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| Sens. Amy Klobuchar & Kamala Harris, both running for president as sitting members of Congress |
Assuming Klobuchar's entry, we are now at an historic point for the race, as she will become one of five sitting female members of Congress to run for the White House in 2020, a record. In addition to Klobuchar, Warren, and Harris, you also have New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who recently announced her interest in running, as well as a long-shot bid by Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. As any other entries into the race by sitting women in Congress would be a surprise (though Gabbard was also a surprise, so I wouldn't totally rule it out), I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the women who have run for president as sitting members of Congress in the past, as this year nearly equals the all-time number of six.
It's worth noting before we dive into the careers of these six women that just being a sitting member of Congress doesn't mean that you're a serious candidate for president, or that all of these women were legitimate threats to win the nomination in the same way that Klobuchar, Harris, or Warren are (in reality, only one of them even came close). Most of these runs seem to mirror Gabbard's more in reality, but were still important stepping stones for the likes of the five women running this year. Obviously other women have run for the presidency, but with the exception of Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who of course had served in Congress previously), none were particularly noteworthy. We're going to get to two anomalies below so I won't spoil it by mentioning them now, but other than the below eight women, the reality is that most other female candidacies were treated as curiosities, not even worth time in print. There are exceptions (Carly Fiorina in 2016, Gracie Allen in 1940) where the media picked up on the run, but as you'll see below, even with a position at the table already, women have struggled to get the sort of press and be taken seriously in the same way that the five women running this year (presumably) will be.
(We'll list them chronologically, because counting votes in primaries is always a bit absurd since we have such a jacked up primary system in the United States)
(Also, yes, I'm aware that Geraldine Ferraro & Sarah Palin both were nominees for the vice presidency, and in Ferraro's case, was a member of Congress-this is extremely impressive, and we've discussed both women multiple times before on the blog. But today the focus is on the top of the ticket exclusively).
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| Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) |
Service in Congress: Senate (1949-73), House (1940-49)
Year She Ran for President: 1964
The Story Behind the Woman: Sen. Smith is one of the most impressive women in American politics in part due to her longevity (serving over three decades in Congress is a major accomplishment), and in part because of the number of political barriers she broke down, including becoming the first woman to ever serve in both the House and the Senate, and the second woman to run in her own right for the US Senate (after Gladys Pyle). As a sitting third-term US Senator in 1964, were she a man she would have been an extremely plausible challenger for the Republican nomination. Unfortunately, sexism was alive and well in 1964.
How Close Did She Get?: Unlike a number of the women we'll see below, Smith genuinely stayed through the race, though she was routinely beaten by Barry Goldwater in the primaries, only hitting double digits in Illinois. Smith was mocked in her initial announcement, with members of the press actually laughing at her when she said she was running, but became the first serious female candidate to run, and also the first to have their name put forth in a convention ballot, gaining 27 votes before eventually throwing her support behind Goldwater. Smith's Senate career continued until 1972, when she lost reelection, being accused of being out-of-touch with her constituents after over 30 years in DC.
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| Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) |
Service in Congress: House (1969-83)
Year She Ran for President: 1972
The Story Behind the Woman: Similar to Smith, Chisholm has earned her place in US history many times over. In 1968, she scored an upset victory over James Farmer Jr. to win a seat in Congress, thereby becoming the first black woman to ever serve in Congress. During her tenure in the House, she made lemonade out of lemons (she was assigned to the House Ag committee despite representing Brooklyn) to create the modern-day Food Stamp program (weirdly partnering with Bob Dole of all people to get this accomplished), and would later help with the foundation of the WIC program.
How Close Did She Get?: Chisholm's run has largely been considered a symbolic run in the years since, and was treated as such at the time, much to Chisholm's chagrin. She was, of course, the first black candidate to run for a major party nomination, and the first woman to run for the Democrats, but couldn't really rise above the fold. She did manage decent (though hardly earth-shattering) performances in North Carolina & California, and went to the convention where she placed fourth in the overall ballots (though part of this was a gesture from noted Civil Rights champion Hubert Humphrey, whom after discovering that he would not be able to best George McGovern for the nomination, released all of his black delegates to Chisholm). She would never run for president again, but became a noted endorser of Jesse Jackson's runs for president in 1984 & 1988.
