Amy Klobuchar to Democrats: don’t rule out female candidate in 2028 after Harris loss

US senator Amy Klobuchar says she hopes her party does not reflexively rule out running a woman for the White House after Kamala Harris – her fellow Democrat – lost to her Republican rival Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, arguing it’s not the “lesson to learn”.

Responding to a question Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about whether Harris’s defeat might dissuade Democrats from nominating a female presidential candidate, Klobuchar said: “You have seen women run other countries quite well” before singling out the former German chancellor Angela Merkel as an example.

Klobuchar added, “You’ve also seen women in the US [be] incredible mayors, incredible governors,” while further noting that fellow Democrats Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin and Jacky Rosen defeated Republican men in Senate races held in battleground states that Trump carried in the fall.

“I mean – this happened,” Klobuchar, of Minnesota, said to Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker. “So I just – I don’t think that’s a lesson to learn.”

Klobuchar’s remarks served to rebut comments that Joe Biden recently delivered to the ABC program The View about his vice-president’s electoral loss to Trump. In a clip Meet the Press aired Sunday, Biden said Harris was “qualified” to succeed him as president. But the president told The View that, as disappointed as he was, he wasn’t surprised Harris’s run for the Oval Office came up short after her critics went “the sexist route, of the whole, ‘This is a woman, she’s this, she’s that.’”

Welker asked Klobuchar whether Democrats may have had a better chance of retaining the presidency if Biden, who defeated an incumbent Trump in 2020, had not waited until June to announce that he was abandoning his campaign for a second term.

Klobuchar said her party “would have been served better by a primary” election that was different than the one which saw Biden easily beat a few longshot Democratic challengers. Biden subsequently avoided a rematch with Trump by dropping out in the wake of a disastrous debate performance that exacerbated questions about his mental acuity and then endorsing Harris for president instead.

Trump then captured every battleground state in November to decisively win the electoral college at Harris’s expense. He also narrowly clinched the popular vote – though he didn’t quite manage to secure 50% of the ballots cast in the race. It was the second time Trump outran a woman for the presidency, having defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in 2016.

He summarily went on to spend the beginning of his second presidency implementing brutal cuts to the federal government, waging economically destabilizing trade wars and deporting or detaining a significant number of immigrants, sometimes defying court orders to do so, among other moves.

“We are where we are,” Klobuchar said, before maintaining that she and her colleagues had “to deal with helping the American people” as Trump’s policies throttled the country ever closer to a constitutional crisis rather than “looking backwards”.

Welker asked Klobuchar – a senator since 2007 – whether she would run for president as she did in the 2020 Democratic primary won by Biden on his way to victory against Trump. Klobuchar did not rule out joining what is widely expected to be a crowded field of contenders but said, “I’m focused on my job right now.”