Had Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential election, she would have entered office 105 years after women won the right to vote. Alas, the journey from the ballot box to the oval office continues. 

Twice now, a major political party has put forth a female nominee for president, and twice America has instead elected a former TV star and sexual predator. President-elect Donald Trump has an extensive history of sexual misconduct and disrespecting women and now has a GOP-controlled Congress that will likely attempt to implement abortion restrictions. 

Still, there is reason for hope.

Just because Harris lost this election does not mean the nation was not ready for a female president. We should not take it this way. 

Kathryn Pearson, a political science associate professor at the University of Minnesota, said any Democratic candidate was likely to lose in 2024 due to the electorate’s desire for change. Pearson said voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy, inflation and the Biden administration made Harris’s prospects substantially more difficult.

“If you look at incumbent parties worldwide who have been in office in the aftermath of Covid and with this inflation, they have all been defeated,” Pearson said. “If you look at political science models of elections, a Democratic candidate, whatever their gender, whatever their race, was up against a really difficult electoral situation.” 

Pearson disagreed with the narrative that the election proved the U.S. was not ready to elect a female president. Harris ran a strong campaign that raised a record amount of money and under different circumstances, could have won the election, according to Pearson. 

“My concern, though, is that even though I don’t think any Democrat could have won, could have prevailed in this scenario, that there will be a narrative that we can’t elect a woman, a woman of color in particular, as president,” Pearson said. “I don’t think that’s true.”

There was hope that Generation Z voters would overwhelmingly support Harris, and while young female voters did, young male voters favored Trump.

Pearson said young men of all demographic groups, but particularly white men without college degrees, favored Trump more in 2024 than in 2020. Economic concerns will be important for Democrats to address as they attempt to gain support of young male voters in the future, according to Pearson. 

It is also hard to tell how Gen Z will change. 

Gen Z has grown up in a world filled with threats of climate change, a global pandemic, gun violence and hostile politics, to name a few. These events can shape drastically different political opinions from person to person. 

Grace Hertzog, a political science PhD student at the University, said predicting how Gen Z will trend politically can be difficult because young people are still developing their viewpoints and political ideologies.  

“We’re in our formidable years where a lot of our opinions and personalities are changing,” Hertzog said. “Someone who voted for Trump now might vote for Harris if she runs in 2028 because so much has changed in those four years.”

Hertzog said the negative rhetoric around Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election may have impacted young voters’ perceptions of a female president. However, current explanations of why Harris lost are largely opinion- based as experts are still analyzing the outcome of the 2024 election, according to Hertzog. 

“I’m curious as to how much of what Gen Z voters saw with the 2016 campaign with Clinton versus Trump stayed with them,” Hertzog said. “And if something about that rhetoric of a female president stuck with them.” 

The Democratic party must take this election as an opportunity to assess their strategies for reaching voters, but their takeaway should not be that nominating a woman is a bad idea. 

“Democrats are going to have some soul-searching moments about how to broaden the party’s coalition and reach voters without college degrees, which used to be a part of the Democrat’s coalition,” Pearson said. “I don’t see any reason why a woman couldn’t lead that effort in the future.”

Pearson said while abortion was expected to play an important role in the election and was important for voters supporting Democratic candidates, it was not as important for swing voters. If the Republican-controlled Congress attempts to establish a national abortion ban, we may see a resurgence of support for abortion rights similar to that following the Dobbs decision in 2022, according to Pearson. 

“Republicans will introduce federal bans, but I think that Republican leaders would know that that is not a winning issue for Republicans electorally,” Pearson said “Some Republican legislators don’t care about the electoral repercussions, but others do.”

Republicans will have to decide whether to represent their constituents or their party, Hertzog said. Democrats won district elections in states that went for Trump. This shows that the electorate is complex and not entirely predictable by presidential votes. Not everyone wants the extreme policies Trump prompts to appeal to his base. 

“I think it’s really easy to get wrapped up in the fear that’s posted on social media about what a Republican trifecta looks like,” Hertzog said. “It’s important to remember that members of Congress are really concerned with getting reelected.” 

For many of us, this election was particularly painful. What might it say about America that a competent, qualified woman who has dedicated her life to public service lost to a convicted felon and sexual predator? 

It may be that voters were just tired of the Biden administration and Harris was too closely tied up in President Joe Biden’s low approval rating to appeal to those who wanted change. Still, the significance of this election for women’s rights suggested more people would vote differently. 

“It’s disheartening to look at the U.S. and then look around the world and we’re one of the few democracies that haven’t had a female leader,” Hertzog said. 

Hertzog said while it might be easy to feel discouraged now, she has confidence that people will feel fired up again and continue moving forward. 

As Harris said in her concession speech, “Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.” 

We will have a madame president. We’re one step closer.