And that’s because there will be multiple highly-qualified women candidates. Yes, 2018 comes first, so please hold your fire on that front. This is a big website, and we can talk about more than one thing at a time.
Anyway, the thought encapsulated in the title of this post occurred to me while reading an article—which included some questionable political framing ably discussed by Gabe Ortiz—about 2020 that named six sitting senators all apparently “eyeing” a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Four of the six are pictured above. The words “woman,” “female,” and “gender” didn’t appear anywhere in the article.
Having multiple women—including, and this is of vital importance, women of color—on the Democratic debate stage would be a terrific development for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the field of Democratic candidates should do a better job reflecting the demographics of Democratic voters. We want to show the American people that our party’s leadership is diverse, because only a diverse party can effectively represent a diverse population, and to show progressive women that we want as many of them as possible to stand alongside men at the highest levels of power.
The other reason is 2016. Without rehashing who did what to whom, it was not helpful to the progressive cause to have a campaign in which some on each side accused the other of using gender as a weapon. Having more than one woman as a top-tier candidate won’t render gender irrelevant as an issue, but what it will hopefully mean is that when gender comes up, primary voters will be able to focus on the candidates’ policy positions on women’s reproductive rights, economic opportunities for women, and gender equality broadly defined. Given the consensus shared by most progressives on these issues, my hope is that gender can be something that unifies rather than divides our party.
Resisting and ultimately defeating Donald Trump is, without question, the most important political task the Democratic Party has set itself in recent decades. Repudiating him and everything he stands for in 2020 is vital not only because of the outright disastrousness of his policies, but also because of the grotesqueness of his rhetoric and actions on the matter of equality. He won the election, but only because his opponent winning three million more votes wasn’t enough in our ridiculous Electoral College system. If he were to win again in three years, that would be a devastating confirmation of Trumpism’s continued vitality going forward, something we progressives simply cannot allow to happen.
A spirited, tough fight for the nomination is not at all incompatible with victory in the general election, as we saw in 2008. We can have that again in 2020, as long as the campaign is focused on ideas, policies, a vision for the country, and even the character of the candidates. A primary contest that shoehorns each candidate into a lane based on their gender, or race for that matter, is likely to create divisions that are harder to overcome.
Within the progressive community, the arguments over the words “identity politics” have been so wrenching because the words mean different things to different people. To some, identity politics means fighting for issues and protections of equal rights centered on one’s identity. To others, identity politics means campaigning or determining which candidate one will support based on identity rather than issues. The words have lost their usefulness because if people can’t agree on what identity politics means, then there can be no productive conversation about its strengths or weaknesses.
This is a crucially important matter, one that goes to the heart of what progressives stand for. In 2016 we had some people accusing some progressives of wanting only to focus on economics and ignoring issues relating to categories like gender and race, and some people accusing other progressives of doing the opposite. Let’s also note that protecting our environment, one of the most important progressive values, doesn’t fall into either of these two sets of issues.
In reality, the Democratic Party’s platform in 2016 ended up being by far the most progressive—in terms of all these categories—of any in our history. Both major Democratic candidates agreed with that assessment. Any progressive movement worth the name—not to mention any that wants to win enough elections to be able to see its values enshrined in law—has to emphasize the importance of both economic and rights-related issues.
Furthermore, progressives, both in appeals to voters and the policies they implement, must recognize the way these two sets of issues intersect. Finally, we can’t just offer a list of policy proposals, no matter how comprehensive, on a menu. We also must put forth a vision based on justice and equality that inspires Americans.
Having (to tweak Mitt Romney’s words slightly) a debate stage full of women would not only send a powerful message, but it should, hopefully, enable Democrats to avoid the kind of divisive, angry split over gender we saw in 2016. Three years earlier, I had written that having more than one serious female candidate for president in 2016 would be great for women, the Democratic Party, and America. That’s just as true in 2020.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).