With the company formal conferment of the nomination for the White House by the Democratic National Convention that concluded last Thursday in Chicago, Kamala Harris has officially become the first Afro-descendant woman to run for president for one of the two major parties.
Based on the latest polls, which see her ahead of Donald Trump in voting intentions, Harris also has a good chance of being the first woman to conquer the White House, a goal never achieved by American citizens until now even though over a century has passed since the passing of the 1920th Amendment to the Constitution which in XNUMX introduced women's suffrage at a federal level.
We asked the professor Stefano Luconi, professor of American history at the University of Padua and careful observer of the events of that country, to comment on the meaning of Kamala Harris' nomination, also in light of the previous attempts by women of color and others to run to lead the United States from the White House.
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The pioneers of the nineteenth century
The women's race for president starts from afar. She was the first to run for leadership of the country Victoria Woodhull in 1872 for a smaller group, the Equal Rights Party. In a period in which women's suffrage did not yet exist, Woodhull's was above all a provocation to claim equal political rights after, two years earlier, the 15th Amendment had granted the vote to African-American males freed with the abolition of slavery , but not to the women who had fought with determination and courage for decades for the liberation of the slaves.
Woodhull would not have turned 35 until September 23, 1872 and therefore did not meet the age requirement to be president. Since he was ineligible, was considered uncandidate and, therefore, the very modest number of votes he received was not recorded.
It was followed by another fierce and determined one Belva women's suffrage supporter (nomen omen) Lockwood, fielded for president by the same party as Woodhull in 1884 and 1888. Lockwood fared no better. She garnered a few thousand popular votes nationwide, but she still managed to call attention to theexclusion of women from active politics.
Gracie Allen's jokes
The third woman to aspire to the presidency was in theory Gracie Allen in 1940, when women's suffrage was a well-established right. A comedian by profession, Allen presented himself at the head of a Surprise Party che had created for the occasion.
The initiative was, in reality, one advertising found to relaunch the radio program she hosted with her husband. One of her proposals included "declaring the existence of men unconstitutional", without making them disappear from society because sometimes they would be needed.
Also, Allen she openly proclaimed that she was incompetent, adding however that so were the politicians in power and in opposition as well as the voters themselves.
Minorities and female candidates
Some of the subsequent female candidacies addressed racial issues. In 1948 and 1952 Agnes Waters, for the National Woman's Party, he conducted a strenuous and openly campaigned anti-Semites and racists.
He denounced, for example, an alleged Chinese "invasion", after in 1943 the United States had reopened its doors to immigrants from China in an extremely limited manner with the granting of just 105 visas a year; he accused African Americans of being agents of the Soviet Union and even threatened to exterminate them all.
In contrast, in 1968 the Communist Party nominated an African-American accountant, Charlene Mitchell, to raise public awareness of the fact that the black community, especially its female component, continued to suffer discrimination in daily life, despite the promulgation of the laws desired by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and 1965 to ensure the fullness of civil and political rights of minorities.
Shirley chisholm
In the climate of the Cold War, Mitchell received just over a thousand votes. Four years later, Shirley Chisholm, which in 1968 had been the first African American woman elected to Congress, He tried to win the Democratic Party's nomination for president.
He only placed seventh in the primaries, due to the boycott implemented against her by African-American Democratic leaders, all men who in theory should have been his biggest supporters.
Black leaders resented the fact that Chisholm had not consulted them before running for office and accused her of not being an adequate spokesperson for African Americans, as she had placed at the center of her program the approval of the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment to the Constitution that intended to prohibit all forms of discrimination based on sex.
Cynthia mckinney
The problem of representing African Americans returned with the candidacy of Cynthia McKinney, a former black Democratic congresswoman from Georgia. Awarded the nomination of Green Party in 2008, in an all-female ticket that lined up the journalist of Puerto Rican origins for the vice presidency Rosa Clemente, McKinney posed as the true voice of African Americans, in alternative to Barack Obama, who he accused of having sacrificed the traditional demands of his minority (such as the denunciation of police brutality) to court the white vote in order to satisfy his own political ambitions.
McKinney struggled to convince even voters of his own party. At the time the Green Party had just over 300.000 members. But, in the year of Obama's triumph, as his potential nemesis McKinney received only about 160.000 votes, equal to less than 0,1% of the valid ballots counted.
On the opposite side of what the black intellectual William EB Du Bois called the color line, the "very white" met no better luck Diane Beall Templin, of the American Party, heir to the segregationist formation created in 1968 by the racist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Templin garnered a paltry less than 2.000 votes in 1996.
From supporting actors to protagonists
Since 1972 there has been a multiplication of women fighting for the White House, albeit on behalf of secondary political forces.
That year the Socialist Worker Party nominated two, Linda Jenness and Evelyn Reed, obviously in different states so that they would not compete with each other.
