The post-Democratic debate polling was unequivocal. Sen. Kamala Harris got the biggest boost from her commanding performance last week while former Vice President Joe Biden lost ground in nearly every poll even as he remains the party front-runner. By most accounts, Sen. Elizabeth Warren won the first debate night and logged the second best numbers in terms of improvement behind Harris.
The dominant displays by Harris and Warren during the debates appear to have at least taken a bite out the nagging electability concerns that continue to follow half a dozen female candidates in the Democratic presidential field. Following the debates, a HuffPost/YouGov poll showed the perceived electability of every female senator who's running rose, though Harris and Warren were the only two who made double-digit gains. Meanwhile, Biden's electability took the biggest hit in the field, falling 13 points, with former Congressman Beto O'Rourke a close second after a 12-point drop. Here's how the electability numbers shook out for the top-tier candidates before and after the debates.
- Biden: May, 70%; June, 57%
- Warren: May, 40%; June, 51%
- Harris: May, 39%; June, 49%
- Sanders: May, 45%; June, 46%
- Buttigieg: May, 28%; June, 26%
Biden, quite simply, did not look sharp. Harris turned in the assertive, charismatic, and skillful night her campaign badly needed. Warren nimbly delivered her consistent and digestible "government for the people" message. Bernie was Bernie—transported almost directly from 2016, he neither gained nor lost the support that followed him into 2020.
Both of the top two men have run for president before, neither won, and yet, it's the women who keep confronting that nagging question: Are you electable? It’s nothing more than a vestigial remnant of the sexism that has dominated the ages and still has a toehold in a millennium that is now crying out for female leadership, particularly in post-Trump America. Last month, a national Ipsos/Daily Beast poll found that while 74 of respondents said they were "personally comfortable" with having a female president, only a third thought their neighbors would be comfortable with a woman running the country. That's internalized sexism.
But the poll also found overt sexism, with 20% of Democratic and independent men agreeing with the idea that women are “less effective in politics than men.” The facts don't bear that out. As I wrote recently, all the data points suggest that white men don't do any better at the ballot box than women or people of color—they just run at higher rates. In fact, an NBC analysis of the 2018 midterms, showed that non-incumbent female candidates widely outperformed non-incumbent male candidates, with Democratic women winning their primaries at twice the rate of their male counterparts. In addition, recent research shows that women of color, white women, and men of color get elected at basically the same rates as white men. As Reflective Democracy wrote last month in their report, The Electability Myth:
There’s no mistaking that white men dominate politics. At 30% of the population, they hold 62% of elected offices at the local, state, and federal level – more than double their share. But while white men may still have a monopoly hold on elected office, they do not hold a monopoly on electability. In 2015, our research found that when they’re on the ballot, women of all races and men of color win elections at the same rates as white men. Running the data on the 2018 elections confirms it: white men’s electability advantage is a myth.
Yet electability concerns dog Harris and Warren while Biden continues to benefit from being viewed as the most electable candidate—45% of Democratic leaning voters said that in a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, with Harris and Warren sitting at 9% and 7%, respectively. But Biden has an actual biographical reason to question his mettle after running for president twice, in 1988 and 2008. Biden's first bid is best known for his withdrawal following a plagiarism scandal in which he admitted to quoting the speech of a British politician almost verbatim and without attribution. Biden's second bid was marked by a series of gaffes, including one in early 2007 in which he hailed Barack Obama for being "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." He dropped out in January 2008 just after finishing a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses.
Biden's bid to date has bore some of the same hallmarks that haunted him last time—he has stumbled twice over issues involving women and race, demonstrating an inability to adeptly handle either issue without making it worse. On the debate stage, Biden easily had more experience in a front a national audience than almost anyone, save Bernie, and yet he got repeatedly bested by a first-term senator making her debut in front of a national debate audience.
And yet people are hung up on the electability of Harris, who hands-down owned the debate stage, and Warren, who 31% of Democratic leaners say has the best policy ideas (Sanders is the closest second at 18%, with Biden at 11%).
So if you think people are being unfair to Biden when they note that he's out of step with the demographics of the Democratic party or that he has a dismal track record of running for president, think about the female candidates who are campaigning harder, doing more interviews, turning in better debate performances, and pushing out more new policy ideas than the current front runner. Isn't questioning their electability based on a singular data point in an election that was marred by rampant foreign interference and an unprecedented FBI intervention just a little unfair? After all, a lot more men have lost their bids to be president than have women.