Could A Woman Win In 2028?

This feels like the final “thing” we haven’t been able to accomplish at the intersection of political grandstanding and identity.

You want to believe that America entertains enough periods of “being vaguely progressive in its voting behavior” — even though the current “vibe shift” is in the other direction, or was and might be slowly creeping back towards center left — that we could eventually get a woman into office, just like (IDENTITY POLITICS ALERT!) we got an African-American male into office in 2008. Now, unfortunately, Obama has two legacies — the first is being “suave” and some version of “dignified” as a statesman, but the second legacy is that him serving in that role basically handed us Trump in so many ways.

It is still remarkable to me that Trump is 2–0 vs. women and 0–1 vs. a man in national elections. You kinda want it to represent more than it does, but it doesn’t represent as much as we think. Clinton should not have been the candidate in 2016 — her time was “supposed” to be 2008, but Obama got there better — and in reality, Bernie was the “tide of history” guy at that point. It is an interesting bar debate as to whether Bernie would have beaten Trump, and I’ve heard both arguments, but we will unfortunately never know.