Mo News: Countdown To The First Woman President

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Hi everyone,

The clock is already ticking on the campaign trail. November's midterm elections are just weeks away - and then the 2024 Presidential election will be here before we know it. It begs the question: will we ever see a woman in the Oval Office?

In this premium edition of Mo News, we spoke to Ali Vitali, the author of Electable: Why America Hasn't Put A Woman In The White House Yet, inspired by interviews with some recent female presidential candidates. Vitali delves into a number of key unique challenges and biases women face from the media and voters. We also look ahead to the likely female contenders in upcoming election cycles and why it might be a Republican woman who wins the Oval Office first.

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

The new DOJ court filing includes a photo of some of the apparently classified files recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

• Blistering DOJ Filing: Prosecutors obtained a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago after receiving evidence that there was “likely” an effort to conceal classified documents there in defiance of a grand jury subpoena, a new Justice Department court filing released Tuesday night said.The 36-page filing was the department’s most detailed account yet of its evidence of obstruction of justice, raising concerns that Trump and his attorneys sought to potentially hide documents and mislead investigators about the sincerity of their effort to return highly sensitive records to the government. ~Politico

• Mississippi Water Crisis: The state's capital city, Jackson, is without reliable running water after its main water treatment facility started deteriorating on Monday – a failure officials blame on persistent water system problems – and exacerbated by this week's heavy rain and floods. ~ Fox WeatherThe source: Torrential rains triggered severe flooding on the Pearl River, forcing the river to rise to a dangerous level and destroying the town's main treatment plant. The damage spurred water pressure issues, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without running water.Currently, Jackson residents cannot "flush toilets, fight fires, and meet other critical needs,” Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said.“Do not drink the water.” The stark warning from officials, urging residents not to drink any water that still comes from the tap while the treatment plant down.Jackson's water system has been plagued with problems for years. The city has been under a boil water notice for weeks, due to what the state deemed a water-quality issue with inadequate treatment to clean the water.The governor announced a state of emergency and has activated the National Guard to assist as the state scrambles to supply the city’s 180,000 residents with drinking and non-drinking water.Jackson Public Schools are shifting back to virtual learning until it’s safe to resume in-person learning.

• Afghanistan One Year Later: One year ago yesterday, American troops left Afghanistan for the final time. The exit ended a 20-year American military mission that helped rebuild Afghanistan and promote a democracy in the country. In a matter of days, the 20 year war ended the way it began: with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan.The aftermath of the collapse still cripples Afghanistan a year later, with the country suffering in the hands of the Taliban.Afghanistan’s economy has crumbled. Taliban rule has put millions in poverty. An estimated 700,000 have lost jobs since the U.S. withdrawal. Citizens have been forced them to sell anything for food, including homes, kidneys, and in the most extreme cases, their children.Food insecurity: The United Nations reported that half the Afghan population (19 million people) are facing acute food insecurity. 90% of the population is experiencing insufficient food consumption.Inflation: The world bank reported in July that prices of diesel, flour, rice and sugar in Afghanistan have increased 50% from the previous year.Women’s rights: Almost immediately after retaking power, the Taliban reinstated their previous ban on women and girls attending school. The group dictates what women can wear, how they travel, and workplace segregation by sex, to name just a few. They enforce these rules through intimidation and inspections.Left behind: The Association of Wartime Allies estimates that 96% of the SIV applicants (aka, Afghan allies and interpreters who risked their lives to help the U.S. military) were left behind. At the pace the U.S. Department of State is moving in its visa application process, it will take more than 18 years to successfully bring our Afghan allies to safety – almost as long as the entire war itself.

Now, to our interview with Ali Vitali, an NBC News Correspondent who covered the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections from their primaries to their inaugurations. In 2020, she witnessed firsthand an election cycle with a record number of women running for their party's nomination for President. A historic election - that ended all too familiarly: with a white male in office.

In her new book, Ali breaks down her experience on the ground with the candidates, and how it changed her perspective of electability

MOSH: Congratulations on the release of your new book. A lot of reporters, when they write a campaign memoir, will just take us through the cycle. You might get a couple good nuggets. Like, 'I bet you didn't know when blah, blah, blah.' But you've decided to take a different tack and focus specifically on why we haven't had a woman president. Talk to me about your process and how you got to writing this book.

