Michelle Obama Is Wrong: Women Can Win.

On Wednesday, Nov. 5, Michelle Obama took to a stage in Brooklyn for a conversation with actor Tracee Ellis Ross about fashion and politics. At one point during the evening, Ross asked Obama about the prospects of a woman becoming president. “Well, as we saw in this past election, sadly, we ain’t ready,” Obama replied. “That’s why I’m like, don’t even look at me about running, ’cause you all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not. So don’t waste my time.”

It had been just 24 hours since election results rolled in from New Jersey, where a woman was elected governor by 14 percentage points, dramatically outperforming preelection polls; from Virginia, where women were elected both governor and lieutenant governor; from Detroit, Albany and Syracuse, which all elected their first Black women mayors; and from Georgia, where a woman claimed a seat on a powerful state board — a red-to-blue flip in a purple state that made her the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Georgia’s history.

Maybe Obama hadn’t had time to fully digest these results; maybe, as my friend and Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod said, it’s simply the case that “she’s right until she’s not!” Whatever the reason, Obama was repeating an all-too-common view about the viability of women candidates. “I do think,” former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle told Politico last year, “that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president.” Mikie Sherrill, now-governor-elect of New Jersey, told NBC during the campaign that, among “insiders,” there was doubt about whether women could win, and she relayed that when she first ran for the House in 2018, a Democratic official told her that “people didn’t think a woman could win in New Jersey.” As someone who works to advance women in politics, I have been told repeatedly by Democratic donors in the past year that when the stakes are high, nominating women is just too risky. One major donor told me after Kamala Harris’ loss that she would never again write a check to a woman candidate for president. “It’s just throwing money away,” she said.

If ever there was a time to retire this myth, it is now. This month’s election results show not only that women are electable, they actually may be what voters prefer in this fraught moment. And by insisting otherwise, Michelle Obama and others are perpetuating a line of faulty reasoning that can take on a self-fulfilling — and highly damaging — life of its own.

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In truth, concerns about women’s electability have been suspect for some time. Multiple studies that have tracked U.S. campaigns in recent years have demonstrated that women perform on par with — or sometimes outperform — male candidates. One study, from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, found that in 2018, nonincumbent women won congressional elections at higher rates than nonincumbent men. Even while Harris lost the presidency in 2024, Democratic women claimed Senate seats in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada — all states that Trump won.

Obviously, the electability elephant in the room remains the presidency. Women have yet to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling (as Hillary Clinton put it) in the U.S., even as 65 other nations have had women leaders since 1960. There are many reasons for this, but one is that there has hardly been a large pool of women in the pipeline to the highest office until now. Ali Vitali — author of the book “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet” and host of “Way Too Early” on MS NOW — recently texted me that she is optimistic about the prospects for a female president largely “because the more women who vie for executive positions — mayors, governors, and yes, ultimately the presidency — the more chances voters have to vote for them” and “to exercise their imaginative power of seeing a woman as the singular leadership figure in whatever role they’re running for.” Moreover, she noted, “Dozens of men have lost their bids for president, and I never run into strategists or voters who question if the whole gender should just pack it in for a while.” Indeed.

Voters themselves say they want more women to run for office. When American University recently conducted a poll on women in politics, the headline in Politico foregrounded the negative: “Americans remain wary of electing a female president, new poll reveals.” Yet that was far from the whole story. Forty percent of respondents said they personally knew someone who wouldn’t vote for a woman president. So, yes, everyone knows a lot of people, and a handful of those people may not want to vote for women. But it seems more significant that, in the same poll, an overwhelming majority (82%) said they, themselves, would be willing to vote for a woman. In addition, 83% said it was very or somewhat important to elect more women, two-thirds of men under 50 said “women in office are better at solving national problems,” and more voters said they trust “information and decisions” from women in elected office than from men in elected office.

