CHICAGO – The delegates wore the white of the suffragettes; Vice President Kamala Harris, however, did not.
Actress Eva Longoria had the crowd chant “She se puede” and other speakers praised the chance to put a woman in the White House. Harris, however, made no mention of being the first female president in American history in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.
And the word “representation” was hardly mentioned on stage during the entire four evenings of the party conference.
Eight years after Hillary Clinton made “I’m with her” her slogan and focused her campaign on “breaking the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” Harris is letting the history-making potential of her candidacy speak for itself, following a golden rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell.
“I don’t think she needs to remind people that she’s a black woman,” said former Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, who is now a senior official in President Joe Biden’s White House.
One look at Harris is enough to know that she would represent a break with 235 years of white men in the White House, party strategists say. So it’s unnecessary to emphasize that fact at a time when former President Donald Trump and his allies are doing it themselves, calling Harris a “DEI employee” who doesn’t deserve her place on the ballot.
Harris becoming the first female president “brings tears to my eyes but no votes to the ballot box,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week at an event with former Obama strategist David Axelrod at the University of Chicago.
“It’s the icing on the cake. It’s not the cake,” Pelosi added.
Harris makes no secret of her gender or race, speaking often about being a woman — one of her first acts after becoming the party’s presumptive nominee was to reach out to her black sisterhood — and the need to “kick that damn door down” if it isn’t being opened to women and people of color.
But neither in her speeches nor in her television commercials does she talk about what it would mean to have a black woman as president.
At the convention, Clinton herself, the first woman ever nominated for chair of a major party, was the one who most emphasized Harris’s potential to make history.
On Monday, Clinton, wearing a white suffragette robe, placed Harris and herself in the nation’s long struggle for gender equality.
“We have made many cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling. And tonight we are so close to breaking it once and for all,” Clinton said. “On the other side of that glass ceiling, Kamala Harris raises her hand and takes the oath of office as our 47th President of the United States.”
In some ways, Harris’ approach is actually a return to Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 2008, when she didn’t draw attention to her gender (until her campaign faltered).
Her strategy was to portray herself as a tough opponent in order to dispel voters’ latent prejudices against women in leadership positions.
When Clinton ran again in 2016, she changed course, emphasizing her gender and saying it was time to put a woman in the White House.
Toughness was also an important theme for Harris. During the campaign, her performance was highlighted as a “combative” former prosecutor who is “as tough as they come,” as her husband Doug Emhoff put it.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has built herself the image of the no-nonsense “Big Gretch,” called Harris “a tough, proven, tough leader.”
Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016 was a crushing defeat for many women, but it also helped give rise to the #MeToo movement, the Women’s March and a wave of women running for political office.
This helped close the imagination gap among female presidential candidates, as Clinton won the majority of the vote. Harris did not have to face the same questions as Clinton about whether Americans would elect a woman president, as nearly 66 million Americans have already done so.
And 82 million Americans voted to make Harris vice president in 2020.
The number of women in other elected offices has also increased in almost every election: According to the Center for American Women and Politics, there are currently 25 women in the Senate, 125 in the House of Representatives, and 99 in state executive offices.
Compared to their share of the total population, they are still underrepresented in the centers of power, but women in power are nothing new.
In addition, the electorate has changed thanks to Clinton, Trump and the failure of the Roe v. Wade ruling.
For example, Trump won among white women in both 2016 and 2020, but polls since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling show a historic gender and party divide, with Harris expected to win among women in November.
Much of the polling advantage Harris has achieved over Biden is due to women who did not necessarily have to make their potential “first” clear in order to get behind her.
After the 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee conducted extensive focus group and opinion polls to understand what had happened. One key finding was that women did not believe Democrats’ claims that Trump was bad for women and was trying to overturn Roe, dismissing them as Trump-style hot air.
“The women who said it was just boasting now know it wasn’t boasting,” Perez said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com.
