The 2024 presidential election was historic in many ways, but one trend did not buck the norm: the gender gap. Indeed, despite Kamala Harris becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to win a majority party’s nomination, the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, and clear attempts by the Harris campaign to win over white Republican women voters, “gender differences in vote choice in the 2024 elections were remarkably similar to recent presidential elections” (CAWP 2024). This essay highlights the long-term ideological and demographic shifts among party constituencies that can help to explain why Republican women cast their vote for Donald Trump, even in a uniquely gendered political landscape.

In the 20 years since the founding of Politics & Gender, gender and politics scholarship has coalesced into a distinct body of research and community of scholarship (Sawer 2025; Tripp 2025). The research published in this journal and others cuts across the traditional political science subfields, methodological approaches, and regional boundaries. While engaging with different topics and parts of the larger discipline, gender and politics research distinguishes itself through its turning around a shared understanding that gender plays a critical explanatory role in our political worlds – whether that be in the gendered ways that politics is enacted or the gendered consequences of political actions. There is a shared language of scholarship amongst researchers.

As this article is being finalized, US President Donald J. Trump has taken numerous executive actions to challenge gender identity; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; and the rights of marginalized populations broadly. These xenophobic, anti-gender political agendas are gaining momentum worldwide (Ayoub and Stoeckle 2024). My hope is that these brief words inspire future politics and gender scholars to apply their research skills to challenge these heteropatriarchal policies that so often reinforce sexism, racism, and homophobia in the name of nationalism. When the Politics & Gender journal began in 2005, the justification question underlying much of its existence was “Does gender matter?” In 2025, if one is to measure the importance of gender by the amount of resistance to gender inclusive policies and feminist advances, one could easily argue that not only does gender matter-but it matters even more.

The 2018 election cycle was referred to as a “Rainbow Wave” because of the record number of LGBTQ+ candidates seeking and winning elective office. The backlash toward the LGBTQ+ community during the first Trump administration, at the local and national level, invigorated queer candidates to run for office. Then, in 2020 and 2022, news headlines again called the election cycles a “Rainbow Wave” (Debussy 2020; Lavietes 2022). According to the Victory Institute, the 2024 election marked a 1.1% increase in LGBTQ+ candidates compared to 2020, however, it was also a 4.8% decrease compared to candidates in 2022. Further, among LGBTQ+ candidates, the share of lesbian candidates dropped nearly 10 percentage points, from 26.7% of all LGBTQ+ candidates in 2020 to only 16.1% in 2024. At the same time, the group of LGBTQ+ candidates in 2024 were the most racially diverse in history, with 37.6% being people of color and just over 15% not identifying as cisgender (LGBTQ+ Victory Fund 2024).

At the 2024 US Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris presented her approach to the military in her speech accepting her historic nomination as the party’s candidate for the US presidency. In this essay, I reflect on the question: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire? I argue that scholars of gender, politics, and representation must turn their attention toward evaluating not just how gender conditions how politicians legislate, run their campaigns, or face barriers to winning office — but whether and to what extent politicians of any gender use their identities to combat the material suffering wrought by American imperialism. I echo calls for greater attention to power structures in the study of gender and representation (Brown et al. 2024) and argue that we must decenter “imperial feminism” and recenter tenets from Black and Third World feminism (Amos and Parmar 1984; Johnson-Odim 1991; Taylor 2017). To this end, I theorize a new type of representative that bridges these concerns: identity representatives.

Over the past quarter-century, the literature on gender, peace, and security has evolved into a substantial interdisciplinary field. In this line of work, researchers have investigated the interplay between state security and women’s security, or how gender equality at the state level affects the occurrence of international and intranational conflict. The conclusion is that more gender-equal countries are less prone to engage in warfare, pointing toward a link between women’s security and national security. Various indicators have been used to capture gender equality in this literature, such as the representation of women in parliamentary roles, the proportion of women participating in the labor force, and school enrollment among girls relative to boys.

What does it mean to be a brave woman? In 2020, we saw Belarusian women take to the streets dressed in white to oppose the violent dictatorship that had been in power for twenty-six years. In 2021, our television screens showed the Fall of Kabul, and the takeover by Taliban fighters, who overnight began to reverse decades of women’s empowerment. In response, and despite the risks, women demonstrators took to the streets in Kabul to demand their rights to work, education, and political participation. And in late 2022, we saw Iranian women fight for freedom, cutting their hair and burning their headscarves as they called for women’s rights in the context of brutal repression. These are but a handful of the myriad examples of women transgressing what is societally expected of them. They go out into the streets, they post on social media, they protest governments and make demands for change. Around the world, we see women being brave. They do so at great personal risk, and often when the potential benefits of being brave are infinitesimally small.

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.

Nancy Pelosi makes history. She was the first woman elected to a high-ranking position in the US House of Representatives when she became the Democratic Whip in 2001. She made more history as the first female Democratic Leader in 2003, and first woman elected as Speaker of the House in 2007. She made history by remaining the Democratic Leader even after losing the House majority. Pelosi made history yet again when she was again elected Speaker in 2019, joining Sam Rayburn as the only House leader to lose and then regain the Speakership.