The conversations have mostly been taking place behind closed doors, but some Democrats have been voicing their opinion on the topic in public.
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Some Democrats are quietly pushing for a straight white Christian male to top the Democrat ticket for president in 2028. They apparently fear that the American people are too biased against women or other “diverse” candidates—even though former President Barack Obama was elected two times to office.
Democrats have reportedly become pessimistic about who the American people will accept, according to Axios. “There is a fear — and I actually don’t think this is just a grass-tops fear, I think you’d hear it from voters, too — that a woman has now lost twice,” a Democratic strategist told Axios. “So not discounting the hundreds of other times men have lost … but is it the right thing to nominate a woman?”
The conversations have mostly been taking place behind closed doors, but some Democrats have been voicing their opinion on the topic in public as well. In November, former first lady Michelle Obama talked about the very topic, and said that the US has “got a lot of growing up to do, and there’s still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman.”
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn said that Obama was “absolutely correct” but said that a woman should be running for president anyway. Former President Joe Biden blamed Kamala Harris’ loss on sexism last year on “The View.”
Latest polling from YouGov shows that Hillary Clinton’s popularity rating is around 35 percent. Kamala Harris’ is currently at 47.9 percent. Critics have said that both Harris as well as Clinton were the most likeable candidates in 2016 for Clinton as well as in 2024 for Harris.
Harris wrote in her book chronicling her campaign for the presidency, “107 Days,” that she felt like she had to pick a straight man instead of Pete Buttigieg. She wrote that he would have been “an ideal partner — if I were a straight, white man.”
“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she said. “Part of me wanted to say, ‘Screw it, let’s just do it.’ But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
Some Democrats have pushed back on the idea that America wouldn’t elect a woman or other diverse candidate other than a white Christian male. Rep. Ro Khanna said, “They have no idea what they are talking about. The data says otherwise.”
Harris “got the same white votes as Barack Obama,” Khanna said. “What she lost in white men, she made up in white women. But we didn’t win as many Latino Americans, Asian Americans, black men or young voters.”
