The future is still female

Saying a woman can’t become President is a self-fulfilling prophecy

(I write at length about many of the ideas below in my new book, “Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age” out in June. Pre-order now and enroll for free in Firestarter University starting in the Fall.)

One of the first podcasts I listened to after the devastating November election loss featured two men and a woman, all moderate pundits, doing a post-mortem and ticking down a list of alleged lessons learned. One of those lessons, according to a male host, was that “Democrats can never again run a woman candidate at the top of the ticket.” Shockingly, not only did the other hosts not disagree, they seemed to support his epiphany. Meanwhile, I was in my kitchen slamming cabinet doors and yelling at my iPhone, “Seriously, that’s your fucking takeaway?”

I’d hoped that conversation was just a knee-jerk reaction, but alas, earlier this month, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic Congresswoman, was asked at a Harvard Institute of Politics event whether Kamala Harris’s loss set back the cause of getting women elected. Her blunt answer: “Yes.” And then, in this week’s profile of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in The New York Times, there it was again, the same sentiment, but this time from a Democratic activist: “… a leader of Empire State Indivisible said … she questioned the country’s willingness to elect a woman in 2028. ‘I sadly think that it probably needs to be some very safe white man. I feel terrible saying that.’”

As someone who has encouraged and trained women to run for office for decades, I feel it’s important to point out that this conclusion—that a woman can’t win—is a lazy lesson for anyone to take away from the 2024 election. It’s also a horrible signal to send women who are currently considering running for office, and an unconscionable legacy to leave to our daughters. But most of all, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; as long as we continue to say or even believe a woman can’t win, she won’t.

Already, women candidates face significant skepticism—even among other women. A poll out just before the 2024 election asked voters: “Do you personally know someone who wouldn’t vote for a woman for President?” Shockingly, four in 10 women said yes, they knew someone—a close friend, family member, or even a significant other—who would not support a female candidate, regardless of her qualifications. Even more troubling, 10 percent of women overall—and 20 percent of Republican women—admitted that they personally would not vote for a woman for President. This internalized bias highlights the deeply rooted cultural and social norms that continue to cast doubt on women’s leadership potential.

And yet, a woman has already won the popular vote for President. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received nearly 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, giving her the largest popular vote margin of any losing presidential candidate in history. And if it weren’t for the anachronistic disaster that is our voting system, she would have been sworn in. And then, in 2024, Kamala Harris, who was forced to run a presidential race in just 100 days (unlike her opponent, who had been running for a decade), still managed to amass 75 million votes. Harris ultimately lost a race that was decided by just 230,000 votes in three states. Clinton and Harris both performed well, especially given that they were each “firsts”—the first woman nominee and the first Black and South Asian woman nominee. Nevertheless they lost, and when a woman loses, society expects them to disappear.

In my new book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, I write about Becca DeFelice, a Texas Moms Demand Action volunteer who now runs Emerge Texas. Becca ran for office twice and lost, and after each of those experiences, she realized that because she had had the audacity to “fail” in public, people expected her to step off the stage and never attempt to achieve anything of import again in her lifetime. “I’ve experienced it, but I’ve also seen it in my work helping women to run for office: Any time a woman steps out in a public way to lead and falls short of their goal, they’re shamed into not existing,” Becca said. “Because if you’re a woman who loses, you’re suddenly the embodiment of every woman who has ever lost anything; a living, breathing reminder that when women try, sometimes they’ll lose.”

Consider this imposter syndrome in reverse: Just as there are few examples of other women who are in power or in the spotlight to follow when they succeed, there are also too few examples of how women should behave when they fail. Men fail spectacularly and publicly all the time, but instead of shrinking, they know they’ll be given the grace to try again. From good guys like Beto O’Rourke to bad boys like Elon Musk, men who fail rarely leave the stage after a significant loss. In fact, their failures can serve as a springboard for bigger and better things. For men, failures are temporary setbacks, but for women, missing the mark is an excuse to be discarded.

That’s precisely why we must reframe so-called “female failures” as wins. Setbacks—in activism, in elections, in life—are inevitable, and it’s important to remember that every time you lose a battle, you’re learning how to win the war. Clinton and Harris's campaigns opened doors that weren't open before they ran. As Clinton said after her loss, “…we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”

It’s this same incremental progress that I’ve seen lead to revolutions in activism: every small, local step forward creates momentum toward a win that eventually changes the world. Every woman who takes action locally or runs for office in her community, from attending a city council meetingto running for school board, is building the momentum that will normalize electing more progressive women at all levels of government.

A couple of years after I started Moms Demand Action, it became clear to me that our volunteers were looking to take the skills they’d learned as activists and apply them to running for office. I started seeing them announce on social media that they were exploring a run for school board or city council or had already filed to run for office. So I went to our leadership team and asked them to come up with a more formal training program, which we called Demand A Seat. Since then, thousands of volunteers and survivors have gone through the training, and hundreds have won elected office: from Minnesota, where Erin Maye Quade became the first Black woman elected to the state Senate, to Illinois, where Nabeela Syed became the youngest member of the Illinois General Assembly, to Indiana, where Andrea Hunley became the first Black person elected to the state Senator from her district.

These wins are part of a bigger trend in America where women have made significant strides in politics in the last 50 years. Of the 64 women who’ve ever served in the U.S. Senate, 26 are serving right now. Six times as many women serve in state legislatures today than in 1971. In 2025, the nationwide share of female legislators is around 28 percent, a seemingly small yet still significant jump of three percentage points over 2018 (and 37 percent of those Congresswomen are women of color). Currently, 13 of the nation’s 50 state governors are women (eight are Democrats), more than there have ever been. And after the last election cycle, New Mexico and Colorado joined Nevada to become the three states where women make up the majority in state legislatures.

Watching women swell the ranks of elected officials reminds me of the opening montage of the movie “Barbie.” As the camera zooms in on Barbieland, we see there’s a matriarchy in charge. A woman is President and there are nine female justices on the Supreme Court. Sitting in the theater and imagining a world in which that could be true made me cry, and I could hear the women around me getting emotional, too. But women aren’t just in charge in Barbieland; over 60 nations have elected female leaders, and three of those women were elected just in 2024.

America may be far from becoming Barbieland, but we cannot allow ourselves to become convinced that the voting public is too misogynistic to elect a woman simply because some people are unable to imagine a world in which women are electable to the highest office in the nation. If America is truly an exceptional nation, we can and must elect women leaders, including a woman President. And the first step toward making that happen is to believe that it can.

---

My new book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, is available for preorder! Out in June 2025, Fired Up will give you the formula for finding your unique spark and show you how to use it to start fires in your life. By preordering, you can enroll for FREE in Firestarter University, a year-long online program that includes live monthly workshops, workbooks and resources, accountability check-ins, and a community to help you succeed.