On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris is facing a lot of comments like this: That is the laugh of a crazy person. She slept her way to the top. It's a fact. And back in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, a lot sounded the same. Well, I think the only card she has is the woman's card. It's very loud and shrill. And she does not come off well. But in the eight years since Hillary Clinton lost, a lot has changed. We all, this country, have given women a lot more leeway in the last eight years to be who they are in politics in a way that we never have before. Here's a closer look at how the politics of gender have shifted and what it means for the presidential race. I accept your nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris is only the second woman and the first woman of Black and South Asian descent to head a major party's presidential ticket. Even before she became the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris faced various racial and gender-based attacks on her

candid to see those attacks began just days after Harris secured the Democratic nomination. KLA Harris is somebody who's not competent to be president of the United States and has a very evil, wicked Jezebel agenda. Other conservatives have suggested she slept her way to the top, referencing her brief relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. It is relevant when a young candidate tries to sleep her way into politics and into power. In a resurfaced clip from 2021, Republican vice presidential P JD Vance questioned why Harris hasn't had any biological children. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies. Hillary Clinton experienced similar attacks on the campaign trail. Social F, I think a lot of it with Hillary Clinton has to do with style and delivery, oddly enough. She shouts, we heard a lot about shrill voices at the time, we heard a lot about women yelling at the time. Amanda Ria was the national political director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

working behind the scenes to manage relationships with key stakeholders when you're preparing someone for an interview or you're preparing them for the debate and the constraints around women. You can't be too hard, you can't be too soft. I think the humorlessness in her campaign is one of the strategic deficits that she's facing. Donald Trump would be yelling and not be nice intentionally. Meanwhile, I was getting calls where she had to be nice and at the same time make sure she's credible. Harris's multi-racial identity has also fueled more attacks. Some Republicans have called Harris a Dei hire, suggesting she only received the nomination because of her race and gender. She's openly a Dei hire 100%. She was a Dei hire. They seem much more animated by the idea that she's been promoted because of her race and gender, that she has not succeeded on her own merits. They realized it had to be a black woman in the vice presidency, now the presidency. That's exactly the reason Kamala got her job when you're an

operative, and you look at the numbers, or you're doing the data analysis, you just know there's a group of people who are going to hear comma as a women's name and say, That's not for me. Many Democrats are worried that Kamala Harris may struggle to earn the support of voters who view her skeptically as both a woman, a woman of color, and a California liberal, particularly those white voters without college degrees in places like those crucial blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Polling experts say Harris could offset any drop-off in support from white men by adding more women, but history suggests this could be a challenge. One of the really remarkable things about Hillary Clinton's candidacy, given the history she was poised to make, was that she didn't really galvanize female voters around her candidacy. But a lot has changed since then. The fallout from Trump's election mobilized women in an entirely new way. Immediately after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we had the Women's March, millions of women

pouring into the streets all over the world. At the time, it was the largest single-day protest in history. Women around the country have changed; they actually see themselves as part of this electoral process, not it happening to them. Then, in 2017, the #MeToo movement began gaining momentum. It brought renewed attention to barriers women faced in the workplace and helped Democrats by mobilizing young female voters. In 2019, there were more than 100 women representatives in the House for the first time in history. Then, in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. Our bodies, our bodies. Once they have seen that abortion rights are at stake, we see a lot of women getting off the sidelines, registering to vote, and coming out to vote, even in red states that don't usually vote for Democratic candidates. Why exactly is it that they don't trust women? Well, we trust women. After the Democratic National Convention, a Wall Street Journal poll found Harris expanded her lead as the candidate best suited to handle abortion rights. Things are also shifting on the

Republican side, we also saw a woman Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, be the last candidate standing against Donald Trump in the Republican primary and get quite a lot of votes. Although, of course, she was not successful. The fact that we have seen more women in those roles just gives you a different view of what could be in this changing political landscape. Harris's campaign is taking a new approach to the rhetoric leveled at her race and gender. In 2016, Hillary Clinton talked a lot about her gender and reacted with maximum indignation and outrage when Trump said anything offensive. You can put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. So far, Harris has avoided race and gender as a central part of her campaign messaging, a major shift from Clinton's glass ceiling rhetoric. In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination, she did not mention race or gender even once. The feeling among her campaign is that she makes a statement simply by being who she is, and she doesn't have to spell it out for people.

he suggested that you happened to turn black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity. Yeah, any same old tired playbook. Next question, please. That's it. That's it. Rather than expressing that outrage and indignation, they've tried to laugh it off. They ridicule it. They've depicted it as weird. Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And you know, they're running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something. Trump has a long history of derogatory comments against women, with Republicans vying for more female and black voters. This could be a liability for the Trump campaign. Crazy Nancy Pelosi said she was always saying she's crazy as a bed bug, that one. You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. Some GOP leaders urged Republicans to stay away from criticizing Harris's race and gender. This election, as I noted at the outset, is going to be about policies, not personalities. Um, this is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris and her her

ethnicity or her gender had nothing to do with this whatsoever. I think it tells you a lot about where the country is on these issues that Republicans know that these attacks don't play well. Harris's rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket has upended Trump's once-comfortable lead in the polls against Biden. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted in August found Harris is narrowly ahead of Trump. Harris had 48% support to Trump's 47%. She has improved her standing in the polls primarily by getting Democratic base voters off the sidelines. She's improved on Joe Biden's standing with young voters, women voters, people of color. But Trump has remained at about the same level. The other thing that's interesting, particularly in the battleground states, is she's not losing any of Joe Biden's supporters. This is still a race that is within the margin of error, too close to call, and it's going to be a knockdown drag-out fight between these two candidates from now until November 5th.

What Harris Learned From Clinton’s 2016 Election Strategy | WSJ

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