Are Americans ready for a woman to be president? Poll finds a shift from decade ago

Fewer Americans now believe the country is ready for a woman to be president than did one decade ago, new polling reveals, potentially spelling trouble for Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the latest YouGov poll, 57% of respondents said they think America is ready to elect a woman to the White House, while 23% said the country is not ready and 20% were not sure.

In contrast, similar polls from 2014 and 2015 found larger shares of Americans believed the U.S. was prepared for a woman to occupy the Oval Office.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said they thought the country was ready for a female president in a March 2014 YouGov poll.

Roughly an equal share, 67%, said the same in a March 2015 YouGov poll — released just one month before Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

Conducted between Oct. 19 and 22, the latest poll sampled 1,615 U.S. adults.

Additional findings

The latest poll also found significant differences among Republicans and Democrats when it came to their thoughts on a woman leading the country.

The vast majority of Democrats, 81%, said they believed the U.S. was ready for a woman to be elected president, while a far smaller share of Republicans, 34%, said the same.

Independents were somewhere in the middle — with 54% saying they believed America was prepared to elect a woman to the highest office in the land.

When the results were broken down by gender and race, there were fewer differences.

For example, an almost identical share of women and men — 57% and 56% — said they believed the country was ready for a woman to be president.

Similarly, 56% of white respondents, 60% of Hispanic respondents and 65% of Black respondents said the same.

The poll also asked respondents whether they personally hoped the U.S. would elect a female president in their lifetime.

A slight majority, 56%, said yes, while 22% said no and 22% said they were not sure.

Here, there was an even larger partisan gap — with 90% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans saying yes. Just over half of independents, 51%, said yes as well.

There was also a bigger gender and racial gap on this question.

Sixty-one percent of women said they hoped to see a woman elected president at some point in their life, while 51% of men said the same.

Similarly, half of white respondents said they hoped to see a woman in the Oval Office in their lifetime, while 64% of Hispanic respondents and 79% of Black respondents said the same.

The poll comes less than two weeks before Election Day, when Americans will have the opportunity to elect the country’s first female president in Harris.

This story was originally published October 23, 2024 at 1:49 PM with the headline "Are Americans ready for a woman to be president? Poll finds a shift from decade ago."