The Numbers Don't Lie, Electability Has a Gender Problem

In the middle of Women’s History month and following International Women’s Day, six in ten Americans believe women won’t achieve equality with men unless there are more female leaders in business and government, with little daylight between US men and women on this question, a new Ipsos survey finds.

This is in stark relief with the current state of the Democratic field, which was lauded for its deep bench of qualified female candidates, but now is absent any competitive women.

So, what happened?

While many things were at play, it seems “electability,” which in 2020 means beating President Trump in the general election, certainly had a hand in erasing the racial and gender diversity from the field.

It’s a question that constantly came up in the primary, creating a hurdle that female presidential contenders never quite outmaneuvered. That’s because the concept of electability and how people vote based on that metric hold a slippery relationship.

On an individual level, we know that there is solid support for a female president, with few outright saying they aren’t comfortable with that possibility. In fact, only 10% of people say they wouldn’t be comfortable with having a woman hold the highest office, according to a January USA Today/Ipsos poll.

Those comfortable with a female president out paces the number of uncomfortable people by 7 to 1, arguably a good sign for women in politics, right?

Despite this high level of individual support, most Americans also say they can’t see their neighbors or family members voting for a woman. Only a third of people think that their neighbor would be comfortable with a female president, while barely more than half, 58%, of people think their spouse or immediate family would vote for a female president.

Putting aside if people are honest about their comfort level, the problem with questions of electability is not one of animosity, but one of uncertainty.  

At the end of the day, no one really knows how comfortable their neighbor is with a female president, regardless of gender. Very few people outright said that their neighbor would be uncomfortable with a woman in the White House. Though, over half of people said they either didn’t know, or neither agreed nor disagreed with how comfortable their neighbor would be with a female president. Only one in five were so unsure about themselves.

This uncertainty plays into the pessimistic calculations that go into working out who the “electable” candidate is. Stacey Abrams summed up electability as “People position[-ing] themselves through the worst lens they can imagine” when discussing her experience as a black woman in her gubernatorial campaign with FiveThirtyEight for their "When Women Run" oral history project.

Abrams observed that voters aren’t just gathering details about candidates in a vacuum, rather they are also trying to guess how others may be viewing that information to gauge whether voters will receive a candidate well. A similar phenomenon plays out in how people think about their back-up for president.

When posed with a hypothetical, who would you back if your first choice dropped out, Reuters/Ipsos tracking shows that Senator Elizabeth Warren was in a statistical tie with Sanders and Biden throughout the better part of the race.

When push came to shove and people’s top choice did drop out, very few ended up backing her candidacy at the polls or the ballot box.

How to fix this issue?

Many female candidates at every level of public office agree: the more women run, the easier it becomes. Women winning, in theory, should quiet the uncertainties that she can’t win, yet it’s that circular thinking that makes winning difficult in the first place.

Normalizing women in public office increases the confidence voters have that people will vote for women, breaking down the Catch-22 that colors the question of electability. We are trending in the right direction; women are running and winning at lower levels of government, according to the Center for Women and Politics.

So, the paradox of electability continues, chipped away slightly as more women make their run. Even with setbacks, slowly but surely things may change.