Americans apparently still can’t stomach a female president, but in some places, it seems a lady governor is okay. With Republican Kelly Ayotte’s win in New Hampshire against Democratic challenger Joyce Craig, 13 women will serve as governors next year. Ayotte will join a cohort of five Republican and eight Democratic women, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, Maura Healey in Massachusetts, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Kathy Hochul in New York, and Kristi Noem in South Dakota. Two US territories—Guam and Puerto Rico—will also have female governors next year. That exceeds the record of 12 female governors set two years earlier.
But that symbolic victory, such as it is, comes amidst much larger defeats. In electing Donald Trump last week, American voters not only declined, once again, to place a woman in the White House—they embraced a candidate who has bragged about assaulting women and deployed sexist slurs and insults with alarming frequency. Eighteen states have never elected a female governor, and only four of this year’s 11 gubernatorial races included female candidates. Three of them, all Democrats, lost to their male opponents.
Fewer women also ran for Congress this year than in the previous two cycles, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. With less than 20 races left to call in the House and Senate, women have won just over a quarter—or 27%—of all congressional seats.
Still, researchers dispute the argument that Americans aren’t “ready” to see women lead. After all, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, even if the electoral college went for Trump in 2016. “Women’s unique lived experiences are an asset to crafting policies [and] driving progress,” the non-partisan advocacy group RepresentWomen said in a statement on November 8. “The results of the 2024 General Election … have left us grappling with the status of women in the United States.” Just 45% of Americans said they hoped for a woman president in their lifetime, according to a YouGov poll conducted shortly before the election. An additional 45% said it doesn’t matter to them. However, there are significant gender and partisan divides here: 51% of women said they desired a woman president, compared to 38% of men. Meanwhile, 86% of Democrats said they hoped to see a female president in their lifetime, versus just 13% of Republicans.
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