(CNN)In an exit interview with The New York Times on Thursday, former 2020 Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar was asked what she learned about running for president as a woman. Here's how the Minnesota senator answered (bolding is mine):
"First of all, I was so proud of all of us. They ended up not choosing the women but that doesn't mean the women are going to go away. ...
"We all have very powerful jobs. We all have ambitions ourselves and there's a lot of other women coming up to the pipeline as well. So I just view it as, it was a process, these were the two that came out of it for various reasons. I mean, let's start with the obvious, Biden and Bernie had run for president before. And they were the most well-known. I'm not saying that they weren't deserving of this, but those were the facts.
"So, I just don't see it as an indictment of women candidates. I have often stepped back and wondered, well, is it — were they looking for a man to run against Donald Trump? Maybe in another election. I don't know."
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Which is a very interesting idea. And a tough-bordering-on-impossible question to not only answer but even ask -- as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren explained when asked about the role gender played in her candidacy even as she was ending it on Thursday.
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"That is the trap question for every woman," Warren said of the idea that sexism impacted her campaign. "If you say yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, 'Whiner.' And if you say no, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, 'What planet do you live on?'"
Yes, nailed it.
On its face, running as a woman for president is no hindrance at all. For the past five-plus decades, Gallup has been asking the public a series of questions about whether they would be willing to vote for candidates with a specific set of traits. In 1958, just 54% of people said they would vote for a woman to be president. By 1983, that number was 80%. In 2015 it was 92% and this year 93% said they would vote for a woman to be president.
No problem then!
Except ... we have had 45 presidents. And all of them have been men. And until Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2016, we had never had a female presidential nominee for either major party. And in this Democratic race, the field of viable candidates has narrowed to two late-70s white men after once boasting the largest number of women (six) ever to run for a party presidential nomination. (All but Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard have now dropped out.)
So, what gives? The chasm between 90+% of people saying they'd vote for a woman and the 0% of women who have been elected president is massive and hard to ignore. And while it's impossible to understand how much sexism factors into those numbers -- either in this race or more generally -- it's equally irrational to think gender had nothing to do with it.
What then to make of Klobuchar's question?
Well, there's little question that the numbers in the Gallup poll are likely somewhat inflated by the perceived social stigma of telling a total stranger that you wouldn't vote for a candidate because she is a woman. How big is that group? Statistically significant? Way bigger than that? We truly don't have a way of knowing -- since we can't inject every person Gallup polled with truth serum and ask whether they would really be OK with voting for a woman. (And keep in mind that Clinton outpaced Trump by almost 2.9 million votes in the 2016 election, despite losing the Electoral College tally).
But there's almost certainly some group of people for whom that is true. Klobuchar's suggestion is that the prospect of Trump waiting in the general election may have exacerbated concerns among some voters -- based largely on longtime gender stereotypes.
The thinking goes like this: Trump casts himself as a man's man -- all toughness and bravado. He will fight dirty. He will hit below the proverbial belt. Nominating a woman to face someone like that would just give Trump too much ammo, too many built-in stereotypes and biases that a bully like Trump could deploy to devastating effect.
To that end, here's Trump on Warren Friday morning: "People don't like her. She's a very mean person and people don't like her, people don't like her. They like a person like me that's not mean."
Of course, the word "mean" is rarely (never?) used to describe male politicians running for office.
And so, much of the party has begun to coalesce behind former Vice President Joe Biden, an allegedly "safe" choice that purportedly gives Democrats their best chance of defeating Trump.
(Although, under this sort of logic, former President Barack Obama should never have been nominated since, as a black man, he represented a risk in that we had never elected someone who looked like him as president.)
How right is Klobuchar? I think she speaks a lot of truth -- even though we will never truly know how close to the mark she is when it comes to how voters thought about their choices in this election.
Here's what we do know: The next president of the United States will be a white man. Again.
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