It was early afternoon on Sunday, July 21, when Stacie Grant heard screams erupting from a nearby conference room at the Indiana Convention Center.
“It was the tweet that went out from the president’s office that he was no longer going to pursue being the nominee,” said Grant, the 26th international president of Zeta Phi Beta, who was working on logistics for the sorority’s 2024 Grand Boulé conference under the theme “Amplifying Women: The Extraordinary Power of She.”
The “president’s office” in this case was that of Democrat Joe Biden, who, after three weeks of pressure following his disastrous June debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, had decided to end his reelection bid.
“Everybody said, ‘Wait, what does that mean?’” Grant said. “Nobody knew what was coming next.”
What came next was a sitting vice president who in those three days had effectively sewn up the Democratic presidential nomination and was due to speak to Zeta Phi Beta, one of the “Divine Nine” historically Black sororities and fraternities, at the Grand Boulé on Wednesday, July 24.
This thunderclap news came 104 years after Zeta Phi Beta was founded at Howard University a few blocks from the White House. That was in January 1920. In August of that year, when Tennessee became the final state to give its approval, the 19th Amendment was passed, granting American women the right to vote.
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the 19th Amendment read. It took nearly a century for the suffragette movement to reach its holy grail. And on Nov. 2, 1920, over 8 million American women voted in elections for the first time.
Now, more than a century later, potentially the most consequential presidential election for women will take place this November. The same question Grant posed on July 26 on a WFIU-FM “Noon Edition” broadcast is still operative today: What comes next?
This election process comes with Kamala Harris poised to be the second woman to win a presidential nomination (Hillary Clinton was the first in 2016, losing to Donald Trump).
It will also be the first presidential and Indiana gubernatorial election since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that essentially ended the 50-year Roe v. Wade era of abortion access. The ruling withdrew a reproductive “right,” the first time that has occurred in the American experience, tossing the issue back to the states.
And it will be the first Indiana gubernatorial election since Dobbs, with the tickets at polar opposite ends on the gender diversity scale, coming two years after Gov. Eric Holcomb signed one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bills a little over a month after the Supreme Court decision.
The Republican ticket features Trump, vice presidential nominee JD Vance, Mike Braun for governor, Micah Beckwith for lieutenant governor, Todd Rokita for attorney general and Jim Banks for U.S. Senate.
Hoosier voters will find a Democratic ticket headed by Harris, Jennifer McCormick for governor, Terry Goodin for lieutenant governor, Destiny Wells for attorney general, and Valerie McCray for U.S. Senate. Harris is expected to name a running mate by Aug. 7.
Those 8 million female voters in 1920 were just a fraction of those eligible in a presidential election where 27 million participated (with Republican Warren Harding defeating James Cox in an election that featured two future presidents running as vice presidents: Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt). The real impact of this new voting bloc, the thinking went, would occur in 1924.
Except it didn’t.
Historian Christine Stansell said the 19th Amendment was the “single greatest act of mass enfranchisement” in American history. Yet the 1920 watershed is problematic, Stansell told WomensHistory.org.
“One, it did not enable Black women to vote in the South. It would take several decades before Black women specifically, and women of color generally, would achieve full voting rights in the United States. Two, it did not drastically increase the number of women voters in elections. Finally, it did not create a ‘gender gap’ capable of significantly influencing American elections,” Stansell said.
“Our estimates of women’s turnout immediately after suffrage suggest that women’s turnout initially lagged men’s by a wide margin,” Christina Wolbrecht, a political science professor at University of Notre Dame, and J. Kevin Corder, a political science professor at Western Michigan University, wrote in their book “Counting Women’s Ballots.” “While the gap slowly closed, even by 1936, nearly 20 years after ratification, women’s turnout was still about 20 percentage points behind men.
“Dominant narratives after suffrage, in popular and academic conversation, put the blame for women’s lower turnout squarely on the shoulders of women themselves,” the authors continued. “As early as 1924, headlines from Good Housekeeping (‘Is Women’s Suffrage a Failure?’) to Harper’s (‘Are Women a Failure in Politics?’) and beyond declared women’s suffrage a failure because women chose not to vote (and when they did, voted like their husbands).”
There was also a huge complicating factor in 1924: the Ku Klux Klan election in Indiana and several other northern states. With the rapid rise of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the KKK took over the Indiana Republican Party in 1924. It elected dozens of KKK members to General Assembly GOP majorities as well as the Klan Gov. Ed Jackson. It dominated county commissions, county courthouses, city halls, police and sheriffs’ departments.
