I’ve noticed this question turning up in the Elections forum a lot lately. I’ve taken part in the debate over this in a thread here, and watched it crop up in many threads. So now let’s have it out…
Ugh. I don’t like any of those three choices. I don’t like to use the word “should” on this question. But I think there’s a good chance it will be a woman. She’s going to have to be completely non-submissive, but I think if she has the right manner, a female nominee will be very good for the Democrats.
Attitude and presentation do matter. This is running to be the big boss. Tammy Duckworth might be able to do it. Kamala Harris can probably do it. Stacey Abrams might be able to do it, someday. But, man or woman, just because you can get elected to Congress doesn’t mean you can make it to the White House. I’m afraid lots of Representatives and Senators don’t have the appearance of strength and will to get elected, even if they’d really be responsible enough in office.
The highest priority is to nominate the candidate who will have the best chance in the General Election of November 2020.
Will a candidate’s 2nd X-chromosome help or hurt her chances in November 2020? I don’t know. Therefore I couldn’t click any of the three boxes. We should use a gender test for the nominee, but we need some pollsters or opinion groups to help us understand the answer to the question I’ve underlined.
Until we know the answer, we can only focus on specific examples. IIUC, Hillary did better among women than any prior candidate, but was overwhelmingly rejected by white men — especially uneducated white men. Leave Hillary unchanged except for her gender and she would have danced to victory easily.
But that was Hillary: she was relatively easy to fit into anti-women stereotypes. Similarly, I’d be much happier about Elizabeth Warren’s chances if she were male.
OTOH, Amy Klobuchar has made a very favorable impression on me. I’d like her chances going toe-to-toe with the Orange Monster. I’m disappointed she hasn’t attracted more support yet. Is that because she isn’t bat-shit left-wing enough for the Bernie Brats?
I softened it from “we have to,” which is really how the presidential gender debates in this forum are coming across. That’s the pulse I’m reading in response to what I see being said here.
Well of course, and right now the Elections forum has Dopers who are convinced they can peg that ideal to a particular gender. The poll is in response to this ongoing debate topic.
Normally I wouldn’t go with gender and voted for the third one.
But this is for President in 2020. Most likely running against the Shit Cheeto. It CAN NOT be a woman this time around. We’ve seen more bigotry and racism seep out of the voters last time. The Howling Yam can just call any female candidate “bitch” and get the biggest cheers of all at his racist rallies. “I’m still building my wall and this bitch wants to let criminals in our country!” I can hear it now.
Who would it be? Elizabeth Warren? No. No, no, no, no, no. Anything she says will be countered by the Orange Shitgibbon with, “Whatever, Pocahontas.” He’ll misspell “Pocahontas” every time he tweets it and none of his base will care. The GOP will not care. More anti-woman hatred will spill over. We’ll be hearing how no woman should ever be in office. No woman should ever be a CEO. All sorts of shit like that will come out from many male pie-holes.
If there’s a woman on the ticket, it should be for VP. Warren would be perfect at that one. She could debate the shit out of Pence in a heartbeat.
TL;DR - Any man has a better chance at winning over Trump. Even if a woman is the Democrat candidate and she points out all of Trump’s contradictions and failures in a perfectly understandable way, many fence-sitting men will think, “She’s right, but she’s a woman, so what does she know?”
I’d feel the same way about a woman president as I did about Barack Obama: That we’re moving in the right direction as far as judging people by the content of their character and their merit, and not the color of their skin or the content of their chromosomes.
Problem is, at the end of the day, I’ll only vote for a candidate that favors my political issues. I’d never vote for Hillary Clinton, but I’ll gladly vote for Nikki Haley.
I think 2016 was a big lesson for us. We were thinking since we had a black president for two terms, SURELY we’re ready for a woman to be President.
Nope.
And that was between a common crook with no political skills versus a woman with plenty of political savvy. Didn’t work.