ALI VITALI: This was actually really organic because I knew I wanted to do a book about the five years that I spent pretty consistently on the road. Ultimately, what this book became was, March of 2020, Elizabeth Warren drops out of the race. I had spent the bulk of 2019 and 2020 following her, following Amy Klobuchar, predominantly following the women candidates.

And a publisher who we had talked to for the book, in its earlier iteration was like, what if your coverage on Elizabeth Warren could be turned into something more far reaching? And we sort of put our heads together on this idea of like, well, why haven't we had a woman nominee his cycle? What does it mean in the larger landscape, and it really was organic from the place of as most reporters will appreciate, like doing the reporting, and then realizing that there's more in this thread that you have to just keep tugging on. The pandemic hit right after that. And we really had no time to unpack the things that happened in the Democratic primary in 2020. Because immediately we launched into, “Okay, COVID is happening, what's the government response?” I was able to take the thoughts that I was sitting at home with, in those early months of the pandemic, and filter all these things through the lens of gender, and sometimes through the lens of race. And that's not something that we get to do a lot in cable news. So it felt like a really necessary exercise for me as a reporter.

MOSH: By your count in the book, 22 women have run for president in American history. One actually before women were even given the right to. In 2016 we had the first female nominee – that was Hillary Clinton. In 2020 we had a record year – six of the women ran in 2020. So I guess we're making progress, we're getting closer. Why is it taking us this long?

VITALI: It's misogyny and a whole bunch of other things. Like there are biases that are in play here on metrics like likability, who's qualified, who can win, who do we assume has the ability to win. Because with any of these candidates, you're assuming that they have the potential to win, you don't actually know until the day that voters go to the polls and the evening when you get your results. Who do we give the benefit of the doubt to more? We usually give it to men. And why is that? Mostly because they're the people who we've seen.

Like, this idea that Joe Biden was the safe or the unrisky or the comfortable candidate, came in part from the fact that he was a moderate Democrat. He didn't have so-called risky policy positions that he could be tagged with in a general election, but also because many people internalize the way that Trump took on Hillary Clinton in 2016. And they extrapolated that out. And they tried to convince themselves that, oh, it's not a sexist decision, because Hillary was such a special candidate, you could never replicate Hillary Clinton. So maybe it's not that we don't want to like women.

MOSH: I mean, she had her own FBI investigation of a variety of things that were happening.

VITALI: Exactly, and she would chalk it up to, “It's not that I lost only because I was a woman, but also because of Comey, and because of Trump, and because of the Russians." But, it's also that we just don't know what we haven't seen before.

It's hard to imagine. Female candidates who run are not just asking people to imagine them in the Oval Office with their litany of policy proposals. They're asking people to go a step further and imagine something that has literally never existed in American politics before, which is Madam President. So you have a double pronged exercise if you're a female candidate already. And part of the reason why it's taking us so long is that women just weren't in a position to run as early as they are now for office, and then mount a qualified and sustainable presidential campaign. The good news right now is that you had a field in 2020, where you had six women who were able to viably run. Four of them from U.S. Senate positions. I don't think you'll ever see a presidential primary again, where you don't at least have one qualified woman running.

MOSH: I think just over 60 countries have had a female head of state in the past 50 years. What differentiates America culturally, politically? What makes America different here than some of these other countries?

VITALI: We look at the presidency in the United States as such an exercise in hyper-masculinity. The fact that you are as the Commander in Chief of the military, there's so much machismo that is wrapped up in a role like that.

MOSH: Is that unique, though? Compared to some of these other countries, like India or Pakistan?

VITALI: I'm not sure it's unique. But there's a very specific type of American macho man that you can think of. And I think that that factors into it a little bit. But then I also think that it's the idea to have our system, because if you look at a popular vote in 2016, you would have a President Hillary Clinton, if that were the metric that we used. That's not what we use. And going a step further, you talk about this idea of a parliamentary system. If that were our system, we would have President Nancy Pelosi because she would be the equivalent of that in her role as Speaker of the House.

