The 2016 pres­i­den­tial race is already upon us. As in 2008, Hillary Clin­ton is poised to become the first woman in Amer­i­can his­to­ry to be nom­i­nat­ed for pres­i­dent by a major polit­i­cal par­ty. Once again, a debate has emerged: just how impor­tant to fem­i­nists is Hillary’s poten­tial nom­i­na­tion, and presidency?

People are ready for a more left-wing message; Obama got elected on a whole lot of young people who were ready for genuine progressivism instead of compromise.

Thus far, the media has tend­ed to shoe­horn fem­i­nist debates into a shop­worn nar­ra­tive of inter­gen­er­a­tional con­flict, pit­ting ​“sec­ond wave” Hillary sup­port­ers against younger fem­i­nists who sup­pos­ed­ly reject Clinton’s fem­i­nism as too old school. But con­trary to these media accounts, polls indi­cate that Hillary’s sup­port is notably high­er among young women than among their old­er counterparts.

More­over, the media’s schemat­ic gen­er­a­tional fram­ing obscures many of the deep­er, more far-reach­ing ques­tions that fem­i­nists are grap­pling with. Would a woman pres­i­dent, even a fem­i­nist-iden­ti­fied woman like Hillary, nec­es­sar­i­ly improve women’s lot as a class? Will the can­di­dates speak to the grow­ing Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment? And what about fem­i­nists on the Left, who are enthu­si­as­tic about the eco­nom­ic poli­cies of social­ist can­di­date Bernie Sanders but wor­ry that he might not also pri­or­i­tize gen­der and racial jus­tice issues?

To dis­cuss these con­cerns, In These Times brought togeth­er three of our favorite fem­i­nists: Sady Doyle, an In These Times staff writer and founder of the blog Tiger Beat­down; Liza Feath­er­stone, a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor and author of Sell­ing Women Short: Land­mark Bat­tle for Work­ers’ Rights at Wal­mart; and Andrea Plaid, con­tribut­ing edi­tor at the Fem­i­nist Wire.

Who are you sup­port­ing for president?

LIZA: Bernie Sanders. It’s very excit­ing that a social­ist is run­ning and address­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, which is rarely tak­en seri­ous­ly in the U.S. polit­i­cal conversation.

SADY: Hillary Clin­ton. She has served for a long time and proven her right to be there. I’m 33, and as some­one who’s grown up with Hillary and seen her uphill bat­tle toward being any­thing oth­er than a punch line, I have an emo­tion­al invest­ment in her.

ANDREA: Nei­ther of these can­di­dates excites me. I have ​“Clin­ton fatigue” — the sheer tired­ness of both Clin­tons tak­ing up space in the polit­i­cal land­scape. And I’m even more tired of the ​“every­thing is about class” rhetoric that is Sanders’s stump speech. That notion lacks as much inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty as main­stream, most­ly white fem­i­nists say­ing it’s all about gender.

Would a female pres­i­dent be mere­ly a sym­bol­ic vic­to­ry for feminism?

LIZA: Sym­bol­ic pol­i­tics are impor­tant. It’s pos­i­tive for lit­tle girls to see that the head of the coun­try is a woman. How­ev­er, we’ve seen many coun­tries elect con­ser­v­a­tive and neolib­er­al women who didn’t mate­ri­al­ly improve women’s lives. There is a woman run­ning and there is a social­ist run­ning, and sad­ly, they’re not the same person.

SADY: I would resist the idea that Hillary is a ​“con­ser­v­a­tive” woman, or a pure­ly sym­bol­ic fig­ure; nobody is say­ing that it’s a fem­i­nist choice to elect Car­ly Fio­r­i­na. Most fem­i­nists are smart enough to tell the dif­fer­ence between elect­ing a qual­i­fied can­di­date who hap­pens to be female and ​“elect­ing a woman.” That said, I do think there’s a resis­tance to hav­ing a woman in the high­est office in the land. Hillary becomes this ​“beloved” fig­ure when she’s work­ing for some­one else, yet attracts enor­mous ani­mos­i­ty when she runs for this par­tic­u­lar office. I wor­ry that, whether they’re say­ing it or not, some peo­ple don’t want to elect a woman.

Which fem­i­nist issues should be pri­or­i­ties for the next president?

SADY: Eco­nom­ic injus­tice, whether that’s fair wages or whether that’s the bur­den of pover­ty on sin­gle moth­ers work­ing out­side the home. It’s one of the rea­sons I’m excit­ed about Sanders as well as Clinton.

LIZA: I com­plete­ly agree. The most impor­tant issue is wages, both equal pay and in the larg­er sense of bet­ter jobs. Women are heav­i­ly bur­dened by these eco­nom­ic problems.

ANDREA: For me, these are cen­tral pri­or­i­ties, but I also think that racial jus­tice issues — wel­fare reform, access to com­pre­hen­sive repro­duc­tive-health edu­ca­tion and ser­vices, police bru­tal­i­ty, mass incar­cer­a­tion, depor­ta­tion, hous­ing — need to be pri­or­i­ties, too. Yeah, my fem­i­nism is mer­ri­ly messy like that.

LIZA: With­out the abil­i­ty to con­trol our bod­ies women are less than sec­ond class cit­i­zens. How­ev­er, I don’t think that the main­stream fem­i­nist strat­e­gy of using this issue to scare women into sup­port­ing oth­er­wise ter­ri­ble Democ­rats has worked. We’ve been see­ing this for years and access to abor­tion just keeps declin­ing, and poll num­bers on sup­port for abor­tion rights aren’t very heart­en­ing, either. So we clear­ly need a more grass roots strategy.

