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Five times in U.S. history a presidential candidate has won the popular vote, yet the Electoral College handed the Oval Office to the less popular guy. Four of those times it was Democrat vs. Republican, and the EC gave the win to the Republican, because reasons. Anyway, this story isn’t about a guy.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 12, 1984--
But we need to start with some guys, cuz patriarchy.
Jimmy Carter is a swell guy. At 90-something years old, he’s still doing work with Habitat for Humanity. But he did get obliterated in 1980 by Reagan. The EC votes were 489 to 49. It’s worth noting Reagan only got 50.7% of the popular vote. Jimmy took 41% and some independent guy got 6.6%.
Jimmy’s VP was Walter Mondale, and in 1984 the sidekick decided to have another go at Reagan. The EC was even more of a blowout at 525 to 13. Reagan took 58.8% of the popular vote, and Walt got slightly less than Jimmy had at 40.6%. Reagan was so damn popular the Democrats could have run Jesus and they’d still have lost, but Mondale wasn’t much of a candidate. What makes his candidacy noteworthy is on July 12 of that year, Mondale chose a woman as his running mate.
Geraldine Ferraro was a wife and mother who kept her birth name. She worked as a civil lawyer in her husband’s real estate firm, then as a prosecutor in New York when the city had few women in that role. Within a year she was assigned to the Special Victims Unit and two years after that she was SVU’s head. She then successfully ran for Congress in 1978.
Ferraro rose rapidly in the house, achieving numerous powerful committee positions, then became the first woman in U.S. history to run as VP on a major party ticket. Unlike the second woman to hold that distinction—the one who didn’t actually say she could see Russia from her house but we believed she did because she was plenty stupid—Geraldine was qualified.
It was an exciting leap forward for women in American politics, and her nomination acceptance speech was an emotional affair. American Rhetoric’s list of top 100 speeches of the 20th century puts Ferraro’s at #56. She faced ample sexism during the campaign, being repeatedly asked if she was tough enough for the job. There was also much ado about her husband’s finances that damaged her. Additionally, she was attacked by the Catholic Church for being a pro-choice Catholic in a way that male pro-choice Catholic candidates did not experience.
Fast-forwarding a few decades, America wasn’t ready for a woman president in 2016, and the country suffered horribly for it, but Americans finally did elect a female VP—a woman of color no less—in 2020.
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