Women Over 50 Who’ve Run For The Oval Office

 In the 241 years since the U.S. Constitution was ratified, more than 2,500 people have filed registration paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president. Barely a tenth of these candidates have been competitive enough to last into the primary season, and even a smaller percentage of these candidates have been women.

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was the first woman to run for president: she began her campaign in 1870, fifty years before women even had the right to vote in the U.S. Nonetheless, the activist and entrepreneur (she and her sister owned a Wall Street brokerage firm) anointed herself as a candidate for the Equal Rights Party and campaigned on a platform that included free love, the idea that women had the right to choose their husband and divorce him, too. One hundred years later, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to run for president when she campaigned—under the slogan “unbossed and unbought”—to be the Democratic candidate in 1972.

Woodhull passed away in 1927 and Chisholm died in 2005, but following in their footsteps are women who have put their own stamp on American politics; women who have changed conversations and broken barriers. Many of these women also happen to have been over the age of 50 when launching their bids for the Oval Office. And so, as a part of our weekly series with Morning Joe and Know Your Value spotlighting women who are breaking age and gender norms, here are four women over 50 who’ve run for president:

Hillary Clinton, 73: The former First Lady and then-New York senator was 59 years old when she announced her first run for president on January 20, 2007. Though she received roughly 18 million votes in the primaries, it was not enough to win the Democratic nomination, and she conceded to then-Senator Barack Obama in June of 2008. “I felt I had let down so many millions of people,” she wrote in her book, Hard Choices. “Especially the women and girls who had invested their dreams in me.”

When she ran again in 2016, Clinton became the first woman to win the Iowa caucus and the first woman to top a presidential ticket for a major U.S. party. Though she won more than 2.8 million more votes than her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, that popular vote victory was not enough to prevail in the electoral college.

“I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will—and hopefully sooner than we might think right now,” she said in her 2016 concession speech.

Carly Fiorina, 66: Before she began her political career by serving as a surrogate for Senator John McCain in the 2008 election, Fiorina was best known for running Hewlett-Packard. She served as the company’s CEO from 1999 to 2005, becoming the first woman to head a company listed on the Dow Jones and the architect of the company’s $19 billion acquisition of Compaq.

Fiorina had hoped to capitalize on this private sector experience when she announced her presidential bid in May of 2015 (she was the only female candidate among the Republicans’ 17-person field that year). But she wasn’t the loudest businessperson in the race, and though she gained some momentum after strong performances in early primary debates, Fiorina only received 2% of the vote in the Iowa caucus. After she finished 7th in the New Hampshire primary, Fiorina suspended her presidential quest in February 2016 and endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz. For seven days in late April and early May, she was Cruz’s running mate—until the senator also dropped out of the race and rendered her status as running mate the shortest vice presidential campaign in modern history.

“There are people in our party who are actually kind of horrified by Donald Trump. I’m one of them,” Fiorina said in March of that year. “We’re going to have to beat Donald Trump at the ballot box. And the only guy who can beat Donald Trump is Ted Cruz.”

Jill Stein, 70: An internal medicine physician with a degree from Harvard Medical School, Stein was the presidential nominee for the Green Party in both 2012 and 2016. During both bids for the White House, Stein ran on a platform that included a “Green New Deal,” a plan she said would create jobs, help the environment and build a more equitable financial system. (The specifics of Stein’s proposal are different than the Green New Deal that has become a core piece of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, though the two plans are spiritually similar.)

Stein is viewed by some as the spoiler of the 2016 race: she drew 1.1% of the popular vote, nearly 1.5 million votes nationwide, and her share of the vote in battleground states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania was larger than the vote differential between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“I consider it a great honor that the party and our prior campaign for president is suddenly being attacked outside of an election season,” Stein said in 2017.

Carol Moseley Braun, 73: Braun is perhaps best known as the first Black woman to win a seat in the U.S. Senate—she was elected to one of Illinois’ seats in 1992, and was also only the second Black senator since the Reconstruction Era—but in 2003, Braun launched a bid to become the nation’s first female and first Black president. “It is time to take the ‘Men Only’ sign off the White House door,” she took to saying on the campaign trail.

In some respects, her candidacy foreshadowed themes that would become popular talking points in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles: Braun came out in support of a single-payer healthcare system and told media that because she didn’t have access to wealthy donors, she would need to depend on smaller contributions from grassroots support. But this did not help Braun in 2003; she struggled to raise money, garnered criticism for a 1996 meeting with Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and a 1993 FEC investigation, and finished a disappointing third in the D.C. primary in January 2004. Braun suspended her campaign on January 15 of that year, four days before the Iowa caucus.

Braun tried to get out of politics in 2008 when she founded an organic food company, but she became a Biden campaign surrogate in 2020 and throughout the 2010s remained vocal about the need for more diversity at all levels of government.

“It’s a small wonder why there aren’t more women, women of color and women of color from not very privileged backgrounds getting involved,” Braun said in 2014. “I think it’s important that both parties reach out and diversify along the lines of race, gender and economic background.”