The micro-campaign to target private liberal wives

In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, her supporters have taken on a daunting task: sorting out the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. At the end of September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic voting had women sticking stickers and notes in places other women are likely to encounter in private: women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and the backs of tampon boxes. They all contained an appeal for the Harris-Walz ticket: “Woman to Woman,” one read: “No one sees your vote at the polls! Vote for the women and girls you love!” Intimate little letters, intended to be read in secret with a promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign season material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently made the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good voted produced -one Harris-Walz video with Julia Roberts as narrator saying, “In the one place in America where women still have the right to vote, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen separating from her male partner to mark her ballot – and across the partition, she locks eyes with another woman her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris, then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we gather, based on his patriotic hat) and assures him she made the right choice. She shares a private look with the other woman as the two clap their hands I voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video similarly: The wise wife assures her husband that she will vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman who is voting for Harris and does the same.

These invitations to quiet rebellion tend to lack a substantive pitch, although some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. The point seems not to persuade conservative women, but rather to give permission to women who are private liberals to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats are guessing that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris as long as they were sure their vote would be kept secret. If they’re right, they’ve found a new source of liberal votes previously thought to be lost to the left. But it’s big if.

Read: What the Kamala Harris Doubters Don’t Understand

Conservatives have been predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out (my wife) had to go to the polls and pull the lever for Harris, that’s the same as having an affair,” Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on air. “I think it’s so gross,” right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I think it’s so sickening where this wife wears the American hat, she comes in with her sweet husband, who probably works his tail off to make sure she can go and have a nice life and provide for the family, and then she lies. to him and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret at the ballot box. Not surprisingly, the same political faction obsessed with cockiness would view the ad through that very lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: Implications of spousal secrecy and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families traditionally united under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to account for much of the conservative backlash.

The options also matter, and both sides have an equal interest in America’s votes tens of thousands of millions of married women. In this regard, conservatives have a historic advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center map out of voters in 2016 found that about half of eligible voters (both men and women) were married, and that a majority of them—55 percent—supported Trump. Following the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute issued a report states that 52 percent of married women had voted for Trump, compared to 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what supporters of the Harris campaign seem to be hoping is that some of these married women are actually quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is a bit of evidence for that. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women have secretly voted differently from their partners. That may be why CNN recently noted the emergence of a Facebook group dedicated to “the wives of the deplorables” who discuss their gradual estrangement from their MAGA spouses. Asked to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s policies in New York magazineoffered four women similar stories: Their marriage hadn’t been particularly political at first, but then their partner had been radicalized by right-wing media that revolved around Trump. These anecdotes tease a wider phenomenon of female voters finding themselves at odds with their male partner.

The more likely scenario may be that women who have voted Republican in the past are simply conservative. Marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-wing pundits speculate that a difference in values ​​between married and unmarried couples explains the gap. “We know that marriage is simply a higher priority for people with a more conservative worldview,” Peyton Roth and Brad Wilcox wrote for AEI, adding that “marriage can push men and women to the right.” An analysis of US and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gendered destiny”, or the notion that their fortunes are tied to those of their gender. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gendered destiny, compared to 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women are becoming more conservative and see yourself as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

Of course, this micro-effort to get married women to support Harris is part of a much larger campaign for those voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknown, but in an election that could be decided by narrow margins, a secret Harris-supporting wife is a reasonable target. Traditional marriage advice may say that there should be no secrets between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy come before inner harmony. All’s fair in love – and the ballot box.