Kamala Harris Could Be Our First Woman President—and It Feels Bittersweet

There is a real possibility that Vice President Kamala Harris could become the United States’ first woman president in 2025, now that President Joe Biden has officially taken himself out of the running and has endorsed her as the Democratic nominee. If nominated, Harris would run against Donald Trump for president in November.

When the news broke, there was part of my brain jumping for joy that the US could finally, finally, elect a woman president in Harris—and a woman of color at that.

But it’s difficult to shake the bittersweet element to this potential historic first: If Harris does get the nomination and she wins, there may always be the sense that she was allowed to reach the uppermost echelon of power because the man in front of her in line had to bow out. And if she loses, it’ll be easy to leave her holding the bag for the entire Democratic party.

It’s not uncommon for women in America to make history by being a man’s number two at the right time. The first woman elected to the Senate, Hattie Caraway, was initially only appointed to her seat to replace her husband after he died in 1931. Just three years ago, then-lieutenant governor Kathy Hochul became New York State’s first female governor after Governor Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign due to sexual assault allegations.

Obviously, we’ve made some progress since the suffragist era, and we now elect women to be senators and governors all the time. But we’ve still never elected a woman to be president.

Harris isn’t confirmed as the Democratic nominee, but being VP and having the president’s endorsement positions her as Biden’s natural successor, giving her an advantage that other women presidential candidates before her haven’t had. Since she is the candidate who would most seamlessly fit into the campaign, Harris has a far better shot at becoming president than she ever did on the primary campaign trail.

Harris dropped out of the 2020 presidential race early (followed later by her fellow female candidates, Sens.s Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren), and some pundits speculated that Democratic primary voters were gun-shy of nominating another woman after Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

And these women candidates were also easy scapegoats. There were supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders who blamed Warren when he did not win the Democratic nomination in 2020. Hillary Clinton is still routinely blamed for the fact that Donald Trump became president, and then everything he did while president, because she lost to him in 2016. As Ralph Nader, who ran for president and lost four times, recently tweeted: “A dictatorial, unelected majority in the Supreme Court has just rendered America a dictatorial president above the law. Thank you Hillary Clinton, whose blundering campaign let the dictatorial Trump become president and led to a rightwing dictatorial majority on the Supreme Court.”

So, if Harris becomes the Democratic nominee and loses, who do you think the country will blame? Forgive me for my cynicism, but I did not just fall out of a coconut tree, and I’ve seen how this works. Rather than place blame on Trump himself, or any of his right wing supporters, or Biden for not stepping aside earlier, or even swing state voters, it will be easier to blame Harris.

In his endorsement of Harris, Biden wrote, “​​My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

What the statement does not address is that at the time, Biden billed himself as a “transition” candidate, and the implication was that he would not seek a second term. How much easier would he have made electing Harris had he stuck to that pledge and endorsed her from the start of this election cycle?

I sincerely hope we do elect our first woman president this year. I just wish she’d had this much support from the start, and felt less like a backup solution. Maybe then it wouldn’t feel quite so perilous right now.