The latest Boom speaker stays mainly the same, with one key upgrade.

Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive. As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission. After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years. Read full article

Back in 2020, Sarah Cooper’s “How to Medical” lip-sync of Donald Trump’s proposed Covid-19 cures went viral on social media. TikTok’s latest trend gives that schtick a new spin.

Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former President Donald Trump has done this week: Throughout these events, Trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens. Yet the two Trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness. For his biggest supporters, the schtick helps generate a sense of joy in transgression. For non-MAGA Republicans, it helps them feel comfortable ignoring what makes Trump extraordinary in favor of traditional grubby partisanship. For many of Trump’s opponents, it makes him seem like something we don’t have to worry about all the time — even when we really do. His absurdity works to make a horrifying reality our reality, something assimilable into the mental frames that we use to get through the day. I don’t think Trump does this by design. He’s not an evil genius, planning out moves 10 steps in advance. This is just who he is as a person; what you see on stage is what you get. But that persona arose from a gut-level understanding of human behavior, one that has allowed Trump to build extraordinary political and business careers on a foundation of lying to everyone around him and pushing the boundaries of “normal” to the breaking point. Without his buffoonery, none of this works — you get unpopular figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. JD Vance, who have all of Trump’s cruelty but none of his charm. Put differently: the dancing is a kind of alchemy that takes his terrifying ideas, like deploying the military against “the enemy within,” and turns them into just another day in American politics. In late 2016, the Atlantic published a campaign trail dispatch by Salena Zito, a conservative reporter, exploring Trump’s appeal to his voters. The piece was forgettable save one line, a description of Trump’s relationship to his fans that has been quoted endlessly for the past eight years: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” In context, Zito was talking about Trump lying about unemployment among young Black men. At the time, he claimed that the unemployment rate was about three times what it actually was — a figure he arrived at in part by counting full-time students as “unemployed.” Zito acknowledged that this is false in a literal sense, but believes the press is wrong to dismiss him over it. She believed Trump’s fans understand the inflated numbers to be emblematic of some larger truth, caring less about facticity than the general picture he paints of a broken America. In the years since, “seriously not literally” has become a punchline among political journalists. Time after time, Trump and his fans have proven that they take his outlandish pronouncements literally. When he said the 2020 election was stolen and demanded Vice President Mike Pence unlawfully attempt to overturn it, he meant it — and his most hardcore supporters staged a riot to try to turn his vision into reality. If there’s a group of Trump supporters whom Zito’s phrase actually describes, it’s not the superfans, but the squishes. Republicans who blanched at January 6, but loved the tax cuts and court appointments that preceded it, are among the most likely to dismiss the idea that Trump should be taken at his word. For these Republicans, his authoritarianism pronouncements are just part of the Trump show — a kind of brand-burnishing performance on par with silly pronouncements like “hydrogen is the new car.” With his most extraordinary ideas safely slotted into the clown box, they can return to treating him seriously as a “normal” Republican candidate for president: assessing his policies against Harris’s and naturally finding hers wanting. The bitter dilemma of choosing between a Democrat and democracy can be wished away. As infuriating as this attitude is, it does have a little bit of grounding in truth. The truth is that all of us, to one degree or another, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” We do it because actually confronting what a second Trump presidency would mean is tough even for his most ardent critics to wrap their heads around. At various points during the campaign, Trump and his team have suggested putting millions of detained immigrants in camps, replacing the civil service with Trump cronies, deploying the military to repress dissenters, setting up special prosecutors to investigate Democrats, imposing 1,000 percent across-the-board tariffs, putting the Federal Reserve under political control, withdrawing from NATO, and unconstitutionally running for a third term in office. If we took all of that literally, really integrated the reality of what these steps would mean into our daily behavior, it would be hard to live life normally. The specter of out-and-out authoritarianism, a crashing economy, and an international system shorn of the alliances that keep the global peace sounds apocalyptic. Actually trying to envision the enormity of this world is psychologically taxing; trying to live as if this were indeed an imminent possibility invariably leads to a life monomaniacally devoted to trying to stop it. For most people, that’s neither desirable nor possible. And Trump’s fog of distortion creates a mental space where one can reasonably tell oneself it’s not necessary. He lies and exaggerates so much that it’s hard to tell which of his policy ideas demand being taken literally. You can make educated guesses — it’s achingly clear he’ll try to fight the 2024 election result if he loses — but that’s really the best any of us can do. Trump demands to be taken literally, but taking everything he does seriously is both psychologically difficult and analytically mistaken. So it makes sense that we all do at least a little bit of “seriously, but not literally”: it helps manage the fear and uncertainty inherent to a second Trump presidency. The buffoonery helps with that.  