Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Sarah Palin Have One Thing in Common

In the summer of 2016, I was living in Washington, DC, and working at The Atlantic, both places that were consumed with the presidential election later that year. The conventional wisdom—backed up by polling, news coverage, and rationality—was that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump. At a work happy hour one evening, I remember talking with one of my then bosses about what might actually change under a Clinton administration. Pragmatically, the answer was: nothing much. Emotionally, though, the stakes felt astronomical. I can remember arguing that Clinton’s inauguration would upend the way America thought about women—that seeing a woman elevated to the most powerful job in the world would overwrite decades of conditioning about who was allowed to have authority and what might be possible. The shifts would be seismic, I argued, even if they weren’t immediately obvious. This was a moment when progress still felt inevitable.