The recent results from New Jersey appear to underscore the good news in this poll. In 2021, the current (male) governor beat Republican Jack Ciattarelli (the same opponent Sherrill faced) by just 3 percentage points; in 2024, Harris carried the state by 6 percentage points; but this month, Sherrill triumphed by a stunning 14 percentage points. Sherrill also did well among groups of voters that many Democrats feared were drifting away after 2024: She claimed 49% of men (compared to 43% nationally for Harris in 2024), 68% of Latino voters (compared to 51% nationally for Harris) and 82% of Asian voters (compared to 55% nationally for Harris). Perhaps most interestingly, she convincingly won the much-talked-about young male vote, a group that narrowly went for Trump at the national level in 2024.

In a climate where voters are profoundly frustrated by the status quo and worried about the direction of the country, they may very well gravitate toward women candidates precisely because they are different. Trump’s world is dominated by white men, and Kimberly Peeler-Allen — practitioner in residence at the Center for American Women and Politics and co-founder of Higher Heights, a non-profit that supports Black women leaders — argues that voters want the farthest thing from it. “As we saw in 2017 and 2018,” she told me by email, “when the electorate is dissatisfied with the White House, they turn to women of color.”

Heading into 2026, women may continue to benefit from this situation. “As women realize our difference is our strength, we become not only electable but the ones ready and able to save our democracy,” Juliana Stratton, Illinois’ current lieutenant governor and a U.S. Senate candidate, told me. Beth Davidson, who is running to unseat Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York in a closely watched election, also told me she views her gender as a plus. “My opponent is constantly trying to prove that he’s a macho man,” she said. “Voters see through it. That’s part of why I think being a woman is an advantage in this environment because people know we’re willing to do more than talk — we roll up our sleeves and get shit done.”

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The self-fulfilling dynamic of the electability lie may be its most pernicious aspect. A study published in 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that voters “withhold support for women candidates because they perceive practical barriers to women successfully attaining political leadership positions.” In other words, if primary voters think women can’t win a general election, then they won’t vote for a woman in the primary.

The electability myth can also dissuade potential candidates from running in the first place. For the last 11 years, my organization All In Together has worked across America to inspire women to participate in the political process. We work to build a pipeline of women who are willing to step up to lead in their communities, and of course our hope is that many will run for office at the local, state or even national level. We introduce them to local leaders, support their civic advocacy and teach the basics of our political system. Sadly, women everywhere still tell me the odds are too great and the barriers too high to consider running for office. When I was elected the only woman councilperson in my small town of Harrison, New York, in 2019, many of my female neighbors thought it was a fluke and that it was a waste of time for other women to run. Fortunately, not everyone was dissuaded. Not long after my election, two courageous women stepped up to run for open seats on the board; both won and were recently reelected to a second term.

The solutions, then, are obvious: First, stop repeating what is untrue so women are not discouraged from running. Second, support more women running so more women win, and the naysaying loses its credibility. My organization is certainly not alone in our efforts to tackle this problem. We are part of a broad (albeit grossly underfunded) ecosystem of groups that have toiled for years to lower barriers and support women on both sides of the aisle — groups like Vote Mama, which has managed to change Federal Election Commission rules and pass laws in dozens of states allowing campaign funds to pay for childcare; Vote Run Lead, Ignite, Emerge and nonpartisan women’s campaign schools at Yale and the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Texas that help with training; and Emily’s List, Higher Heights, Winning For Women and others that fund women candidates, both Democrats and Republicans.

So, if you are a voter looking for new leaders who can move American politics forward, consider supporting one of the many stellar women lining up to run in local, state and congressional races across America in 2026 and beyond. They have proven they can win, and as more of them do, it will become a matter of when, not if, a woman will be elected president. In the meantime, we can celebrate that something feels different in the political air since Nov. 4 of this year. For those of us who work on women’s political participation, it feels like hope.

Lauren Leader is the founder and CEO of All In Together, a nonpartisan women’s civic education and mobilization organization.