Women other than Hillary Clinton who’ve run for President
As expected, Hillary Clinton entered the Democratic presidential primary race on Sunday. So how unusual is her candidacy in historic terms?
The closest thing we can compare to Hillary Clinton is … Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Clinton came close to defeating Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. She received more than 17 million votes during the nomination process and trailed Obama by 103 delegates at the end of the process.
Since 1789, the Constitution had never directly prohibited women for running for President. Article II, Section 1 spells out the basic qualifications for office:
“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States,” the Article reads.
In reality, the states controlled voting requirements and major political party nominations in the early years. But after the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum, and in 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the presidential nominee of the Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
Woodhull didn’t receive any electoral votes and we’re not sure if she received any popular votes, but in 1884, attorney Belva Ann Lockwood became the first woman to receive popular votes in a national presidential election. But she couldn’t vote for herself that year.
By September 1920, the 19th Amendment giving all women the right to vote had been ratified, but it would take another two decades for the next significant female presidential candidate to emerge.
In 1964, Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine received 227,007 votes in Republican primary season and won 27 delegates at the 1964 Republican Convention. Smith was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination at a major party convention.
In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination as well as the first major party black candidate. She came in fourth at the convention where George McGovern won the Democratic nomination. And in 1976, Ellen McCormack received 22 votes at the Democratic convention won by Jimmy Carter.
Other candidates in recent years for the presidential nomination of a major political party include Michele Bachman, Carol Moseley Braun and Patricia Schroeder.
The most-successful third-party female presidential candidate, in terms of aggregate votes in a general election, was Jill Stein of the Green Party, who received 469,000 votes in 2012.
But the two most high-profile women nominees on presidential ballots have been Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sarah Palin in 2008 as vice presidential candidates. Neither ran for president during the primary season that preceded their nominations.