Madam President?

The 2020 US election will mark 100 years since women won the vote in America and waiting in the wings to fight Trump are three incredible female Democrats, hoping to celebrate the anniversary with a woman in the White House. Nick Bryant investigates.

- Nick Bryant

The year 2020 promises to be one for the history books, a moment in time when two opposing forces seem destined to collide. Donald Trump, if his presidency has not imploded by then, will seek re-election. American women will mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which granted them the right to vote. Unsurprisingly, female campaigners, emboldened by #MeToo, Time’s Up and the Weinstein effect, are linking these two events. What better way to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage, they reckon, than to shatter the most durable glass ceiling in global politics, and to evict from the White House a boorish misogynist who has boasted of sexually molesting women?

Three Democratic women, determined to succeed where Hillary Clinton failed, harbour ambitions to be in the centre of that double celebration. Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris. All of them are members of the United States Senate. All of them are former lawyers. All of them are outspoken critics of the President. And all of them want to make 2020 the year of the woman. Never before in US politics have so many female candidates eyed up the possibility of becoming America’s first Madame president.

Of the three, Elizabeth Warren, a 68-year-old former Harvard professor, is the most well known. This is partly because Donald Trump has done so much to raise her profile. To the President she’s “Pocahontas,” the nickname, combining everyday sexism with a racial slur, he regularly uses to mock her claim to Cherokee heritage. It stems from Elizabeth’s personal story of how her parents eloped because her father’s conservative family from Oklahoma were bitterly opposed to their son marrying a woman with a Native American bloodline.