Voters have selected a neoliberal candidate every election for decades. Republicans are even more neoliberal than the mainstream Democratic party is. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is inherently a neoliberal tenet. “Free market” economics is a neoliberal tenet.

Neoliberal doesnt mean “new liberal” as in “new left wing politics”. It is a rehashing of the term liberal as in classical liberalism. Neoliberalism is a spectrum of political approaches that spans everything from virtually-no-government libertarianism all the way to ineffectual big government (IE mainstream leftwing politics). Its all various approaches to the question “how small can government be while still maintaining the status quo of the social contract, the market, and extractive economic policy?”.

Progressive politics, of most all forms, are closer to classical liberalism because classical liberalism also spawned socialism eventually, just as it spawned neoliberalism. It goes back to the idea that government should actually be something for people, not the bare minimum of whatever placates people while still being able to bleed them dry.

Quite honestly, given the American penchant for electing neoliberals, and the rich man’s affinity for funding them, a neoliberal woman is far more likely to get elected than a woman who isnt. Hence Kamala and Hillary both being nearly elected. The only reason they lost is because they were running against an even more neoliberal candidate whos party has the EC locked up. America elected its first black president because he was a neoliberal. If Obama had been a Mamdani style progressive candidate he would have gotten smacked down by John McCain. He probably wouldnt have gotten anywhere near the nomination