Where Have All the Pussyhats Gone?

Democrats embraced female activism during Trump’s first term. Can they find a new balance the second time around?

Demonstrators participate in the 2020 Women’s March in New York City on January 18, 2020. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

Democrats aren’t sure how to talk about women

In the midst of last week’s government-shutdown fight, as Chuck Schumer weighed caving to Donald Trump, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the Senate minority leader to heed the advice of two fellow party members and buck up.

“Democratic senators should listen to the women,” Pelosi said, referencing Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Patty Murray, the party’s lead appropriators. “We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women.”

Eight years ago, such a paean to women leaders would have elicited rounds of applause and online euphoria from fellow Democrats, many of whom were wearing pink pussyhats and freebasing the female activism that had energized the party’s response to Trump. Today, things are different. And even among some of those same Democrats who eagerly showed up for the Woman’s March and plastered “This Pussy Grabs Back” bumper stickers on their cars, Pelosi’s recent statement felt slightly off key.

“It’s too siloed for today’s politics, and I think younger people see it kind of like second-wave feminism,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told The Bulwark.

Since Trump’s victory in November, Democrats have been unsure of how to talk about gender and how much to rely on it to activate their base. Much of this ambivalence is owed to conventional wisdom that the party is suffering among male voters and can’t afford to alienate them any further.

Democratic operatives who spoke with The Bulwark said there has been post-election reflection on the question of whether the party overtorqued itself by elevating topics that are seen as “women’s issues.” They relayed focus-group data that appeared to show a growing perception that the #MeToo movement had gone too far and the knee-jerk “believe women” mantra wasn’t always helpful. Privately, strategists have urged party leaders to focus on talking about how issues relate to men and women equally and speak to broader challenges rather than dividing them on gender lines.

“The younger elected officials, like an AOC, don’t have as hard of a time with this. They know how to talk about issues in a way that can relate to men and women. But it’s a lot harder for older politicians who came up in a different era and whose sensibilities are different,” one Democratic strategist told The Bulwark.

This approach presents an incredibly stark contrast with how the party operated during the first Trump presidency. Following Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Democrats rallied around the notion that women were being marginalized and placed under a unique threat. The Women’s March was the first show of oppositional force against Trump. Thousands of woman-led activist groups popped up around the country and fueled political donations with “rage giving” and new donor networks that specifically supported female candidates. It was cool, not corny, to slam the patriarchy. And 2018 was embraced as the “year of the woman,” thanks to record gains made in Congress.

Kamala Harris’s defeat engendered (so to speak) a different reaction. Democrats believe that they’re not winning women voters by the margins they need to, but their strategic priority has been trying to make up ground with male voters. Still, strategists are scratching their heads over what remedies are needed. Harris hardly ever emphasized gender on the campaign trail, especially compared to Clinton’s 2016 campaign. They’ve wondered how they might balance the girlbossy “Yass Queen” politicking that appealed to some base voters while also making inroads with younger men—or if a balance is achievable at all.

“In some ways, Hillary was one approach, Harris was another approach—and we need a third approach,” Lake said. “No matter what you do, whether you emphasize it or not, the emphasis is going to be on gender. They’re going to run on you on DEI, being the mommy party, not being tough enough. There’s very little point in avoiding it.”

Aside from Pelosi’s plea to Schumer, gender has not often been at the forefront of the conversation about how Democrats should push back on Trump. But it’s not absent entirely.

Although millions of women are not flooding the streets in protest of Trump, organizers say that many are still reaching out to run for office. Amanda Litman, cofounder of Run for Something, told The Bulwark that their organization has seen a significant increase in people interested in running for office compared to this same point in 2017, and the majority of the potential candidates are women. Other groups, like Emerge, which recruits and trains women to run for office, said they expect to see similar levels of interest from first-time female candidates.

But the messaging driving those campaigns won’t look the same as it did six years ago.

“Under his first term, we really knew that women’s rights were going to be under attack, especially with Roe v. Wade. So that is why it was extremely gendered,” said A’shanti F. Gholar, president of Emerge. “What is different this time is that it is more economy-focused.”

Gholar said that in her group’s conversations with candidates, there is a focus on messaging around “community” and explaining how issues like equal pay translate to greater financial security for the entire family. “We don’t have to have this binary,” she said.

That shift in messaging is a clear response to 2024. In focus groups after the election with voters who supported Joe Biden and then Trump, both men and women said they felt like Harris talked too much about abortion and Planned Parenthood and not enough about lowering the cost of food. In a focus group organized by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, one participant said he felt like the message from Democrats was that “every man is a misogynist” if you didn’t support Harris.

“When you’re talking to everyday people and regular voters, what they want to know is, ‘What’s your plan to solve the problem?’” said Laphonza Butler, who served as a United States senator from California from 2023 to 2024 and is a close confidante of Harris. “The American people can see what gender she is. And does it matter whether it’s a white woman or a black woman or an Asian woman?”

The 2025 off-year elections will be an early test case for how Democratic women running for office emphasize gender, if they emphasize it at all. Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger is running to be Virginia’s next governor, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill is vying for the New Jersey governorship. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced she will run for governor in 2026.

Democratic operatives say they are reassured by the number of women who are running for office. But there’s still a lot of consternation about what lessons voters are going to take from Harris’s loss. No one wants to admit publicly that the country might not yet be ready to elect a woman—but in private, doubts remain. Some operatives have theorized that the only way a woman will be elected president is if both parties nominate a woman for the office—as was the case in Mexico’s last presidential election. And even then, they believe the first woman to be elected will likely be a Republican.

Asked at a recent Harvard Institute of Politics event whether Harris’s loss set back the cause of getting women elected, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) answered plainly: “Yes.”

“I think there’s so many women who watched that and are just so furious about what she had to endure,” she said. “I think particularly for black women, this was really, really, really painful because this country has been saved so many times by black women. . . . How can we still be in a country where a qualified woman—and certainly a qualified woman of color—can’t win?”

🫏 Donkey Business:

— Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to draw truly impressive crowd sizes at his “stop oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sanders said 34,000 people attended the Friday rally in Denver, the largest crowd that he has ever drawn. Semafor’s Dave Weigel reported that many of the attendees at the Colorado event weren’t die-hard Bernie fans; they hadn’t supported him in his presidential bids and weren’t on Sanders’s massive supporters list. What that says about the energy among Democratic voters remains to be seen, but it’s a notable data point.

— If it feels like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been all over the place recently, that’s because he has been. The former vice presidential candidate has appeared on podcasts, given interviews about what went wrong in 2024, and he even hit the road with a series of town halls in Republican-controlled congressional districts. But as Democrats try to chart a path forward from the 2024 election, not everyone in the party is pleased to see Walz getting out there. CNN reports that some Democratic operatives think Walz is “bringing a kind of politics that didn’t work and is already of the past to parts of the country where Democrats are only going to win by creating distance.”

My open tabs:

— Joe Biden wants back in the game, apparently.

— The left isn’t loving Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance.

— Democrats continue to feel the heat at home.