This year, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, Md., and a Democrat, sought support for her U.S. Senate bid from an elected official she had known for years.
“She said to me, ‘I’m so sorry. I want to be really blunt with you, Angela,’” Alsobrooks, who is Black, said, recalling that the official, a fellow Democrat whom she did not name, said she thought Alsobrooks could not win. “We are not ready to elect a Black woman in the state of Maryland,” Alsobrooks recounted the official as saying.
It turned out that Maryland Democrats were ready to do just that.
Alsobrooks beat a white man in her Senate primary by more than 10 percentage points. Public polling has shown her leading another, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, whom she will face in November.
But the exchange, which Alsobrooks described in an interview last week during the Democratic National Convention, underscores the way a party that is trying to elect the first Black female president is still battling anxieties about the idea of electability — and preparing to confront them.
Electability — a squishy and often self-reinforcing concept about who is perceived as being able to win elections — was a through line of the Democratic primary in 2020, when voters stung by the 2016 election wrung their hands over whether preferred presidential candidates who were female, nonwhite or both could garner enough support in key battleground states. The party ultimately coalesced around Joe Biden.
Democrats did not have a chance to air those concerns in a drawn-out primary in 2024, and many suggested last week that identity-based questions about electability should remain firmly in the past. They view the issue of electability as providing cover for racist and sexist notions about white voters being apprehensive about backing Black candidates and male voters being reluctant to vote for female candidates.
“People say, ‘Oh, women candidates, they can’t beat Donald Trump,’ and I say to them, ‘You know what, Nancy Pelosi did it every single day,’” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota told her state’s delegation last week.
But, just below the surface, many of Harris’s supporters — particularly those who are Black — see those concerns as an intrinsic force in an election where the candidate is trying to make history.
“Do I still have concerns about whether or not we’ve reached that point? I think we have, but I do have concerns about it,” said Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, a Democrat who nevertheless said he was heartened by the confidence he sees around Harris’s candidacy.
A shift in Black voters’ pragmatism
During her first run for president in 2019, Harris hoped to draw support from South Carolina’s Black voters, one of the most important demographics in the 2020 presidential primary. Yet their support for her was negligible compared with their support for Biden, the candidate most Black voters in the state knew best as an ally of prominent South Carolina lawmakers and the vice president to America’s first Black president, Barack Obama.
More, they saw Biden as the most electable — not to them, necessarily, but to the vast majority of Americans, who they argued, would find him formidable in a race against former President Donald Trump.
Atima Omara, a Democratic strategist in Virginia who advises largely women, people of color and young people, said questions of electability could be somewhat circular, fueled when a largely white class of consultants, donors and top party brass fails to support candidates of color.
Omara believes those questions bubbled up again this summer, when the future of Biden’s candidacy was in doubt and some Democrats briefly suggested there be a “mini primary” that could bypass Harris.
“That was because they were questioning whether the Black woman was electable or not,” Omara said. “‘Let’s put in somebody more palatable.’ That was the subtext there.”
Annie McDaniel, a Black state legislator in South Carolina who supported Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey during the state’s 2020 primary, said this dynamic haunted her until just a week ago.
“Going to the convention, I was concerned about her electability because I knew the issue was still there,” she said of Harris. She changed her mind after seeing an arena filled with Democrats of all ages, races and genders cheering for Harris. And back in South Carolina, the voters Harris may have had to fight to win over seemed more supportive.
Harris lets others do the defining
If elected, Harris would be America’s first Black and Indian woman to become president — a fact few have glossed over in discussing her candidacy. Harris herself, however, has been less vocal about it. She did not directly mention the history-making potential of her candidacy when she spoke at the convention in Chicago.
There, it was Harris’s immediate family and close friends who defined the vice president’s identity. That allowed Harris to make a pragmatic case for her candidacy in her own words — one that was centered not on her race or gender but on her political experience.
“I was very pleased that she kept the focus on the country, on the people that she wanted to serve. Why get off into her history making? That ain’t gonna put food on anybody’s table,” Clyburn said.
That, Alsobrooks said, is ultimately how voters would show that a Black and South Asian woman is electable.
“We’re not electing people based on their race, gender or anything else — we’re electing people who best articulate a positive vision for our country,” Alsobrooks said.
The Debate debate: Trump suggests he may bail, Harris seeks rule changes
The Harris and Trump campaigns are preparing for a debate that may or may not happen on Sept. 10 on ABC, and like boxers trying to psych each other out at a weigh-in before a bout, they are trading taunts. My colleagues Michael M. Grynbaum and Maggie Astor have the blow-by-blow.
The Harris and Trump campaigns squabbled on Monday over the ground rules of their coming debate in Philadelphia — the home of Rocky Balboa — and within hours, the Trump campaign found its argument undermined by an unlikely foil: the former president himself.
Donald Trump swung first, blasting ABC in a social media post on Sunday, suggesting that the network’s anchors and executives were biased against him and threatening, not for the first time, to pull out of the event. “I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” he wrote.
Then, on Monday, Harris’s campaign went public with its request to ABC and other networks to change one of the debate’s agreed-upon conditions: that each candidate’s microphone be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak.
In a statement to Politico, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, added a dig for good measure: “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”
Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, shot back. “ABC offered the exact same debate rules as CNN, and we accepted — as did the Harris camp,” he wrote, referring to the CNN debate between Mr. Trump and President Biden in June, when the muted-microphones rule was in effect.
Miller tossed in a gibe of his own: “Now, after the Harris campaign has begun debate prep, they’re clearly concerned about what they’re seeing from Harris’s performance.”
But when Trump was asked about the microphone issue by reporters in Virginia later on Monday, he seemed to back away from the fierce objections of his team.
He told members of the news media that it “doesn’t matter to me” whether the microphones were muted, adding, “I’d rather have it probably on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time.” Trump also said that ABC should be “shut out” of hosting the debate, while adding he was still “thinking about” whether he should participate.
— Michael M. Grynbaum and Maggie Astor