After spending the next two months “deeply depressed,” the junior senator from New York experienced what she called the most inspiring day of her political life: the women’s march. And almost two years to the day after that, Gillibrand sat in a Manhattan wine bar, holding a glass of pinot noir, and described why she believes the country and the Democratic Party need an unabashedly feminist campaign for president — and why she thinks she is the candidate to run it.
“You understand, this is my space,” Gillibrand said in an interview. “I don’t know if my party will get as far as I will go on a lot of these issues. But I believe in them so strongly.”
At a moment when women are ascendant in Democratic politics and polls show a record gender gap between the parties, Gillibrand and her advisers see an opportunity to ride a wave of women’s political energy right into the White House. While multiple women are serious contenders for president for the first time in American history, Gillibrand is the only one who is making running as a woman, for women, the central theme of her candidacy.
Whether her campaign is successful or not, Gillibrand’s approach will test how much views have changed on issues like discrimination, sexual harassment and female leadership, after two years of an administration that has embroiled the country in an emotional debate over gender bias.
Gillibrand says advocating for women has been the cause of her political life, from her days as a young lawyer raising money for women’s charities. But she is choosing the mantle of feminist crusader at a time when other core Democratic issues are more problematic for her.
As a House member from upstate New York earlier in her political career, she held far more conservative positions on gun control and immigration. Her years as a corporate lawyer, taking clients that included a big tobacco company, and her past as a voracious fundraiser from Wall Street donors complicate her ability to attack greed and inequality in big business.
And by using her gender to find a toehold in the Democratic electorate, Gillibrand risks pigeonholing herself in a race where voters may be seeking a broader populist message.
“There may well be a risk,” Gillibrand said, in what she calls her “women plus” campaign platform. “But it is who I am. I think the country would be so much stronger if women had greater voices.”
Still, Gillibrand is unwavering. Calling out sexism and sexual misconduct in all corners — including her outspoken critiques of former President Bill Clinton and former Sen. Al Franken — is a political calling card that she feels distinguishes her.
Her first words on national television describing her rationale for running were that she is a “young mom.” Her first big speech as a candidate took place at a women’s march in Des Moines, Iowa. Her first fundraising event was hosted by a women’s group in the Bay Area. And her first question from the press — about her likability — she derided as “sexist.”
Of Trump’s 2017 tweet that Gillibrand “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions,” she called the president “misogynistic,” saying in the interview, “I mean, he essentially called me a prostitute!”
There is no real precedent for Gillibrand’s strategy. As a candidate, Hillary Clinton struggled to talk about her gender and essentially tried to copy the approach of the male presidential candidates who had preceded her, said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's former communications director.
“I had no idea what it looked like to do it differently. Sen. Gillibrand is doing it differently,” said Palmieri, who has discussed Gillibrand’s presidential ambitions with her. “She knows the risk involved with being so plain-spoken and forward-leaning as a woman candidate and doesn’t care.”
There is also the math: Women are expected to make up a clear majority of voters in a Democratic primary — nearly 60 percent, according to Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who specializes in female voting behavior.
For years, Gillibrand has fundraised for women seeking office through her Off the Sidelines political action committee, helping her develop a national network of female donors and a robust list of supporters. In 2013, she delivered a speech laying out her economic plan aimed at promoting women in the workforce that included proposals for equal pay, paid leave, affordable child care, universal pre-K and raising the minimum wage.
In the Senate, some of her biggest fights have been around securing greater protections for women facing sexual assault cases in the military, on college campuses and on Capitol Hill.
Gillibrand has also shown a willingness to buck powerful men in her own party.
In 2017, she made headlines by saying Bill Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky should have prompted him to resign, angering the Clintons, who had championed her early in her career.
Gillibrand is also still navigating the fallout from another controversial choice within her own party: her decision in late 2017 to become the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of Franken, following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. Despite the backlash she has faced from some Democratic quarters, Gillibrand said she saved the party from itself, arguing that standing by Franken would have cost Democrats congressional seats in the midterms.
And she said Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, would not have won his special election in Alabama if Franken had not stepped aside and provided the party with a clear message against the Republican, Roy Moore, a state jurist accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls.
“God bless him if he wanted to sue every woman who made an allegation against him,'’ she said of Franken. “But just imagine this last election how many women came out to vote and ran for office, and young women. Would they have felt that nobody had their back?'’
Her advisers argue that the incident shows Gillibrand as a fighter unafraid to take on powerful men and that the intense energy of women in the Democratic Party will outweigh the concerns. Her campaign distributed a memo as she entered the race saying that 58 percent of Democratic presidential primary voters in 2016 were women, and that female candidates won nearly two-thirds of open House Democratic primaries in 2018.
“Looking at 2018, there was something in the water she will tap into because it’s authentic to her,” said Glen Caplin, a top adviser to Gillibrand.
It is a strategy neither Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., nor Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., have embraced in their presidential platforms. During her campaign rollout last month, Harris focused heavily on her connections with the black community and her career as a prosecutor. Warren has centered her argument around class, rather than gender, making her personal story of economic struggle the centerpiece of her pitch to voters.
“Ultimately, that’s why I decided to run,” Gillibrand said. “Because I was concerned maybe the rest of the team doesn’t focus on these issues. Maybe the rest of the team doesn’t get where they need to go.'’
And while Gillibrand denounced questions of “likability” as sexist, Warren explicitly demurred from such labels in an interview last month.
Gillibrand’s bluntness worries some Democrats in early voting states, who fear a repeat of the kind of sexism they believe sank Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
Linda Smoley, who hosted Clinton at her Sioux City, Iowa, home in 2015 and attended Gillibrand’s first house party in Iowa in January, said she was so distressed after Trump was elected that she got anti-depressants from her doctor and then accidentally drove her car into her house.
Gillibrand had reached out moments earlier about appearing atSmoley’s local women’s group, Siouxland Progressive Women. But after the trauma of 2016, Smoley at first voiced reservations about selecting another female nominee.
“My only concern is that she is a woman,” Smoley said, “and I fear that in this misogynistic society in which we live, I think it will be hard for a woman because there are so many middle-aged and older white men who don’t want to cede power.”
But moments later, she was reconsidering, gingerly.
“But maybe we have turned,'’ she said. “Maybe this time, if she can convince those white women Trump voters how we as Democrats could make lives better, maybe she could get some of that vote that Hillary lost.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.