MOSH: In these parliamentary systems, you elect the party, and then the party selects their leader.

VITALI: Broadly, that's one of the reasons why we're lagging behind. There's just not that many presidential elections, especially not ones that are fully open fields, where you can just get a bunch of candidates together and see how they fare. So you're not working from a very large sample pool. But all those things combined lead to a system. This is a really tough system for women.

MOSH: Globally, historically, it's been a conservative woman who has been the first woman elected men in these countries. What's your sense there? The first female president here in the U.S. might end up being a Republican.

VITALI: Yeah, it definitely could be, even though Democrats have done a better job of filling their pipeline with qualified female candidates and doing so intentionally. Republicans play an entirely different game. When it comes to women running, they don't necessarily run gender first, identity politics. The base hates that, as multiple conservative consultants pointed out to me. But what Secretary Clinton said to me when we were talking for this book is, it could very well be a conservative woman who gets there first. Now, Clinton was fast to say that that's not what she wants. But history tells us that those are the kinds of women that do well, first. It's a completely fair assumption that that's exactly what we could see first in this country too.

MOSH: The Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Winsome Sears – who's African American, female, Republican – says, I'm not about identity politics. I'm not my race. I'm not my gender. I'm about issues.

VITALI: When I talked to Carly Fiorina for this book, who ran for president in 2016, that's exactly what she said. She acknowledges that there are inequities in this system for female candidates. And at the same time, we really do need to elect people on their merits. You can also say that we're electing the best people on their merits, like those two things can be true, and it can mean that women win in those systems.

MOSH: You brought up the idea earlier of likability and electability, and how female candidates are specifically asked about it. “Is she likable enough?” “Is she electable enough?” Female candidates are asked about that, or are scrutinized in a way that male candidates are not.

VITALI: Well, have you ever asked in your campaign coverage? Because I know the answer for me is No. Have you ever asked a male candidate, “Do you think you're likable enough?” I've never asked a male candidate that and, you were on the road with Hillary Clinton in a cycle where a debate moderator asked her at a time when voters viewed her as the most qualified person to run for president in 2008. She was still being asked on the debate stage, "do you think you're likable enough to be president?" The sign of progress is that no debate moderator today would ever ask a woman candidate on debate stage, do you think you're likable enough? But at the same time, they're still having to answer for that question in a bunch of different ways.

MOSH: Having spent time on the Hillary campaign in 2008, the Hillary that we got to know on the plane after an event, she's like, coming over to the back to talk to the media. She'd come back with a beer and just chitchat. This Hillary Clinton is a very likable, authentic person.

And then it felt like she was a different person at public rallies.And it did feel like, what happened to Hillary that we knew on the back of the plane?

VITALI: The ethos of that campaign was trying to fit this woman who ultimately campaigned to 2016 as something like a hyper feminist icon, right? Because it became cool in 16, to be, you know, the girl boss and to be a feminist icon. That wasn't cool in 2008. And so they made her into a candidate that was fitting into a masculine frame of Commander in Chief. But at the same time, many of these female candidates are in a trap, where if they don't show themselves, they're seen as inauthentic, but if they do show themselves, they can also be seen as inauthentic, because maybe that doesn't jive with the view that the public has of them already. And a lot of the female candidates in 2020 were doing for that.

MOSH: The number of American women registered to vote and the number of women who vote has been higher than men, going back to the 60s. . Statistically speaking, women are the majority of voters in this country. The majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016. What do we make of the fact that more women than men vote in this country and yet we're still in the situation we're in?

VITALI: Well, not all men just vote for men, and not all women just vote for women. Certainly 2020 is far from the first time that Americans have considered female candidates. You look back at Shirley Chisholm and her run in the 1970s, 1984, and Geraldine Ferraro getting on the Mondale ticket 2008, Sarah Palin running alongside John McCain. If those campaigns bore out the idea that women just vote for women, we'd be in a very different situation right now. And something that I detail in the book is this idea of the gender gap that we often focus on, is driven by men becoming more conservative. In 2016, I was seeing a lot on Twitter and among Democratic voters who I would talk to, is the idea of, oh, I can't believe that white women voted for Trump more than they voted for Hillary. And that wasn't exactly a surprising statistic for those of us who follow this stuff, because white women do tend to vote conservative. So it's not that women, we talk about them as a voting bloc, but they're no more monolithic than men are. And I think that we need to do a better job of parsing that through.