Since then, up to and including 2020, there have been 43 female candidates in the November presidential elections, including those of Templin and McKinney. Some of these supporting candidates ran several times, even for different parties, as happened for Gloria La Riva, fielded by various Left formations in 1992, 2008, 2016 and 2020.
The one that achieved the most success was Jo Jorgensen, of the Libertarian Party, which in 2016 received almost two million votes. Her performance, however, took a backseat to the over 65 million votes that went to Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same election, the first woman to be nominated for president by one of the two main parties.
The case of Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton's was the real precedent with which to compare Harris' candidacy: the same party to which she belongs, the Democratic one, the same opponent, Trump.
Clinton won the nomination in 2016 thanks to the pressure of the outgoing president, Barack Obama, who induced his deputy, Joe Biden, not to run, and to the maneuvers of the democratic leadership, who eliminated Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who was very popular with the party base.
For Obama it was probably a matter of paying off a debt of gratitude towards the former first lady, who had supported him in 2008 after losing the primaries without dragging the challenge to the national convention.
The Democratic leaders, however, were influenced by former president Bill Clinton and by the fear that Sanders, elected to the Senate as an independent, was not controllable by the party and had positions that were too progressive, even social democratic, to obtain the consensus of a moderate electorate the whose vote was considered essential to conquer the White House.
Ma Clinton failed miserably. Equipped with very poor communication and incapable of fully outlining what her plan was for the future of America, she thought that to defeat a political neophyte like The Donald it was enough a negative campaign that limited itself to stigmatizing populism, sovereignism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny, without articulating an alternative vision for the United States.
We all know how it went. Above all, they were depriving Hillary of their support young people, who considered her too tied to the strong powers of the economic-financial world, the African Americans, who reproached her for taking their vote for granted, and paradoxically the feminists, for which she was only an careerist and an opportunist because, despite having been publicly betrayed and humiliated by Bill at the time ofAffair with Monica Lewinsky, she would have chosen to remain close to her cheating husband to fuel her presidential ambitions.
Similarities and differences between Hillary and Kamala's candidacy
Like Hillary Clinton, Harris also reached the nomination by virtue of internal maneuvers within the Democratic Party which once again saw Obama as the protagonist, placing himself together with Nancy Pelosi at the head of the consortium that he induced Biden to give up his candidacy although he had won the primaries.
Not even Harris stands out for her ability to lead an electoral campaign at a national level: she had attempted to obtain the Democratic nomination for the White House in 2020 but, with consensus in free fall already at the end of 2019, she withdrew before it even opened. primary season.
Also Harris has problems with the African-American electorate, not with the female component, who has long taken her as a model, but with the male one: men do not like women in a position of power and accuse her of the exemplary sentences imposed on black defendants in the role of prosecutor general of California between 2011 and 2017, as well as for his opposition to the release of those convicted of minor bloodless crimes, primarily possession of crack cocaine, in order to reduce overcrowding in the state's prisons.
However, unlike Hillary Clinton's candidacy, the announcement of Harris's sparked a uncontainable enthusiasm among Democrats. Even the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had harshly criticized Harris' inability to manage the immigration dossier, has turned into one of his most ardent supporters.
Kamala's assets
Harris' popularity stems primarily from simple comparison with Biden. This is demonstrated by the 81 million dollars raised in the first 24 hours of the president's withdrawal, the result of the immediate thawing of the contributions of the large Democratic financiers who opposed Biden's re-nomination.
Compared to the greyness and signs of senescence of the party's previous candidate in pectore, any alternative would have stood out like that of a giant of politics, capable of restoring hope of success in the eyes of a party that now seemed resigned to defeat against Trump.
Likewise, for voters not converted to Trumpism, any candidate with a modicum of common sense, which in Harris' case includes formulating clear programs such as addressing the high cost of living, he would have seemed like a statesman compared to the ramblings offered daily by the tycoon.
The latter is disliked by a large part of the female electorate, mindful of the contribution of the three judges he appointed to the Supreme Court to reversal of the sentence Roe v. Wade precedent which from 1973 to 2022 had guaranteed the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy at a federal level.
Not surprisingly, the Chicago convention and Harris' acceptance speech were strongly inflected in the feminine, with particular attention to the defense of women's reproductive rights.
In 2016, white women gave Clinton just 45% of their votes. But, according to an Associated Press poll from August 19, 49% of them now express a favorable opinion of Harris.
In an election looming with a very small margin of victory it could be precisely this cohort that marks the difference and makes Harris the first female president, breaking – as Hillary Clinton stated last Monday in Chicago – “the highest and most resistant of glass ceilings”.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “indispensable nation”. History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) and Lthe black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path to equality, 1619–2023 (2023)
Books:
Stefano Luconi, The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5, goWare, 2023, pp. 162, €14,25 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
Stefano Luconi, US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022, goWare, 2022, pp. 182, €12,35 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
