Most will agree that scholars of political science will examine the two-year cycle of this American presidential election for generations to come. The essays in this symposium are “first reads,” and due to time and space constraints can only identify a handful of trends. Suffice it to say that Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin's candidacies are a boon to women and politics scholars, offering a wide swath of research questions and data to mine. The use of gender as an analytical category (Hawkesworth 2006; Scott 1986) will enhance examinations of the vast difference in Clinton's and Palin's ideologies, candidacies, and gendered performances in a way that illuminates, rather than obscures, the ideological diversity among women in the United States (see Schreiber 2008). Yet the deep attention paid to Clinton and Palin has so far focused on gender despite the candidates' own allusions to race and class identities as complicating factors in their gendered self-presentations. To focus solely on their positions as female candidates obscures some important macro-level questions about the 2008 election as a watershed moment, whether the focus is on “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” or the shift in target voters from soccer moms into hockey moms.