Laughing at Trump makes it easier to see him as something other than the boogeyman. I mean, look at him! He’s swaying on stage to “Ave Maria,” babbling about Pavarotti, making Kristi Noem sweat. Who couldn’t appreciate that?  We laugh not only because he’s funny (which he objectively is), but because then we don’t have to confront the reality of what he truly represents — at least, for a minute. The problem, though, is that Trump is a fundamentally serious thing. He’s not just doing a traveling stand-up show; he’s running for president of the United States. He wants to be in charge of the most powerful nation in human history, for his fingers to be on a nuclear button that could annihilate the planet.  It would be bad enough if someone who wanted this kind of power were just a clown. That he’s a clown with a proven track record of doing insanely dangerous things makes the laughter feel a bit hollow. Former President Barack Obama — who I’m convinced understands Trump better than almost anyone — recently gave a speech that distilled the problem down to its core. After describing some of Trump’s recent lies about hurricanes, Obama asked, “When did that become okay?” He expands: If your coworkers acted like that, they wouldn’t be your coworkers very long. If you’re in business and somebody you’re doing business with just outright lies and manipulates you, you stop doing business with them. Even if you had a family member who acted like that, you might still love them, but you’d tell them you got a problem and you wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. And yet, when Donald Trump lies, cheats, or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, when he calls POWs “losers” or fellow citizens “vermin,” people make excuses for it.  And that’s just it. This shouldn’t be okay, but enough people have accepted it that it is by default okay. The buffoonery helps us cope with the normalizing of the abnormal, the fact that the old rules for politics that kept things safe are being blown up at a faster and faster rate. When the prospect of a second Trump presidency feels too real, there’s always the comfort of laughing at him.

From a booger buster to a food masher, these gifts make this amazing (and difficult!) job just a little easier.

The deadly and destructive hurricanes this year have torn through enormous swaths of the country and reached places where people have never experienced such disasters in their lives. Beryl, Debbie, Francine, Helene, and Milton all made landfall in the continental United States in a season that’s shaping up to be well above average and may set all-time records for hurricane activity. The storms have stunned and alarmed experts who have been tracking these cyclones for decades. And there’s still more than a month to go in the season.  • How climate change is contributing to increasing hurricane risk. • What climate change cannot be blamed for. • The other ways in which human activity is contributing to more severe hurricanes. Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.  In a warming world, it’s reasonable to ask how climate change is affecting the storms we’ve seen: How much of the damage can we trace back to our ravenous appetite for fossil fuels? And how much worse are storms like these going to get?  There are strengthening links between climate change and the most deadly aspects of hurricanes, but climate change isn’t the only way humanity is enhancing the devastation of these disasters.  Some types of extreme weather have a robust connection to climate change. As average temperatures rise, heat waves get hotter, for example. But severe weather events like hurricanes are more complicated, arising from local, regional, and global ingredients, making humanity’s specific role harder to discern.  One way to model a hurricane is as a heat engine, a device that harnesses a temperature gradient to do work. Your car likely has a heat engine that uses gasoline to heat air inside a cylinder that presses on a piston to turn your wheels. Hurricanes are heat engines that use hot water to move air.  When warm water evaporates from the surface of the ocean, it cools down the surrounding water, similar to how evaporating sweat cools your skin. As low atmospheric pressure settles over an area of hot ocean water, convection elevates that evaporating water up to high, chilly altitudes, where it then condenses and warms the air around it, forming a convective storm. The warm air surrounded by cooler air creates a temperature gradient that generates wind. If it’s large enough, the Earth’s rotation induces a spin into the storm.  The stronger the contrast between the hot and cool portions of the storm, the more intense the cyclone.  Higher temperatures across the planet from the rising concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere mean oceans can accumulate more heat, and warmer air can hold onto more moisture, encouraging more evaporation.  “The more greenhouse gas, the more potential there is for stronger winds and hurricanes,” said Kerry Emanuel, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most prolific researchers studying the links between climate change and hurricanes. “For every degree centigrade that you raise the ocean temperature, the wind speed in the hurricane goes up between 5 and 7 percent.”  The other way that climate change can influence hurricanes is through water. While we rank hurricanes by their wind speed, the flooding that they leave in their wake is what tends to cause the most fatalities and property damage.  Warming across the planet is causing ice on land to melt, increasing the quantity of water in the oceans. The water is also expanding as it heats up. These two phenomena cause sea level rise. So when a hurricane makes landfall, particularly with high winds, it can push water further inland and cause storm surges to reach greater heights. And again, warmer air can hold onto more moisture. For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) increase in air temperature, air can retain 7 percent more water. That means when a major storm occurs, it can dish out more rain and cause greater flooding.  So climate change can increase the destructive potential of hurricanes. But having all the raw materials present needed to build a dangerous hurricane doesn’t mean that one will be assembled. Compared to weather events like thunderstorms and heat waves, hurricanes are relatively rare; there are only a couple dozen tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean in a given year and a smaller subset of them ever reach hurricane strength.  Hurricanes demand a precise sequence of actions to form, and there’s a lot that can disrupt this choreography, such as wind shear, atmospheric stability, or dust from the Sahara Desert.  And scientists still aren’t clear what governs the total number of cyclones across Earth. Even in 2024, when there was ample high-octane fuel for hurricanes all season in the Atlantic, there was a lull in cyclone activity before gargantuan storms like Helene and Milton erupted.   “Conditions have to be kind of perfect for that to happen,” Emanuel said. “But they do become perfect once in a while.” The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.  “There’s never been a consensus among the scientific community who actually studies hurricanes about the overall frequency of hurricanes when it comes to climate change,” Emanuel said.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international team of climate scientists convened by the United Nations, put out their latest comprehensive assessment of the body of climate science last year. It was the sixth iteration of the report, but for the first time, authors included a chapter on weather extremes. When it comes to tropical cyclones like hurricanes, they found that there wasn’t an increase in the overall number of these storms, particularly when looking at the ones that made landfall in the United States.  “A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the USA since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events,” according to the IPCC report.  Hurricanes are relatively infrequent weather events, and their numbers naturally vary year to year and decade to decade, making it harder to suss out a specific trend due to climate change. There has been an increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic since the 1980s, with more cyclones and an increase in stronger hurricanes. However, it’s not clear how much of this is due to a normal pattern of high and low activity versus human-caused warming.  The IPCC authors also note that there isn’t great data on hurricanes going back over the whole time humans have been burning fossil fuels since the mid-18th century. “This should not be interpreted as implying that no physical (real) trends exist, but rather as indicating that either the quality or the temporal length of the data is not adequate to provide robust trend detection statements, particularly in the presence of multi-decadal variability,” they wrote. Which is to say, scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.  That said, the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.  Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.  Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.  One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.  Emanuel, however, is hesitant to read too much into the precision of these direct attribution studies for individual storms, particularly when it comes to rainfall. For one thing, rain is much harder to measure than temperature. The amount of rainfall can vary a lot over a short distance and rain gauges aren’t spread out evenly, so ground-based measurements are patchy. Meanwhile, radar is a coarse measure of precipitation.  “The theory is crystal clear, and if you treat this as a problem of risk, undoubtedly these storms have produced more rain than they would have if the atmosphere were cooler. It’s a slam dunk,” Emanuel said. “To be able to say in a particular storm, ‘So much of the rain was caused by climate change,’ I think that’s going out on a limb.” However, as average temperatures continue to rise, many of these hurricane trait knobs will continue to turn to higher levels and more robust signs of humanity’s role will likely emerge. There’s an upper limit to how strong a hurricane can get, but the Earth hasn’t hit that ceiling yet. “The potential intensity can still go up,” Emanuel said. “We might see records being broken 50 years from now, we might have 220-mile-per-hour hurricanes.”  