3 women top early 2020 list for Dems
CONCORD,N.H.— Three prominent female Democrats all but openly began running for president this week, taking their most active steps yet to challenge President Donald Trump and claim leadership of a movement of moderate and liberal women that has come to define their party during the 2018 elections.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York campaigned in the early primary state of New Hampshire on Thursday, while Sen. Kamala Harris of California was poised to visit similarly crucial South Carolina and Iowa. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts left little doubt about her intentions when she released a genetic test indicating she has Native American ancestry — a move to blunt Trump’s taunts alleging she had mischaracterized her heritage.
These women are beginning to offer themselves as potential presidents at a time when stark divides around gender are shaping the midterm campaigns: A record number of women are running for Congress, mainly on the Democratic side, and polls show women favoring Democrats by a huge margin. Yet Trump has begun sharply assailing the #MeToo movement and making increasingly explicit appeals to male identity.
Gillibrand, who touted a paid family leave proposal beside Molly Kelly, New Hampshire Democrats’ nominee for governor, in a Concord candy shop Thursday, predicted multiple women would run against Trump in 2020. She said she had made no decisions about her future, but cast the political moment as one of women mobilizing against a “credibly accused sexual harasser and sexual assaulter” — Trump.
Gillibrand, 51, said the political energy among Democratic women this year far exceeded anything she saw in 2016, when Hillary Clinton stood a chance of becoming the first female president. Alluding to the Women’s March of 2017 and the recent protests against Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, she said that energy would help define the 2020 election.
“It will carry over to the presidential race,” Gillibrand said in an interview. “You’ll have many women running. It’s not going to be just one woman running.”
It would be unprecedented for multiple women in high office to seek a party’s presidential nomination in the same year, and it could create an unpredictable dynamic in the primary — potentially dividing voters determined to nominate a woman and perhaps heightening scrutiny of how male candidates have treated women in public and private life.
Harris and Warren have both confirmed they are considering the 2020 race, while Gillibrand has been exploring a campaign without saying so definitively.
If multiple women run, no one Democrat could monopolize the vision of breaking a glass ceiling, as Clinton did in 2016. And any Democratic woman might face anxiety, expressed quietly by some concerned party members, about the ferocity with which Trump has savaged his female critics.
But some Democrats say electing a woman is even more important now than in 2016. And many Democratic leaders believe the political mood in the party could quickly catapult one or more women to front-runner status.
Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, the largest U.S. city with an elected female mayor, said Democrats had been rallying to female candidates in the midterms and there was an opportunity — “now more than ever” — for a woman to lead the party. Breed said she would back Harris if she runs.
“We’re overdue, let’s put it that way,” Breed said in an interview. “It would be great to finally see a woman step up and run this country.”
Trump, who has issued blanket denials of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, maintains strong support among conservative women and carried a majority of white women against Clinton in 2016. But his current standing with female voters is dismal: women disapprove of his job performance by a 2-1 margin, while men are evenly split, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump now regularly criticizes #MeToo and at a recent rally mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who said Kavanaugh assaulted her. The president often singles out female Democrats for ridicule, including Warren, Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader.