Editor's Notes: Women Can Win and Democrats Should Continue to Nominate Them

Today, we published Megan Wachspress on a hypothetical Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run. Keen observers noted that it is not really an endorsement or a call for AOC to run. It is about women in politics:

Here is the thing about being a woman, and especially a woman in a position of public authority or attention: You do not get to be a genius, the hero. These are not cultural tropes or roles readily available to women. When is the last time you heard a woman in politics or just in your profession, described as “charismatic”? “Brilliant”? “Ambitious”—in a good way? It is vanishingly rare for a woman leader to be perceived sufficient-unto-herself, the reason for which other people take action. For women in politics, even being seen is dangerous. Visibility, the food on which men’s careers feed, is always double-edged; a woman’s physical person is subject to scrutiny no man’s is ever subject to, her vocal tics not edited out but a knock to her credibility.

More centrally, it is about focusing on the actual goal rather than on finding heroes:

I want to urge my political allies, those who share my commitment to substantive policy outcomes, to adopt this same political orientation, to embrace feminist politics of solidarity rather than personality. Feminist not because AOC is a woman (. . .)It is feminist because it rejects the model of political leadership as individual domination, heroism, and investment—a model which has never been available to women—in favor of collective work and accountability, conditions under which equality within political movements can flourish.

What I want to address is something narrower, but also important. Megan briefly touches on it and then moves on:

Democrats have tried twice now to elect a woman president, and failed. Whether and to what extent the specifics of either candidacy make their failures generalizable to all women candidates could fill several books, but the brute fact remains.

I will go further: their failures do not generalize to all women candidates, and indeed those failures were extremely contingent and, we must never forget, very narrow.