If you expand the question of “How does climate change affect hurricanes?” to “How do people affect hurricanes?” there are other variables to consider as well.  One factor is aerosols, tiny particles suspended in the air. These aerosols can come from natural sources like dust, but they can also rise out of smokestacks and tailpipes attached to generators and engines burning fuels like coal and diesel. In the atmosphere, their presence can suppress hurricane formation. They can also block out enough sunlight to cause a measurable drop in the temperature below. Higher concentrations of aerosols can thus lead to fewer hurricanes.  As governments across North America and Europe implemented new air pollution regulations over the past 40 years, the amount of aerosols over the Atlantic Ocean declined. That helped drive the rise in tropical cyclones in the Atlantic over this time period, according to a 2022 study in the journal Science. More recently, the International Maritime Organization imposed new pollution regulations on ships in 2020 that led to a 10 percent drop in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution around the world. That may have helped push the Atlantic Ocean to record high temperatures.  The other major variable is that a growing number of people and properties are now in the paths of these storms, even far away from coastlines. That means when a hurricane makes landfall, it threatens to kill more people and destroy more homes. The rising exposure to extreme weather coupled with inflation means that extreme weather events in general are extracting a far higher price in lives and livelihoods.  Conversely, it shows there are ways to reduce the harm from hurricanes, even as they spool up faster, pour out more rain, and linger longer. It demands careful planning and sound policies, as well as some difficult decisions about where people can live. And it remains prudent to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, as fast as possible. 

Google is planning to ban advertisers from running ads related to the US presidential election after polls close on November 5th. Axios reports that this is the second time Google has decided to ban election ads once polls close, after first implementing the policy during the 2020 election. Google says it’s reenacting the policy again this year “out of an abundance of caution and to limit the potential for confusion, given the likelihood that votes will continue to be counted after Election Day.” During the last presidential election in 2020, it took days for President Biden’s win to be confirmed after an influx of postal voting during the pandemic. Google’s policy applies to any US election ads or ads that refer to the US elections that...

It really works!

Eight years ago, when Hillary Clinton seemed poised to be elected the first female president of the United States, it sometimes seemed as though the candidate and the media couldn’t talk about it enough.  “I think it would be a great moment for our country,” Clinton told 60 Minutes about the possibility of becoming the first woman in the Oval Office. “Every little boy and every little girl should be given the chance to go as far as his or her hard work and talent might take them.” On the trail, she underscored the possibility that she would end America’s long tradition of only electing men for president. “Clearly, I’m not asking people to vote for me simply because I’m a woman. I’m asking people to vote for me on the merits,” Clinton said at one event in 2015. “I think one of the merits is I am a woman, and I can bring those views and perspectives to the White House.” Clinton leaned into the symbolism and meaning of her history-making run. She wore white — the color of the suffragist movement, which won the women’s right to vote in 1920 — as she accepted the Democratic nomination. She made a point of centering policy questions that had long been sidelined as women’s issues. And she framed her candidacy as the culmination of a generational project of women fighting for their political rights. This year, the United States is once again on the verge of potentially making history with a woman at the top of the ticket, facing off against the same candidate from 2016. The observation that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” feels prescient because the tidy comparisons end there.  This time, what was once a major election theme — whether America was ready to elect a woman as president, and what it would mean if it did — is mostly absent from the national conversation.  The changes have much to do with the different candidates and a very different set of circumstances this year. They also point to just how much the culture of politics in the US has transformed since 2016.  As the nominee, Harris has made a point of sidestepping questions about her identity. When right-wing commentators launched misogynistic attacks on social media, amplified by former President Donald Trump, the campaign didn’t bother to respond. When Trump suggested, absurdly, to a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, that Harris had been hiding her identity as a Black woman and only recently “happened to turn Black,” Harris refused to take the bait.  “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please,” Harris laughed, when CNN’s Dana Bash asked her about Trump’s remarks in an interview. Later in the interview, after Bash noted that Harris hadn’t mentioned her race or gender in her DNC acceptance speech, she asked about a viral photograph of Harris’s grandniece watching her accept the nomination from the audience. Harris again declined to talk about the potentially historic nature of her candidacy. “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” Harris said.  