Hillary Clinton may feel like the press hounds and harasses her, but there’s one segment of the media from which she’s getting the kind of coverage you just can’t buy: women’s magazines.

Better known for features like “10 ways to flatten your tummy” and lush fashion spreads, the magazines have been hiring well-connected Washington women lately in the hopes that having an inside political track will position them for could be a historic White House run.


They’ve also ramped up their interest in politics, delving into hot-button issues like abortion rights and gay marriage and profiling members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. But a POLITICO review of several of the magazines’ past few months of coverage suggests that readers will be getting a heavy dose of liberal cheerleading this campaign season along with their skincare, makeup and fashion tips.

“We’re thrilled that Hillary is in the race,” said Marie Claire Editor-in-Chief Anne Fulenwider, whose May issue included an entire section on the women who run Washington. “We’d love to see a woman president for the United States.”

Clinton, a fashionista in her own right who counted herself among famed designer Oscar de la Renta’s friends, already has a natural home among women’s magazines and their mostly liberal audiences. But the reporting and writing often veers beyond alignment and into outright boosterism — if not of Clinton herself, then of Democrats and the progressive causes they identify with.

Take Vogue. In the past few months, the magazine — whose fabled editor, Anna Wintour, is an unabashed Clinton fan and has even taken her shopping — has featured John Kerry, a book about the first lady, and a feature on the first gay male White House social secretary, Jeremy Barnard. Clinton was the first first lady to appear on the magazine’s cover and has appeared in the magazine at least seven times.

“I can only hope that all of you here in Little Rock will be celebrating her come November 2016,” Wintour said as she introduced Clinton at an event in Arkansas in 2013. “Just as all of us, all of us at Vogue, look forward to putting on the cover the first female president of the United States.”

Elle has seen perhaps the most Clinton action in its pages recently, with a Gucci-clad Chelsea gracing the cover the same week her mother announced her candidacy — a coincidence, Editor-in-Chief Robbie Myers said — along with several online articles on everything from how Clinton’s inner circle is dominated by women to “12 Times Hillary Clinton showed us exactly who she is” (“brave, feminist, and unapologetic”).

It’s enough to make Republicans scream.

“I just hope that these editors, which in my experience tend to be very liberal women, can take their blinders off and can see that there are lots of conservative issues women can embrace and lots of conservative women who can be celebrated,” said Katie Packer Gage, a top campaign aide for Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid.

The magazines don’t ignore the GOP. Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, Reps. Elise Stefanik, Martha McSally, Martha Roby and Jaime Herrera Beutler have all been featured in print or online over the past few months. In previous years, Vogue has written about Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul and other Republicans. And as the cycle gets moving, more GOP women will probably be covered. But you’re not likely to see articles defending the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, or arguments against federal regulations requiring equal pay for women.

Of all the top women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire cover politics most intensely — both host stand-alone politics sections on their websites. Cosmopolitan has a full-time politics writer; last October, Cosmo announced a get-out-the-vote campaign and even began endorsing candidates (though Editor Joanna Coles said the endorsements would be limited to the midterms). Marie Claire has hired former White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco and former Jill Biden aide Courtney O’Donnell as contributors, while Glamour hired Giovanna Gray Lockhart, a former aide to Sen. Kristen Gillibrand and wife to former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart.

Coles, whose recent issue includes a feature on female senators, has been perhaps the most vocal about only backing candidates who are abortion-rights supporters and favor equal pay and mandatory insurance coverage for contraception. But she was actually a bit more subdued about Clinton, saying that while “there’s a lot of excitement” about the former secretary of state among Cosmo readers, there’s also some anxiety over her perceived inevitability.

“It’s incredibly interesting to us watching the first female presidential candidate with a real shot,” Coles said in an interview. “I don’t think we think that differently from rest of media on this, but the fact she has been the first women running as president really seriously with a serious shot is very interesting, as a moment of history.”

Clinton deserves some credit for getting more politics into women’s magazines, Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive said.

“When we first started three cycles ago, we really had to persuade the politicians to be in the magazine — we had to go through the whole eye-roll, ‘Ugh, is this going to be about fashion, are you going to do her do’s and don’t’s?’ Now, I don’t get any of that,” Leive said.

But Leive, whose magazine featured Michelle Obama on its May cover, pushed back against the idea that women’s magazines lean left.

“I think there’s a misconception that fashion or women’s fashion magazines lean one way, that we’re Democrats. So part of our coverage that we really adhere to is a fairness and a philosophy of being pro-woman, nonpartisan,” she said, noting that last fall she interviewed Stefanik and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.). “We have 20 million print and online readers, and these are women whose political views are not monolithic. We keep that top of mind when it comes to our coverage of Washington and politics.”

The magazines know they’re not publishing the most serious political profiles. They tend to focus more on the personal stories behind the candidate, or what it’s like being a powerful woman, than on their policies or positions on major issues.

“I don’t want to pretend we’re doing some huge, in-depth political coverage,” Coles said, hastening to add that Cosmo’s readers still care about serious topics like the economy or foreign policy. “But so much of that is covered in the mainstream media, so where we’ve been focused is on issues that particularly engage our reader,” she said.

Covering politicians, especially women politicians, can lead to certain pitfalls, as “Saturday Night Live” comedian Cecily Strong made clear during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month when she demanded that reporters pledge not to report on Clinton’s appearance.

“What you never want to do is to go into a situation with a preconceived idea of the outcome, and you never want to go into an interview with a politician with a preconceived sense of what the conversation will be,” Coles said. “We have to be as vigilant as everybody else and at Cosmo we are, actually.”

For Myers, the Elle editor-in-chief, focusing on a candidate’s image is a gender-neutral endeavor.

Hillary Clinton on the cover of magazines during her time as first lady. | AP Photo

“It’s so funny to me, but we talk about a man’s image too, meaning, ‘Oh, he’s scrappy or he’s a natty dresser, or he clearly has invested in botox’ or whatever,” Myers said.

She pointed to a recent Elle story on Clinton. “There was not a lot of undue attention to the way she looked. When you talk about her image, it’s a much broader word — how does she come across, communicate to people.”

The magazines boast enormous audiences, especially among the younger women whom Clinton’s camp has always counted on for support — millions of readers, according to Hearst, which owns Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Elle. Cosmo reports its “reach” (an audience measure combining print and digital readers) to be 53 million, Glamour’s about 28 million, Vogue’s at 28 million, Elle at 21 million.

It’s a hugely important demographic for Clinton and Republican rivals, too: According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, women have cast 4 million to 7 million more votes than men in recent elections. Additionally, a higher proportion of women under the age of 44 voted in the past four presidential elections. That pattern is reversed among older voters. The main audience of these magazines? Young women.

“These are not typically women who are sitting at home at 6 p.m. at night watching the evening news,” Gage said. “They’re not sitting and watching Sunday morning shows. You have to reach them where they’re at.”

Kate Glassman Bennett contributed to this report.