Kirsten Gillibrand's losing brand of feminism

Here's why Gillibrand 2020 is going nowhere

Kirsten Gillibrand.

The polls trickling in after last month's Democratic debate show that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand received absolutely no bump from her lively performance. Around 1 percent of voters supported her bid for the presidency before the event — and 1 percent did so after.

She is an attractive and well-spoken candidate who had generated high expectations. Why is she flailing? Essentially because she is selling a brand of feminism with little resonance beyond Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg's white professional female devotees, especially when the country is preoccupied with so many other pressing issues.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.