,” he said.
And before that rally, Obama spoke with some campaign volunteers and called out Black men who aren’t supporting Harris.
“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he said.
Kalid Meky, 53, a Black man and Harris supporter from California, said he understood that Trump had a “charisma“ that appealed to some younger Black men.
In Las Vegas to hear Obama speak, Meky described Trump’s attitude as, “‘I do what I want when I want. I got a billion dollars. I don’t obey the rules. I talk the way I want to talk.’ They see that and they see hip-hop-ishness.”
The two campaigns have also presented starkly different views of masculinity.
White men comprised Harris’ entire short list of potential running mates. She ended up going with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a man known for his “big dad energy.” As soon as he was chosen, the campaign quickly leaned into some common masculine tropes: his love of his flannel and pheasant-hunting, his background as a veteran and his past as a high school football coach.
But Walz has also talked about his and his wife’s struggles with infertility, support for LGBTQ rights and, of course, his support for women in leadership roles. And one of the other most public men on the trail for Harris is her husband, Doug Emhoff, whose devotion to his wife and her career has been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
The Trump campaign and its allies have tried to undercut this image of manhood, mocking Walz’s masculinity. They have gone after Walz as “Tampon Tim,” a derisive nickname stemming from a mischaracterization of a Minnesota law requiring schools to provide menstrual products in restrooms.
And if there was any question on what leadership looks like to Trump — the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” is one of the former president’s favorites, often played at his events.
Making history
Harris’ supporters are well aware — and excited — that they could help elect the first female president. And, they say, there’s no need for her to talk about how she’d be a break from every other president in history because it’s obvious just looking at her.
“It’s very evident to people every single day that Kamala Harris is a Black woman running for president of the United States of America,” said one Harris campaign official who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “I think that is evident in how we are running this campaign. I think it is evident in the attacks that our opponents are lobbing against us.”
“I think she’s running the campaign like she runs her life, and it’s a mirror of how most Black women run their lives. We don’t go into rooms announcing our identity because it’s obvious,” a Black woman who is a Democratic strategist with close ties to the campaign added.
This strategist noted that Clinton leaned hard into the “glass ceiling” message, and it didn’t work: More white women voted for Trump than for her.
Jennifer Lawless, a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about women in politics, said that Clinton’s experiences also helped make the idea of Harris running, and potentially winning, less of a shock.
“As of right now, every place Kamala Harris is on the campaign trail, Clinton has already been,” Lawless said. “Harris already broke the glass ceiling; she became vice president of the United States. But as far as becoming a Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton already did that. In terms of being well poised to win the popular vote, Hillary Clinton already did that. And so it’s less novel.”
Clinton notably has not been on the trail yet for Harris, although a campaign official said the former secretary of state was expected to do an event in the final stretch. She has headlined several fundraisers for Harris and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Currently, there are a record number of women serving as governors (12) and in Congress (151 out of 535 seats), according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
Still, that’s far lower representation than women have in the general population. A Harris campaign official said the vice president recognized that she could open the door for those who might come later, and it was something that was important to her.
“She’s not concerned about being the first,” the Harris campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last, right? And I think that says a lot, frankly.”
