‘It’s our time’: As Harris accepts the nomination, many women say a female president is long overdue

“Electric.” “Joyful.”

The kinetic energy powering Kamala Harris ’ whirlwind presidential campaign carries the hopeful aspirations of history and the almost quaint idea of electing the first woman to the White House. But inside it, too, is the urgent and determined refusal of many Democratic female voters to accept the alternative — again.

“Serious.” “Unapologetic.”

Listen to the women cheering “We’re not going back!” at the Harris campaign rallies. See them singing along during the dance party roll call at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Understand the mothers and daughters and sorority sisters and, yes, the men, brothers and boys who have watched and waited and winced as the country tried eight years ago to break the glass ceiling — and failed.

“Overdue.”

This time, this year, facing Donald Trump again, a certain and influential swath of the electorate is not messing around. “It’s our time,” said Denise Delegol, 60, a retired postal worker from West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

Harris campaign reignites Democratic party’s enthusiasm

The promise of a Harris presidency is shaking a sizable segment of the nation out of a political funk, reviving the idea of a milestone election and an alternative to repeating the Trump era. It’s putting the country on the cusp of what Michelle Obama, in her convention speech to Democrats, called a “brighter day.”

Once President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and embraced his vice president at the top of the ticket, some found hope where before they had felt mostly dread.

“Overnight it went from doom-scrolling to hope-scrolling,” said Lisa Hansen of Wisconsin, who led an early Trump resistance group in 2017 as her first foray into political activism.

Lori Goldman of Michigan, who founded Fems for Dems to elect Hillary Clinton two presidents ago, said, “I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.” She’s 65.

And Shannon Nash, an attorney from California and, like Harris, a fellow member of the historic Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., said from the convention hall Thursday night, “The joy is coming back to politics.”

Women have been here before, in 2016, when they donned matching pantsuits, poured champagne and settled in on election night, some with friends and daughters by their side, expecting Clinton to win the White House only to be shaken by Trump’s victory.

As one woman said at the time, she threw up the next morning.

Republican women eye history, too

To be sure, some voters had a different first female president in mind. Nikki Haley lifted Republican hopes during the GOP primary, but her moment faded after rival Trump branded his former ambassador to the United Nations “birdbrain.”

Lisa Watts, a retired business owner from Hickory, North Carolina, who was attending her fifth Trump rally this week, had little interest in Harris. “I don’t think that her record proves that she is ready to run this country,” Watts said.

The thousands of women who pack Trump rallies, and tens of millions more who are expected to cast ballots for him in November, are participating on the other side of the potential history-making.

The former president, convicted in a hush-money case and still facing a pending federal indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, would become the first felon to win the White House.

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump rejected as “insulting” the idea that Americans should vote for a woman for president because it would make history.

“If you ever give me a job because … of the fact that I’m a woman and not based on any merit or qualification, guess what? I’m turning that job down all day long,” the former president’s daughter-in-law said on her podcast in July.

Abortion, immigration and the war in Gaza

For those voting for Harris, this election feels more joyful, but also more necessary and urgent.

“We need to do this, be serious about it this time,” said Monique LaFonta, a mother of two twin girls, after attending a Harris rally in Milwaukee.

Trump’s creation of a conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned a woman’s right to abortion access produced outrage among many women who powered that year’s midterm election — and are a potentially influential force in this one.

“We are living in just such a wildly different situation,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice women. She said Harris is “unapologetic” when it comes to reproductive rights.

Harris herself carries this potentially history-making moment not as a campaign feature but a matter-of-fact representation of who she is and has always been, much the way Barack Obama often left his race merely implied to voters. Rather than reminding voters that the nation’s 47th president could become the first in its more than two-century history to not be a man, Harris is running instead on what she would do in the job and how she would do it.

In her speech Thursday night accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Harris acknowledged that she’s “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” but she did not specifically mention the historic nature of her candidacy.

Many receive her style as a brand of American optimism rooted in the generations who came before her, a Black and South Asian woman, the daughter of immigrants — a Jamaican father and Indian mother — who dared to dream in this country. She is blaring Beyonce’s “Freedom” as her campaign theme song along the way.

And yet among demonstrators calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war outside the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, pharmacist Fedaa Ballouta said that while having the first female president would mean a lot, she expects more. “I wish that that woman was pro-life when it matters regarding Palestinians.”

Clinton’s defeat paved the way for this moment

So much has changed in the American political landscape since Trump entered that scene almost a decade ago with his braggadocio and electoral momentum.

“Such a nasty woman,” he called his 2016 Democratic rival Clinton, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state. “Horseface,” he labeled a Republican primary rival, a woman. “Fat pig,” he bullied a famous female comedian. He once bragged that as a celebrity he could “grab” women by their private parts — and get away with it.

More than 1 million people in the United States and around the world filled city streets in protest the day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Many wore pink “pussy” hats. “The Resistance,” they called it.

Trump himself has stayed the course, deriding Harris as “Laffin’ Kamala,” mocking her laugh or mispronouncing her name, which means “lotus flower” in Sanskrit.

In many ways, Clinton’s defeat eight years ago set the stage for this moment. It was a crushing setback that dashed women’s hopes for bringing the U.S. into alignment with leading democracies around the world that have had a female in charge.

Angie Gialloreto of Pittsburgh was disappointed then. But the 95-year-old, attending her 13th presidential convention, is still at it, ready and waiting for the country to try again. “It’s time,” she said.

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Associated Press writers Isabella Volmert in Michigan, Mike Householder and Farnoush Amiri in Chicago, Michelle Price in North Carolina, Ali Swenson and Aaron Morrison in New York, video journalists Martha Irvine, Serkan Gurbuz and Teresa Crawford in Chicago and photojournalist Jacquelyn Martin in Milwaukee and Chicago contributed to this report.