What are your biggest crit­i­cisms of Hillary and Bernie?

ANDREA: I don’t think either gets inter­sec­tion­al pol­i­tics. They talk about their bona fides: Hillary about her ini­tia­tives regard­ing women, Bernie about his eco­nom­ic jus­tice acco­lades and march­ing with King. But now we’re in the cli­mate of Black Lives Mat­ter. San­dra Bland, Ralk­i­na Jones, Raynet­ta Turn­er and Joyce Cur­nell have died in police cus­tody under ques­tion­able cir­cum­stances, as have non-Black women of col­or like San­dra Lee Cir­cle Bear, a Lako­ta woman. Their names need to said, and the nexus of issues that led to their deaths need to be addressed and ulti­mate­ly, elim­i­nat­ed.

LIZA: It’s baf­fling and dispir­it­ing that Bernie is not more out­spo­ken on racial injus­tice. I don’t think he doesn’t care. But he’s a stub­born old white man who doesn’t like to be crit­i­cized. With Hillary, my biggest crit­i­cism is her entire record: She has not only rep­re­sent­ed the main­stream of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but often pushed that main­stream to the Right.

SADY: I do wor­ry about that with Hillary. That’s been my crit­i­cism of every­body who’s won the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion. With Bernie Sanders, my crit­i­cism (if you can call it that) is that he has less expe­ri­ence on the world stage. Grant­ed, very few can­di­dates have the kind of high-lev­el expe­ri­ence Clin­ton does – very few peo­ple have been a Sen­a­tor and a Sec­re­tary of State and a high­ly vis­i­ble part of two Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tions – and the fact that she has that expe­ri­ence means there’s more of a record for us to parse and ques­tion. I also wor­ry about whether he’s going to be grace­ful in deal­ing with the nat­ur­al desire of peo­ple on the Left to test him on issues around race and gender.

LIZA: Years ago I went to a Bernie Sanders house par­ty with my baby, and instead of try­ing to kiss the baby, like a politi­cian, he just did what any old white man does, which is talk to you and ignore the baby.

Right now Bernie is trail­ing Hillary among women and vot­ers of col­or. Why do you think this is?

LIZA: Part­ly, because it’s some­what new to be run­ning a social demo­c­ra­t­ic plat­form that empha­sizes eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty. We don’t even expect a can­di­date to be talk­ing about these things so we don’t look for it. Women and peo­ple of col­or are used to the democ­rats being the only alter­na­tive to the repub­li­cans, so Hillary has a lot of name recog­ni­tion. But the issues that sanders is talk­ing about are impor­tant to these vot­ers, espe­cial­ly African Amer­i­cans. i do think his plat­form has the poten­tial to catch on.

ANDREA: I dis­agree. This isn’t about white women and peo­ple of col­or — and remem­ber that women of col­or fall into both cat­e­gories — not under­stand­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty. In fact, peo­ple of col­or can prob­a­bly school quite a few white pro­gres­sives on these matters.

LIZA: I didn’t mean to sug­gest that these vot­ers don’t under­stand eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty issues. Every poll shows we do.

ANDREA: Bernie’s prob­lem is he sounds too much like white pro­gres­sives and social­ists who over­sim­pli­fy our issues as ​“all about class.”

LIZA: I don’t think he exact­ly believes that. Equal pay for women is a sep­a­rate issue in his plat­form, and he has start­ed to say more about racial jus­tice. He obvi­ous­ly knows that these are impor­tant issues in them­selves. But yes, he often seems to change the sub­ject to eco­nom­ics as if they are more fun­da­men­tal and he shouldn’t do that, because, of course, it’s not true.

ANDREA: And that doesn’t mean that we’re nec­es­sar­i­ly run­ning to Hillary, either — again, quite a few of us remem­ber that she, her hus­band, and her most­ly white female sup­port­ers — includ­ing fem­i­nists — stood against peo­ple of col­or and our issues.

On the cam­paign trail, Hillary sounds like an eco­nom­ic pop­ulist, but she sup­port­ed poli­cies like NAF­TA, as well as ​“reforms” to wel­fare and bank­rupt­cy. Which Hillary should we believe?

LIZA: We should believe her record, which is neolib­er­al. Her cam­paign rhetoric is pret­ty much a response to mar­ket research and most like­ly, it ends there.

ANDREA: I agree with Liza on this.

SADY: Peo­ple do learn over the course of 20 years, and that Hillary has learned from people’s con­cerns about eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and the mid­dle class dis­ap­pear­ing. But there is the ​“liar” nar­ra­tive about Hillary: Due to entrenched misog­y­ny, the media views her with sus­pi­cion — this shad­owy, evil woman behind the scenes. We are more inclined to dis­trust her than anoth­er can­di­date who has moved left.

Do you wor­ry that Bernie is too far left for the vot­ers? That nom­i­nat­ing him could cost the Democ­rats the presidency?

LIZA: Not at all. He’s draw­ing huge crowds in places like Iowa that are cer­tain­ly not Berke­ley. But I don’t think that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment will actu­al­ly let him be nominated.

SADY: Peo­ple are ready for a more left-wing mes­sage; Oba­ma got elect­ed on a whole lot of young peo­ple who were ready for gen­uine pro­gres­sivism instead of com­pro­mise. I do wor­ry that Sanders vs. Clin­ton will become ugly. And we’re going to get to the fin­ish line unable to get behind the nom­i­nee, and then I am going to wake up one day and Ted Cruz will be president.

What­ev­er our dif­fer­ences, we real­ly can­not stand to have a Repub­li­can pres­i­dent again.

ANDREA: On that I agree.