Stop me if this sounds familiar: A woman is running for president against Donald Trump in a high-stakes election, with fundamental rights and democracy itself on the line.
But despite these similarities, perhaps the most striking thing about the 2024 election is how much it doesn’t feel like 2016.
It’s not just that Kamala Harris is a different candidate than Hillary Clinton, and not just that we’ve lived through eight years of social progress (and setbacks) since Clinton’s campaign: The Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, the fall of Roe, the Eras Tour and all things Beyoncé, the Barbie movie and the surge of interest and investment in women’s sports, among other things.
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Rather, it’s all of that and this: Americans are seemingly more open to voting for a woman now than they were in 2016 because in the last eight years, they’ve gotten a ton of practice.
There’s been so much progress in such a short period of time, in fact, that it almost feels normal that so many women are running for office. But it's not—or at least it hasn’t been until very recently.
After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, women didn’t just turn up to march in record numbers. They also stepped up to run for office. My organization, Run for Something, launched on Trump’s Inauguration Day in 2017. In the years since, we have worked directly with more than 1,800 millennial and Gen Z women across the United States, nearly half of whom are women of color. (Organizations like EMILY’s List, Emerge, Vote Run Lead and more also saw huge spikes in people expressing interest in running for office.)
The results were almost immediate. In 2018, a record number of 529 women filed to run for seats in the US Senate or House of Representatives, compared to 312 just two years earlier. And after 117 of those women won seats in Congress, many politicos declared it the second “Year of the Woman”—after 1992, when a record-breaking five women won seats in the Senate. Today, there are 150 women women in Congress, and 25 in the Senate.
In 2016, not a single state legislature was majority women, or even 50/50. Now, women rule Nevada and we are damn close in Colorado and Arizona. Run for Something has helped elect hundreds of women to office at the state and local levels, including helping make St. Paul, Minnesota, the first major American city to have an all-women (and majority women of color) city council in November 2023.
Representation isn’t everything, of course, as women leaders don’t always espouse pro-women policies—but it’s also not nothing. Thanks to the record numbers of women running and winning, we’ve wildly expanded our idea of what a “leader” looks like.
We no longer tolerate debate over whether women are electable—the proof is in the election results, as well as in the overwhelming amount of research done in the last four years showing voters no longer penalize women candidates for their gender (and in some cases, reward them). There are fewer expectations of how a woman in politics should look, dress or act in 2024. You don’t have to wear a pantsuit unless you want to; you can laugh, have fun, dance, and lead, all at the same time.
We can see this in Vice President Harris’ candidacy. She is no longer defining what it means to be a woman running for office—she just is a woman running for office, even when that office is the Oval Office. Her identity is a part of her story as she makes the case for abortion access, child care and other kitchen table issues, but her identity alone is not the whole story.
One might say that she is unburdened by what has been, while still existing in the context of all that has come before her.
All that said, of course, winning this election will not be easy. Harris will face extraordinary headwinds—racism, sexism, hundreds of millions of dollars in negative attack ads, and more. And if the last six weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what else awaits us between now and Election Day.
On top of that, we didn’t have a ton of time to mentally prepare for the rollercoaster we’re about to be on. I’ve heard from so many people, especially women, who feel a whole mess of emotions: They’re excited and scared and ready to fight; afraid to imagine what it might feel like if we win and what it might feel like if we don’t.
Especially for those who were invested in the 2016 election, the pain and sadness of the ensuing weeks and years still loom over us. We stood under a literal glass ceiling at the Jacob Javits Center in New York on election night, hoping we would metaphorically break it. Instead, we were the ones left broken.
But we have spent the last eight years—on top of the years since 1972, when Shirley Chisholm ran for the presidency unbought and unbossed, and the decades of fighting before–healing our wounds and preparing for this moment. We’ve been at the democracy gym, putting in the reps electing women reps. Our muscles are strong; we’re ready to go.
At least, I am. And I am even more excited to bring my young daughters with me to the ballot box this year, letting my toddler wear her “future voter” sticker with pride. I hope to one day tell them that 2024 was the extraordinary year America elected its first woman president—and the first of many years in which voting for a woman for president was utterly ordinary.
Amanda Litman is the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse candidates running for state and local office.