(I know, I know, don’t call me Shirley.)
Ignorant white men who hate women are going to vote for His Orange Flatulence no matter who the Democrats run. The election will be decided by people who do NOT go to Trump rallies and who do NOT listen to no news except FoxNews. Over half of these voters are women.
Is there any way the Lie Machine can create a believable lie about Amy Klobuchar? I want a candidate so unimpeachable that even Americans, stupid as they are, will finally see though the bitter retchings erupting from Trump’s barf-hole.
I’m not an expert on the personalities, but I see Harris and Gillibrand as having flaws that can be exploited by the hate-filled liars. I like Amy Klobuchar!
Did you just contradict yourself?
Democrats need to nominate someone who will win, and who will have long coat tails to increase our winnings in other races.
No idea if a woman would help or hurt that. College educated women are only a quarter of voters, and white women without college preferred Trump by 30 points.
Hillary won the popular vote, but not in the right states. Are there enough college educated white women to flip PA, MI, WI, FL?
Seems getting blacks, young voters and disaffected liberals would be better for those states and if possible minimizing losses among high school educated whites.
And sadly, high school educated whites seem threatened by multiculturalism and feminism.
Hillary Clinton was a woman and she lost, but I don’t think that she lost because she’s a woman. An actual good candidate could win regardless of gender. And we’ve got some good contenders who happen to be women.
And we’ve also got some good contenders who happen to be men. Now is not the time to be chopping out half of the field arbitrarily. If we want to thin the field, let’s start by ignoring the joke candidates (some of whom also happen to be male and female).
It will always be easy to push for white men in charge. That’s the status quo. And there will always be some sort of apparently rational explanation why we’re not ready for a non-white-man in charge (“next time we’ll run a woman… but not this time”). I’ll vote in the primary for the candidate that best combines the qualities of likelihood of beating Trump and matching my own political inclinations. I strongly suspect that will be a woman, but we’ll see.
Mike Pence is a brick wall. I don’t think anyone has the ability to “out-debate” him. It’s not that he’s “better” at arguing, it’s that he has a very aloof and detached manner, more so than any politician I’ve seen, actually, down to his supremely impassive facial expression. He’s the perfect foil to Trump, who is nothing but emotive. Pence is icy cold. I do not think Warren would fare well in a debate against Pence.
My heart is crying out for a woman to finally become president. My head tells me a gender test is wrong. I’m frankly torn.
In the poll, I’m selecting the 3rd one, no gender test, because that’s good policy. There are so many excellent women coming up in the political world now, I have faith one of them has to break the ultimate glass ceiling before long. Maybe even 2020! Why not? But to peremptorily rule out half the population before it even gets going is bizarre and unhelpful.
Yes, it’s long past time that we should have had a woman President. But you can’t force the issue. Compare race: Jesse Jackson spent the 80s running to be the Black President of the United States, and his platform was “I’m black, and it’s past time we had a black President”, and every time, he failed horribly. Obama, by comparison, ran to be President of the United States, and had a real platform and qualifications, and just happened to be black, and he won.
We won’t get a woman president by trying for a woman president. We’ll get one by trying for the best President we can get, and sooner or later, the best President we can get is going to just happen to be a woman.
That’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that in 2016, that happened to be the case, and instead we got the worst President we could get.
You left off the “ever” at the end of that sentence.
I think it has to be a man, and a white man at that. What’s right, proper, overdue, etc., isn’t the same thing as what’s realistic. Sad but true. Infuriating but true. IMHO.
The Dems HAVE to win this presidential election. There can’t be any snafu or spanner in the works. No bumps in the road. And right now the Dems need to stop fighting among themselves. Geez, Louise, people! Thump could get elected for another four years–think on that!
Earlier threadon this subject.
Joe Biden is a woman?
Yes, Clinton was better than Trump, but she’s not the best we could do. She was, in fact, a pretty bad candidate, and that’s a large share of why she lost.