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| Rep. Patsy Mink (D-HI) |
Service in Congress: House (1965-77, 1990-2002)
Year She Ran for President: 1972
The Story Behind the Woman: While Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress, Patsy Mink was actually the first woman of color to be elected to the body, besting Chisholm by four years. In her two separate stints in Congress, her signature contribution was Title IX legislation, which allowed women to have equal access to high school athletics, as well as federal funding for public preschool programs.
How Close Did She Get?: Mink's run in 1972, unlike Chisholm's, almost certainly was intended to be a symbolic one, though not necessarily for her race or gender, but more to show her solidarity with the anti-war movement in Vietnam. Mink ran only in one primary that year (in Oregon), achieving 2% of the vote, and then promptly threw her support behind South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. Mink, however, was not done with her time in presidential circles. After losing a Democratic Primary for the Senate in 1976, she served in the Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of State, before a decade in the Honolulu City Council, and then finally a return to the House after Daniel Akaka ran for the Senate seat that year. Just a few weeks after her death, President George W. Bush renamed the Title IX bill after Mink.
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| Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-CO) with her daughter Jamie |
Service in Congress: House (1973-97)
Year She Ran for President: 1988
The Story Behind the Woman: Schroeder entered the House at the young age of 32, knocking off an incumbent Republican (Mike McKevitt) to get the position. Schroeder's tenure in the House was marked by both history and tangible legislation. She was famous for bringing diapers on the House floor, as well as for her quick wit, once saying about Duke Cunningham after he trashed Bernie Sanders & said something homophobic, "Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman-do we have to call the Gentleman a gentleman if he's not one?" During her time in office, her signature legislative achievement was the Family and Medical Leave Act, as well as being one of the driving forces in making Joe Biden allow Anita Hill to testify in the Clarence Thomas hearings. She's also, full disclosure, one of my personal heroes.
How Close Did She Get?: Schroeder was initially a champion of Gary Hart's campaign for POTUS, but when he dropped out she briefly entered the race to succeed Ronald Reagan. Schroeder dropped out before the primaries even began, but became famous for crying during her press conference, which resulted in her being mocked by the press, and receiving hate mail (primary from women) for decades who said she'd set back the women's movement. To her credit, Schroeder (correctly) pointed out that President Reagan had cried publicly with no backlash, but sexism rarely misses an opportunity to rear its head when women run for public office.
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| Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) |
Service in Congress: Senate (2001-09)
Year She Ran for President: 2008
The Story Behind the Woman: Hillary Clinton is by-far the most famous woman on this list, and arguably the most famous woman in the world (save QEII) so she doesn't really need much of a story here. Obviously she'd served as First Lady of the United States before a race for the Empire State's open Senate seat, a contest that was initially expected to be close (particularly when it was assumed that Clinton would face NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who also ran for president in 2008 as a frontrunner, only to lose the nomination) but wasn't. Unlike Chisholm, Mink, & Schroeder, Clinton didn't really have a signature achievement in the Senate-she was always at the forefront of issues, but her tenures as First Lady and Secretary of State are where most of her substantive public policy contributions came.
How Close Did She Get?: Clinton's run in 2008 was greeted with a sense of inevitability, though she had a number of serious opponents, including five men who had served as her Senate colleagues: Joe Biden, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Evan Bayh, & Barack Obama. Clinton was not prepared for the latter candidate, who caught on with the grassroots in the party, and gleaned what was going to be the cornerstone of her campaign (the support of the African-American community, who had supported her husband's campaign sixteen years prior), a death blow to her campaign. Clinton would of course run eight years later for the nomination, becoming the first woman to win the a major party nomination, though she was not a sitting senator at the time, and would lose the electoral college in a tight race against Donald Trump.