It’s a very different answer from the one Hillary Clinton gave 60 Minutes eight years ago. It was hard not to notice that, unlike Clinton, Harris wore a dark suit to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination, standing in front of a sea of delegates who wore white instead. To be sure, Harris is finding ways to highlight the contrast between her and her opponent, such as forcefully advocating for reproductive rights against a candidate responsible for appointing Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade and proposing to cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. Harris has also spoken of being part of a new generation of leadership, which might be a more subtle way of highlighting her gender. “I think generational change is stylistically standing in for the conversation about electing a woman,” says Rebecca Traister, writer for New York magazine (which is part of Vox Media) and the author of multiple books about how women have reshaped contemporary politics. One of Trump’s most successful lines of attack against President Joe Biden was over his age; now he’s facing off against someone younger, non-white, and female — traits that have allowed Harris to make the case that she’s the change candidate, despite being the current vice president. The decision not to emphasize the possibility that Harris would be the first Black woman president probably isn’t coincidental. Harris is likely running her campaign differently in an attempt to ensure a better outcome than 2016, when Clinton won the popular vote but still lost the election.   After her loss, an argument emerged, popular among the progressive and populist wings of the party, that Clinton and her supporters had overemphasized her gender as a selling point in the race, alienating voters who weren’t moved by the idea of making representational history. They argued that the party as a whole should do less talking about identity issues like race and gender, focusing instead on economic class and uniting people under a common set of Democratic ideals.   “One of the lessons coming out of 2016 is that focusing on identity was not enough to sway swing voters in battleground states,” says Jennifer Lawless, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia who studies the intersection of politics, media, and gender.  The question of whether Clinton talked too much about gender can’t be untangled from other thorny questions about her campaign and external factors like James Comey’s last-minute announcement that the FBI was investigating more of her emails.  But Harris is likely making the right choice in choosing not to emphasize gender. There’s good evidence to suggest that voters don’t want Harris to talk about gender or race, preferring instead that she focus on issues. The fact that Trump’s campaign is trying to drive the gender gap with overt appeals to male voters, says Lawless, means Harris can focus on issues that might matter to women without trying to win them by explicitly invoking identity.  “They’re making gender salient,” Lawless says of Trump and Vance. “Voters only need to look at Harris and realize she doesn’t hold those views. So she gets away from being ‘a woman running as a woman’ and still reaps the benefits.” The choice to emphasize other messages during Harris’s short campaign is more than just thematic. It also speaks to the precarious place the campaign finds itself in, with only weeks left until Election Day.  This time, Democrats are much more aware of the fact that Harris might not win. The polls show a tighter race this year than they did in 2016, when the conventional wisdom, informed by inaccurate polls, was that Clinton was the favorite to win. “I don’t think there’s a lot of excitement about talking about it for a bunch of PTSD-related reasons,” Traister says. “The last time it was a real possibility, we set the world on fire instead.” It’s not just that supporters are much more aware of the possibility that Harris might not win. It’s also that they’re more aware of what it will mean if Trump wins again. Harris’s late entry into the race has also played a role in the conversation surrounding her campaign. In 2016, after Clinton emerged as the early frontrunner, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek, New York, Time, and the New Yorker, and was given frontrunner status and treated with extra scrutiny. Vogue made a first-time presidential endorsement in favor of Clinton and was one of the many magazines and news sites that devoted thousands of words to the question of whether she’d made history. (Full disclosure: I wrote one of those stories for Vox in 2016, but thankfully we waited to see if she won before running it.)  Clinton was also covered by a resurgent women’s media that invested in campaign coverage and championed causes like reproductive rights. But women’s publications that had time to plan coverage for Clinton’s historic run were caught off guard, just like everyone else, by Harris’s late entry into the race, and the constellation of media outlets that reach voters have shifted. In 2016, Clinton wrote a piece for the Toast, a niche but much-loved feminist website, on its last day of publication; eight years later, the writers for the feminist blogosphere have largely moved on to more mainstream publications, and women’s publications aren’t as much of a fixture of campaign coverage. Harris did appear on the digital cover of Vogue this cycle, but she garnered more attention for appearing on newer outlets that have large female audiences, including the podcast Call Her Daddy.  