The Bulwark's Will Saletan has spent the last several weeks watching focus groups of undecided voters and has watched them gradually come around to potentially supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Saletan cautions readers that there is still a long way to go until election day, but his overall impression from watching these voters is that "the barrier to electing a woman president -- the ultimate glass ceiling -- is ready to break."
He then walks through several of the doubts expressed by many of these voters throughout the course of focus groups and he shows how they have slowly evaporated as the campaign has progressed.
One of the most potentially damaging critiques of Harris was that she was only hired to check a box as being the first Black woman to be vice president, and not because she had any particular talent for governing or campaigning.
As Harris has stepped into the spotlight, however, these fears have diminished.
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"In the same group... an older white woman in Michigan initially signaled that she agreed with the DEI critique of Harris," he writes. "But as the discussion went on, she acknowledged that “lately she’s been a little bit more eloquent in her speaking. That’s what often happens when a vice president emerges from the president’s shadow. The impression that she’s not up to the job begins to fade away."
One Pennsylvania voter who backed former President Donald Trump in 2016 then switched to President Joe Biden in 2020 explained that he personally didn't like 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton but expressed an openness toward Harris.
“She just wasn’t a very likable personality,” said the voter of Clinton, before adding, “I think America’s ready to elect a woman.”