MOSH: So later in 2020: Biden makes an explicit promise to select a woman as VP. And you go through, in the book, whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Take us through the arguments here.

VITALI: Totally depends who you talk to. And I talked to a bunch of people who had different opinions. On the one hand, the fact that the Biden campaign thought that laying out that mile marker at the apex of his political power over the Democratic Party, saying, “I'm gonna pick a woman no matter what,” it's a sign of progress, because the last two women who were selected as Vice Presidents were selected when the man who was picking them was at a low point in their political agenda. And the fact that, that was sort of like a political throwing spaghetti at the wall, versus in 2020, where it was like a very deliberate decision of like, women are an asset, gender and diversity are an asset, lived experience is an asset, we need to show that we are a broad tent party in terms of we physically have embodying it, like that's a sign of progress. And that's awesome. And also, there are some people who wish that Biden never said that, and just simply picked a woman and said, “I'm going to just pick the best person.”

MOSH: So he picks Kamala Harris, who's our first female Vice President. She's been dealing with her own challenges in the position. She obviously ran for President, there were issues with her campaign early on. What does it mean, now that we have our first woman Vice President for the American journey towards a female President?

VITALI: It means a lot to have her there. And Republicans and Democrats both agree with that statement, the idea that seeing her as Vice President is extremely important, because it's one less hurdle for voters to have to imagine. They see it every day. So that's the pro of having Kamala Harris there. If you're doing it right, people really aren't hearing about you, and you're just supporting the guy at the top. And that's what she's doing. So a lot of these negative stories, frankly, will go without pushback from her office. There's not an apparatus that's meant to lift Kamala Harris up because that's not the role of a Vice President.

MOSH: John Adams, you know, the first Vice President, lamented how useless a job that felt.

VITALI: Absolutely. But also I would have loved if Kamala Harris spoke with me for this book, the fact that she is the person who has been elevated the furthest. And most of her other contenders in the 2020 field spoke with me, but her office told me it was a no-go for them. She's someone who had previously challenged the current President, first of all, that's not like new or shocking, Biden had challenged Obama, and on and on and on, HW to Reagan, all of those things. She's not the first Vice President who came from a crop of rivals. But they are balancing a lot of interests here, and I think that might be part of why they ultimately didn't sit down with me for this book, despite the fact that almost everyone else who ran including Secretary Clinton did.

MOSH: We speak here now in midway through 2022. We have midterms coming up. We got a Presidential coming up. We're also facing the potential for, you know, Apollo versus Rocky again, in Trump versus Biden.

VITALI: I think that we're in a place where the process is still governed by two older white men right now for both parties. Because Biden and Trump are both going to run again. For Trump, it's just a question of when. I feel like we're going to wake up one day in the next few months, and he's just going to announce a run for President. That's kind of what all of our sources are telling us in real time.

Biden, I know that DC likes to throw around this question of, 'oh, will he run or he won't run.' But like he's said, he's running. You got to take the man at face value. He says he wants to run for president again. And it's not surprising for a man who wanted to be president for over three decades that he is there now and wants to keep doing it.

So that complicates things for people like Kamala Harris, but certainly she's not the only one who has presidential ambitions. I do think, though, that what we've seen in the last few weeks, Liz Cheney's saying that she's thinking about what comes next, that she'll do whatever it takes to make sure Trump doesn't get into the Oval Office. I could see a world pretty easily where she's running in a Republican primary that maybe the party doesn't want her to be running in. But she's happy to insert herself in, just because it shows a stark contrast. I think her calculus is like, how do I run in a Republican primary that shows we're not all Donald Trump acolytes. If you look at the accountability politics around Trump right now, it's women who are leading that charge. It's Liz Cheney, people like Senator Murkowski, who's up for reelection in Alaska right now. It's the women from within the Trump administration who have testified for the January 6 committee.