Perhaps the biggest reason we don’t hear as much about whether the United States is ready to elect a woman is a simple one: The novelty may have worn off.  “There’s not as much of a question of whether America will elect a woman because they’ve done it all across the country, in all of the states,” says Christina Reynolds, who worked as Clinton’s deputy director of communications in 2016 and now serves as senior vice president for Emily’s List, an organization that works to elect Democratic women.  At this point, Harris isn’t the first woman nominee from a major party. Even if she won, she wouldn’t be the first woman to win the popular vote. If she succeeds in November, her supporters will of course celebrate the historic nature of her victory. But the fact that Harris has made it this far, when many Clinton supporters felt she was the only Democratic woman who had a shot of being elected in their lifetimes, is evidence of how many more women are serving in high-profile political positions post-2016.  “Eight years is not a lot of time in real life,” says Lawless. “But in politics, it’s forever.” In 2018, a record number of women ran for office and won, sending more women to Congress than ever before. The ranks of highly visible women serving in political office expanded, too: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Squad became powerful leaders on the left, Stacey Abrams drew national attention by helping deliver Georgia to the Democrats, and in the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris ran for president alongside Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand (former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson ran, too).  Republican women also came to prominence in the years since 2016: Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, became governor of Arkansas, conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Green is a household name, and Nikki Haley was the last candidate standing in the 2024 Republican primary against Trump.  As more women have run for office, political scientists have found that the gender biases long believed to be a barrier for women getting elected are less pronounced than previously believed. While Clinton was the target of sexism over her political career and other well-known female politicians face misogynistic attacks, those high-profile instances are not as predictive of the experience of women running for other offices as people may expect.  “For a long time, the notion was that underrepresentation is driven by demand-side effects, meaning voters don’t want female politicians because they think they can’t do a good enough job or that politics as a profession is very male-typed, and it runs against traditional gender notions of what women can and can’t do,” says Susanne Schwarz, an assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College.  In a meta-analysis of 67 survey experiments asking voters to choose a hypothetical candidate, where gender was randomly assigned, Schwarz and a colleague found that women candidates actually performed a bit better than men. The finding echoes Lawless’s previous research showing that voters and the media, with some notable exceptions, generally treat women who run for office the same as men. Harris entered late in the race, without a long campaign in which she could be tarnished by her opponents. She’s spent the last four years in a supporting role in the White House, visible but somewhat less scrutinized than her recent predecessors, including Joe Biden when he was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. Those unique circumstances make her an unusual combination: well-known enough to have the obvious qualifications necessary to serve as president, but not well-known enough to have her reputation calcified, for better and for worse, in the minds of voters.  “Harris is much closer to the hypothetical candidate in these surveys” — the ones favored by voters — ”than Clinton was in 2016,” Schwarz says.  After 2016, Clinton’s candidacy and her loss sparked a lot of debate about what having better representation in politics can and can’t accomplish. “We’ve been forced to talk about gender, race, identity politics, and representational deficiencies in ways that had not been pressed in this country in the same way before,” Traister says. “There’s been quite a bit of smart conversations about representation and what it achieves and doesn’t. I think we’re a little smarter about representation and identity politics than we were before.” Ultimately, Reynolds says, not having to talk about the history that Harris may or may not make in November is an encouraging development. If the candidate, media, and voters are talking about it less, it means that the question is probably less of a concern. “I’m not saying we should never talk about gender,” Reynolds says. “But I think it’s nothing but positive that we don’t hear the question as much.”  Even if we don’t talk about it as much, other questions about gender, and particularly how it will impact each candidate’s vote totals, remain. Recent polls suggest an extremely close race, with Trump holding a double-digit lead with male voters and Harris holding a similar edge among female voters. Whether or not candidate gender is a major theme of the campaign, the gender divide driving more men to support Trump and more women to support Harris could be the defining factor in the race.    The question of whether the US would ever elect a woman president feels answered. The question of whether it will elect this woman this year? Not so much.