Opinion | Judge Kamala Harris on the Merits — Not Which Box She Checks

“Aren’t you thrilled to see a woman running for president? Isn’t it great?”

Like many women, I’ve faced variations on this question multiple times since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. I know I’m supposed to say “Yes!” and to possibly add “Yay!”

But I don’t particularly care that the Democratic candidate is a woman. I care about having the best, most electable Democratic candidate possible, and I suspect many Americans, male and female, feel the same. As my colleague Jeremy Peters reported last week, voters are looking for electability, not representation. “In interviews, Harris supporters of all races said they were concerned that if she talked more directly about her race, she risked feeding the backlash that has been building over diversity,” he wrote.

The year 2020, in other words, is as over as 2016.

If President Biden had pulled out of the race months ago, other candidates, male and female, could have made a case for their qualifications and electability and maybe had a better shot at the presidency. As groovy as the vibe feels right now, all the memes and Zooms in the world can’t cover for Harris’s weaknesses or less than overwhelming vice-presidential record. Nor will promoting her as possibly the first woman president do anything substantive to help her win.

Most Americans don’t put nearly as much importance on identity as Democratic leaders seem to think they do. According to Pew, 64 percent of Americans — and 57 percent of women, even 43 percent of Democrats — said electing a female president during their lifetime was not important or didn’t matter. Rather than focusing on what Harris means to women, South Asian Americans or Black people, we should focus on what she might mean to all Americans.

Donald Trump may be the latest in a long line of male presidential candidates, but I don’t oppose him because he’s a man; I oppose him because he is a terrible candidate, a catastrophic leader and a terrible human being, one who treats women (and men) horribly.

Similarly, women didn’t necessarily vote for Hillary Clinton because of her sex. And despite efforts to make gender central to her campaign, women didn’t turn out for her in the same force as pollsters predicted. “I’m Not With Her: Why Women Are Wary of Hillary Clinton” ran a headline in The Guardian months ahead of the election.