The Likeability Trap: Why We've Never Had a Woman President

Ali Vitali shares 5 key insights from Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House…Yet.

Will Kamala Harris be elected president this year? If so, she will break this country’s more than 230-year streak of uninterrupted male leadership. What is it about American political culture that’s kept women from the presidency for so long, even as dozens of other nations have had female heads of state? NBC News correspondent Ali Vitali tackles this question in her book Electable: Why America Hasn't Put a Woman in the White House . . . Yet. Ali covered the 2020 presidential campaign -- a campaign that featured an unprecedented number of women candidates on the Democratic side. And even though Kamala Harris’s election as vice-president was historic, Ali digs deep into our past political history to understand why the top job has yet to go to a woman. Here’s Ali to share 5 big ideas from the book.

The 5 Key Insights

1. Electability

2. Likeability

3. Proving qualifications.

4. Assessments of Vice President Kamala Harris.

5. How this history happens.

1. Electability.

Everyone wants to back a candidate who can win, which is why electability is an important metric. Gender factors into how electability is assessed. Understanding biases and how they manifested in recent election cycles for female candidates is the first step towards disrupting those trends and leveling the playing field for candidates of both genders.

Can a woman win? was the key question of the Democratic primary at a pivotal moment, mere weeks before the Iowa Caucus in January 2020. Looming over the field was also a more specific question: Can a woman beat Donald Trump— especially after Hillary Clinton’s loss in the presidential election of 2016? Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sparred over these questions on the pre-caucus debate stage after news broke that, during a private dinner in 2018, Sanders told Warren that he didn’t think a woman could win the presidential. This is according to Warren, though Sanders denied the account—which also thrust into focus the dynamics of believing men over women. But the larger issue was that unanswerable question: Could women do what had never been done—was it time a female could win the United States presidency?

“Understanding biases and how they manifested in recent election cycles for female candidates is the first step towards disrupting those trends and leveling the playing field for candidates of both genders.”

Flying from the Iowa Caucus to the New Hampshire primary, Warren was asked about how gendered dynamics affected her experience in Iowa, and what she hears from voters. She was candid with the dozen of us traveling reporters, sharing that, “Everyone comes up to me and says, ‘I would vote for you, if you had a penis.’”

2. Likeability.

Electability is bound to likeability—especially for women, for whom being liked impacts their ability to get votes, and thusly their ability to win.

It’s a metric that dogged Hillary Clinton her entire political life. Most of us recall the debate stage moment in 2008 when then-Senator Barack Obama quipped that Clinton was “likable enough” after the moderator asked her what she’d say to those concerned about “the likability issue.” Her likeability was a threat to her candidacy, despite voters agreeing that Clinton was the field’s most experienced and “electable” candidate. At the outset of her presidential run in 2016, The Washington Post revived the metric: “Regardless of whether it’s fair, it’s a question that has followed Clinton. And even if it’s a double standard, it’s still a potentially real factor for her when it comes to getting people to vote for her—at least theoretically.”

But it’s more than theoretical. A study by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation (BLFF) found that “voters will support a male candidate they do not like but who they think is qualified, but don’t apply the same standard to women.” It called to mind the dozens of voters I met who backed Trump even though they didn’t like his brash persona.

“Her likeability was a threat to her candidacy, despite voters agreeing that Clinton was the field’s most experienced and ‘electable’ candidate.”

If you’re trying to make sure everyone likes you, it can be hard to differentiate yourself from the field, or attack rivals—which is also part of being a candidate. This only complicates the situation for woman candidates further.

3. Proving qualifications.

That same BLFF study also found that for men, qualifications are assumed, whereas women have to prove their qualifications. It’s something that became a pivot point in the campaign conversation for Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg (actively Secretary of Transportation for President Biden), after Klobuchar was quoted in the New York Times as effectively saying that a woman with equal or less experience than Buttigieg would struggle to be taken seriously as a presidential contender.

Some in Klobuchar’s orbit were reticent about engaging further. Being a woman who was also in the race for president, complaining about the unfair dynamics faced by women running for president could ring hollow or seem selfishly biased. But Klobuchar leaned in any way—not because she wanted to win because of her gender, but because she saw it as a fact that women had to do more to be taken seriously. This, of course, was and is true. I look back on this news cycle and wonder how anyone could have seen it any other way.

4. Assessments of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris is historic, glass ceiling breaking, and trailblazing. The first woman and woman of color to hold the role of Madame Vice President. It’s a milestone, but remains a difficult road.

“[People] are all struggling for the metrics to assess her because we expected that her ‘newness’ would manifest as tangibly different.”

Some say Harris is doing a good job but is getting a bad shake. Others say she falls short of expectations. To me, they are all struggling for the metrics to assess her because we expected that her “newness” would manifest as tangibly different. This is fundamentally unfair because, in theory, each new vice president is new. But also, this mentality set her up to fall short of expectations before she even began. There was no expectation for Pence or Cheney or Gore to reshape the office. Why, suddenly, is there anxious foot-tapping for Harris to do so? This is inextricably linked with her identity—for better and for worse.

5. How history happens.

With VP Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket and competing in an election that will be won or lost by close margins, the U.S. is — once again — on the verge of potentially making history.

Not that Harris herself is talking about that historic potential much. That’s by design, allies and those close to her tell me. One look at Harris and it’s clear she’s historic; that she doesn’t appear as every president before her has. But her campaign message is focused elsewhere — from her opponent to the reproductive healthcare landscape and fundamentals of protecting democracy. It’s a different strategy than Hillary Clinton employed in 2016 against Trump, where she leaned in more heavily to visuals of breaking glass ceilings and the history she sought to achieve. 

But to me, the progress of the last several years was best encapsulated by Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, D-Virginia, who told me this at the outset of Harris’ ascension this summer: “I feel very confident she’s going to win. But if she doesn’t, it’s not because she’s a woman. Just as when Donald Trump loses, it’s not because he’s a man. It’s because he’s a terrible candidate who has terrible policies.”

We’re closer to a level playing field than ever. That is what we should all want. That’s what happens the more that all kinds of candidates run; it becomes normal, because it is. It’s far from a perfect practice — and we’ll see sexism and racism rear their heads in 2024 in various ways, I’m sure. But by the end of this presidential process there will be one more paradigm to look at and examine. And that new “one” just may be seated behind a desk in the Oval Office, as Madam President.