In a WFIU-FM “Noon Edition” broadcast hosted by Laurie McRobbie and Bob Zaltsberg on July 26, State Affairs asked Grant whether her organization began with the mantra of the right to vote. And how did that evolve?
“We know in the 1920s there was an interesting time for the entire country,” Grant said. “When you think about African Americans and their entire experience in their ability to go to colleges and universities, it wasn’t as widespread as it is now. So the mere fact that Howard University was one of the few places they could go to get an education, they realized that finding some community to help you sustain your process through matriculating from school was essential.
“And challenging the scholastic endeavors of members was something they were focused on. And then realizing, how do I reach back and give back and stand on the front lines of women seeking rights, the right to vote being one of them?” she continued. “How do women educate themselves? That was a paradigm shift. Our founders were on the cutting edge of speaking out about how things weren’t normal at the time and advocating that everyone should have access and opportunity in an organization that was speaking out on the societal ills of the day and find solutions for them.”
Vice President Harris told Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis: “In this moment our nation — as it always has — is counting on you. To energize, to organize, to mobilize. To register folks to vote, to get them to the polls and to continue to fight for the future our nation and her people deserve.”
Fabio Rojas, the Virginia L. Roberts professor of sociology at Indiana University, participated in the WFIU-FM broadcast. “Gender is one of those things that does not have predictive power in terms of projecting how a person will vote,” Rojas said. “Historically it’s more complicated. So in the 1920s, a lot of progressives and suffragettes were actually Republicans. Black voters were still in the party of Lincoln at that time.
“If you go back and look at the founding of Zeta Phi Beta and other organizations, I bet the story would be very complicated,” Rojas continued. “You probably saw a lot of Republican activists in that organization. One of the big stories in American politics is the movement of African American voters into the Democratic Party in the 1940s. But now we’re seeing a little erosion where Trump has actually reclaimed a little bit. That is fueling what has been some of his swing state victories.”
The early incarnation of the Biden-Harris campaign morphing into the “Kamala” juggernaut that is poised to win a presidential nomination in just a few days is fascinating. On July 21, tens of thousands of Divine Nine members participated in a Zoom call with the group Win With Black Women and raised over $1 million for the Harris campaign in three hours. A similar call with white women took place July 24.
The Harris presidential campaign raised more than $200 million in donations in just a week.
So we’re waiting to see if the “Harris movement” can survive its early honeymoon, withstand the inevitably harsh attacks from Trump and related super PACs, and lift boats up and down the ballot. For instance, if McCormick can ride the tide of the Harris candidacy and tap into the reservoir of teachers, educators and their families, as well as retired educators and abortion rights proponents, that’s how Glenda Ritz won the Indiana superintendent of public instruction in 2012 in a seismic upset of Republican Tony Bennett.
Ritz was outspent 10 to 1, but she relied on a movement to get her there. Whether this movement of women changes the dynamic in a red state like Indiana remains to be seen.
As Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs reported following the 2022 election five months after the Dobbs decision was handed down, not a single General Assembly Republican lost that November. Gov. Holcomb’s approval rating is a net +18, according to a Morning Consult tracker released last week.
On May 7, primary election day, McCormick told Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs that the impact of the Dobbs decision had not sunk in by November.
“A lot of it was timing,” McCormick said. “People hadn’t been informed as much as they should have been. They hadn’t felt the impact; they hadn’t watched the actions since then. It was pretty early. Now people are paying attention to the rhetoric at the national level. People weren’t misinformed; they were uninformed. And now we have this piece that now there’s been a little time for it to sink in on exactly what happened.”
“We’re already seeing a consolidation,” Rojas said. “Almost every major Democrat has come out to endorse Vice President Harris. They have already scheduled an online nomination process so that the actual convention for the Democratic Party will be a more of a publicity and communication event rather than an actual brokered convention. We see a lot of evidence the party is strongly backing Vice President Harris.”
Whether a “Harris movement” breathes life into down-ballot races in red states like Indiana remains to be seen.
Or as Zeta Phi Beta’s Grant said on WFIU-FM of just being alive in general: “It’s always good to be above ground and to be seen and not viewed.”
“Amplifying Women: The Extraordinary Power of She”? We shall see.
Brian A. Howey is senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Find Howey on Facebook and X @hwypol.