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| Rep. Michele Bachman (R-MN) |
Service in Congress: House (2007-15)
Year She Ran for President: 2012
The Story Behind the Woman: Bachmann is probably recent enough in the public consciousness, particularly after the Kristin Wiig impressions of her on Saturday Night Live, that she also doesn't need the same sort of "story," though DC politics move quickly and she's been gone for four years now so perhaps she's not well-known anymore. She came to the House from the Minnesota State Senate, noted as a strong proponent for a gay marriage ban in the state constitution, an issue that would be a hallmark of her life (in the 1980's, she started a gay conversion therapy camp). Throughout her 8-year tenure, she rarely got much done legislatively, but she became a national figure for her appearances on FOX News, frequently trumpeting the social politics shared by men like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
How Close Did She Get?: Bachmann's presidential campaign is remembered as a bit inconsequential today, considering she ended up getting sixth place in the Iowa caucuses, but that wasn't always the case. She emerged as the surprise victor at the Ames Straw Poll, which resulted in her getting a cover story from Newsweek, which proclaimed her "The Queen of Rage." However, while her bombastic comments and factual inaccuracies weren't a struggle in her highly-conservative district (though she never won by safe margins despite it being a safely Republican district otherwise), they didn't fly with the national press. She claimed, amongst other things, that mental retardation was caused by vaccines and that Democratic administrations caused swine flu outbreaks. While four years later Donald Trump would get away with such a cavalier attitude to the truth, Bachmann could not and quickly came back to the House, nearly losing her seat that year to Democrat Jim Graves (winning by just a percentage point), which caused her to soon retire.
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| Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) |
Service in Congress: Senate (2003-09)
Year She Ran for President: 2000
The Story Behind the Woman: While Dole and the next woman on our list were in fact women running for president and did serve in Congress, they didn't do these things at the same time, and as a result don't make the list (since they weren't doing this "from a position of power"). However, both were impressive in that they accomplished each milestone, and of course being "in a position of power" doesn't necessarily mean you can't take the nomination (Hillary Clinton, as we mentioned above, won the nomination as a former, not current, senator). Dole by 2000 had already had an impressive career in Washington, not only as the high-profile wife of Bob Dole (affording her a plum speaking role at the RNC in 1996), but also as Secretary of Labor under President Bush and Secretary of Transportation under President Reagan. In many ways, it'd be the equivalent of if Elaine Chao were to run for POTUS (as she also held the same positions and was married to a Senate Majority Leader).
How Close Did She Get?: Not very. Dole did run for president, and was actually doing quite well if you looked at national polling numbers (she was in second place to George W. Bush in a Gallup poll) or the earliest indicators of the race (she placed third in the Iowa Straw Poll behind Bush and Steve Forbes), but her fundraising was anemic & she seemed to be getting these numbers based solely on name recognition. Dole was reportedly one of Bush's top choices for VP before he stunned the political world and went with Dick Cheney, before eventually (successfully) running for political office in 2002 for her sole term in the US Senate (she lost as part of the 2008 Obama landslides against Kay Hagan).
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| Sen Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) |
Service in Congress: Senate (1993-99)
Year She Ran for President: 2004
The Story Behind the Woman: Prior to serving in the US Senate, Moseley Braun had been a power-broker in Illinois politics, championing liberal causes in the State House and as Cook County Recorder of Deeds. She ran for the Senate in 1992 against incumbent Sen. Alan Dixon, using his vote to confirm Clarence Thomas as a hammer against him in the primary, gaining enormous support from the African-American community to best Dixon. As a result, she became the first black woman ever elected to the US Senate. Her one-term in the Senate was mired in both controversy and progress. Moseley Braun was investigated for campaign fraud and for her ties to Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, which largely cost her her reelection campaign (though she got a lot closer than I had remembered despite being written off by most heading into election day). However, she was able to create a number of symbolic wins for women and communities of color in the Senate, including allowing women to wear pants on the Senate floor & declining a renewal of the Daughters of the Confederacy's patent in 1993 because it contained the confederate flag (Moseley Braun threatened to filibuster the patent "until this room freezes over," and won over her colleagues, much to Jesse Helms's chagrin). She was also a strong champion of abortion rights and an early defender of gay rights. Post the Senate, she became an ambassador during the Clinton administration.
How Close Did She Get?: She didn't. Moseley Braun was included in the debates (I remember a great exchange with Joe Lieberman where he asked her "how do we try to increase the black vote in 2004?" to which the senator replied "the last election was decided by the black vote-Clarence Thomas's"). However, after she failed to gain traction in the DC primaries, she dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean's campaign. She would run once more for public office, in 2011, as Mayor of Chicago, but would emerge in fourth place.
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