MOSH: At the same time, though, he has a bunch of female leaders who are loyal to him. Nikki Haleys, the Kristi Noems. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to be the next governor from Arkansas. What’s your sense of how Trump looks at possibly selecting a woman?

VITALI: I feel like that is the most likely scenario if he wins the nomination again. I do think that gone are the days of just like only white male tickets. I think that there's a real reality where he's got a good relationship with Governor Kristi Noem in South Dakota. She's a steadfast conservative, she brings real conservative credentials to his ticket. Obviously, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the likely next Governor of Arkansas, but also someone with deep conservative ties because of the work that her father did. She herself worked in Trump's administration, one of the most visible people defending his record over the course of his two years that she was Press Secretary there.

Nikki Haley has a little bit of a different space, because she's been on both sides of the Trump issue over the course of the last year and a half since they've left office. But nevertheless, Elise Stefanik is one of the women who is going to be elevated continuously in the House ranks, especially if they retake the House.

MOSH: You talk in the book about how one of the challenges we face is that we dismiss the idea of misogyny. And by dismissing it, we're never really able to address it in a real way.

VITALI: The tangible (failed candidate) things - well, they ran out of money, they didn't recruit good campaign staff, they didn't have enough infrastructure across the country, candidate was a bad manager - these are all things that are pretty tangible things that you can list as like, that's why that candidate didn't do well. But the percentage of that that's unexplained still is gender is bias is stereotype. And it's all swirled together.

But just because it's intangible, you can't quantify it on a piece of paper, doesn't mean that it didn't have a marked impact on the way that voters voted. We can't just ignore it. You have to speak to it. Because once you're primed to see it, you don't really stop seeing it, and that disrupts these narratives before they start and hopefully levels the playing field.

MOSH: I'm curious as to the thing that most surprised you in your research and writing process.

VITALI: I actually was surprised by how little data and research there is in this space. Because my goal in writing this book was to match the feelings with the facts, the fact that most people talk about: it's harder to be a female candidate, it's harder to be considered qualified, it's harder to get together the resources that you need for a successful run. There were a lot of those statements that we feel are right, but there's a lot of things that just haven't really been studied yet. I think the thing that was the most striking and frankly, the most, I would say validating, is this idea that a lack of electability actually impacts a bottom line.

MOSH: Is there a chance that we see our first woman president in 2024?

VITALI: Elected, not electable?

MOSH: Elected, not electable.

VITALI: I mean, look, 2024, again, governed by two men who want to reclaim their title. It's a tough cycle for that. I still think we might see women compete for it, though. And I still maintain that there is a very high likelihood that someone like Trump could put a woman on the ticket with him. Obviously, Biden has said he's going to run with Kamala again. So like, women will again be elevated. If the stakes change at all, that could change everything. But right now, it's a process that's governed in the short term by two white men.

MOSH: I'm obsessed with the scenario that Biden chooses not to run again. Kamala, of course, views herself as the heir apparent, and then is challenged by other Democrats. And how the gender politics plays out there.

VITALI: Oh, my God, I'm waiting for that. And I've talked with my sources about this constantly. Just the idea that it won't be catty for like, Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker and the men to run, but the second that the female Senators who served alongside Harris decide to run, they will be considered not respectful of their female colleagues. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope saying it now means it gets negated. But, I'm waiting.

MOSH: Ali, are you ready for another full presidential cycle?

VITALI: Yeah, I'm ready for my third one.

MOSH: I think there's some people who become lifers in this. You have to weigh your personal life with your professional life, but there is this addiction, this high.

VITALI: Totally. Like nothing else, though, because you find consistency in a completely inconsistent lifestyle. All of us joke about like, post campaign depression, because it's real. You're like falling off a treadmill, like someone presses stop and you're just like, thrown off.

MOSH: Alright, so get your sleep, get your friends. Get ready. You have a midterm and then and then off to the races. Ali, I wish you great luck with the book.

📸 Top Banner Photo Credit: Getty Images

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