A mother’s tearful question: Will a woman ever be president?

Hayley Cleveland felt her hopes swell when she saw a Harris-Walz sign hanging on a farm fence in her one-stoplight Missouri town.
She had raised her daughter, Aihva Cleveland, here as a single mom, politically isolated in a sea of green fields and red politics. She was excited: This year, 18-year-old Aihva would vote for the first time, and for a woman president.
A generation of girls has watched a woman campaign for the presidency twice. Twice in a decade, a majority of women have voted for a female president – and lost.
Men have controlled the most powerful office in the United States for all of the country’s 248 years. The women who supported Vice President Kamala Harris’ surprise sprint for the presidency – including mothers who wanted this for their girls – did so ardently, as if parenting itself had become political.
Hayley Cleveland early-voted five days before Election Day. Moved to share her experience with like-minded people outside her Republican-majority town, she swiped open her TikTok account and started recording a video from the driver’s seat of her car.
Sign-up for Your Vote: Text with the USA TODAY elections team.
“Whenever I walked inside the county courthouse, it was full,” she said to the camera. “It wasn’t just full with people. It was full of women. It was full of women who have shown up to vote.”
Most of the women, she said, brought their children and most of the children were little girls.
“I obviously don’t know how they voted,” she said, “but women are showing up in this election like a lot of us haven’t in the past – white women.”
Cleveland blinked tears behind long black lashes set by her daughter, an aspiring esthetician. She felt that nervous-excited feeling again, like seeing the sign on the farm fence.
“They need our voices today,” she said, “to speak for their rights in the future.”
During the 108 days that Kamala Harris campaigned against Donald Trump, the vice president rarely made gender an issue. And yet some women – Cleveland included – saw in former President Trump’s political attacks the sort of misogyny they have dealt with over and over again from the men in their lives.
Trump laughing in North Carolina when a rallygoer screamed that Harris “worked on the corner,” like a prostitute. Trump in Michigan calling Harris “an evil, sick, crazy…” then, “it starts with a B but I won’t say it.” Crowd members filled in the blank. Trump calling the women liars who have accused him of sexual assault, despite having lost multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuits for doing so.
For his own part, Trump has posted on social media that he “will protect women at a level never seen before. They will finally be healthy, hopeful, safe and secure. Their lives will be happy, beautiful, and great again!”
The election had been just another topic of discussion at the Cleveland household, an extension of a conversation that intensified when Roe v. Wade fell, and the Supreme Court erased 50 years of abortion rights.
That night, Cleveland, who divorced Aihva’s father seven years ago, went to her daughter’s room and told her “she had a few hundred condoms coming in the mail,” Aihva recalled, and not to be alarmed when Amazon showed up. Her mother put them in a bowl on the kitchen table.
“I told her friends to take handfuls,” Cleveland said.
With the election looming, Cleveland didn’t see in the former president the straight-talking, successful businessman promising economic prosperity that other Americans did. She saw “someone accused of so many sexual assaults.”
“It’s like a permission slip for young boys,” Cleveland said. They can say, “My dad voted for him. My dad condoned this type of behavior, so he’s not going to get mad at me.'”
If her mother had begun to hope that Harris could win, Aihva said she heard enough in the hallways of her town’s one school to temper her optimism.
She heard “uneducated teenage boys saying very disrespectful things” about Harris, she said. “They just try to tear down women, saying things like, ‘It was crazy for a woman to even try because she wasn’t ever going to win.'”
More:Black women activists grieve Harris’ loss, but vow to rest, reflect and remain resilient
A day before Election Day, Aihva early-voted and took her mother with her.
Cleveland posted a TikTok of their feet walking a red brick sidewalk to the polls. “One more early vote cast today, honored to be able to experience this with my daughter,” Cleveland wrote.
She didn’t tell her daughter how to vote. But their conversations over the years had a big influence, Aihva said.
Research shows that’s true for most American parents and their teens, according to a 2022 survey by Pew Research. The vast majority of parents pass along their political loyalties.
In the survey, 8 in 10 parents who were Republican or leaned Republican had teens who also identified as Republicans or leaned that way. Among parents who were Democratic or leaned Democratic, 9 in 10 had teens who described themselves the same way.
“Every topic that comes up that might be political, we talk about it,” Cleveland said. “I want to have conversations about her values.”
The night of the election, Cleveland was restless. She tried to make jewelry but couldn’t stay focused. She tried to watch a Christmas movie but couldn’t sit still. She kept hoping: “I would love to see Missouri go blue. I think we’ll close the gap,” she told herself.
Aihva was working at a spa doing lashes, so Cleveland joined girlfriends for a watch party, hoping to celebrate. As the night wore on, the numbers flashing across the screen moved farther into Trump’s corner, a map of red states bleeding into one other.
Cleveland cut the night short and went home to bed. But she woke up every hour to check her phone. She told friends that she was “in a toxic relationship” with the Electoral College. In her own room, Aihva also checked her phone at 4 a.m., not fully awake. But she could tell the direction.
When her alarm rang at 7 a.m., Aihva padded over to her mother’s room like she does every morning, to chat, before the day gets going.
She found her mother at her desk.
“My mom had already been crying,” she said. “That made me cry – I cry whenever she cries.
“We have cried a lot,” she said. “We had a lot of conversations during, before and after the election. We are pretty nervous about how the world is going to look.
“I do not remember much about Hillary (Clinton) running,” Aihva said. “I was just too young. But in this one, I was super hopeful that Kamala would win. I was very hopeful she would win and I was hoping that if she did win, it would empower more women to step up and take bigger roles.”
Harris won women voters aged 18 to 44 by a 12-point margin, 55% to 43%, according to the Associated Press. But a majority of older women broke for Trump and so did white women, 53% to 46%.
According to USA TODAY/Suffolk University exclusive polling, there was also a dramatic split between married and single women in key swing states. In Michigan, for instance, among married women, 54% went for Harris and 41% for Trump, while among single women, 76% voted for Harris and just 14% for Trump.
In the county where the Clevelands voted, more than 80% of voters elected Trump, according to the Missouri Secretary of State.
After the “shock and disbelief and tears,” Cleveland went back on TikTok, her eyes puffy and her hair still wet.
“It took me a lot of tears, a couple miles’ walk, a shower and some deep breaths this morning,” she said on camera, “but what I do think is really important is that one, we may not be the majority but we also are not alone.
“This morning,” she said, “I have seen compassion and empathy in places I didn’t expect to see it.”
Lauren Villagran can be reached at [email protected].