The micro-campaign to specifically target private liberal wives

In the final weeks of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: sorting out the thorny entanglements between politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic voter fraud resulted in women posting stickers and sticky 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 written with the Promise of secrecy should be read in secret. Unlike typical campaign material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently brought the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris Walz video narrated by Julia Roberts that said: “In the only place in America where women still have the right to vote, you can vote like you want and no one.” will ever know.” You see a woman separating from her male partner to mark her ballot – and looking over the partition at a second woman, about her age, who gives her a knowing Gives smiles. The first wife casts her vote for Harris and then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we assume from his patriotic hat) and assures him that she made the right choice. She takes a private look at the second woman as the two caress each other I voted Stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Smart wife assures her husband she'll vote for Donald Trump, then gets the attention of a young woman who votes for Harris, and does the same.

These calls for quiet rebellion typically lack a substantive tone, although some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. Apparently it's not about convincing conservative women, but rather about giving women who are privately liberal permission to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats suspect that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris as long as they were assured their vote would be kept secret. If they are right, they have discovered a new source of liberal votes that were once presumably lost to the left. But this is a big deal If.

Read: What Kamala Harris' doubters don't understand

Conservatives were predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out (my wife) went into the voting booth and pulled the lever for Harris, that would be the same as having an affair,” Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on the show. “I think it’s so disgusting,” right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I find it so disgusting that this woman wears the American hat, she comes with her sweet husband who probably goes out of his way to make sure she can have a nice life and provide for the family, and then she lies him and said, 'Oh yeah, I'll vote for Trump,' and then in the voting booth she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret.” Not surprisingly, the same cuckold-obsessed political faction is pushing through the ad would see this particular lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: the effects of secrecy between spouses and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families traditionally united under the authority of a father. This, even more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to be responsible for much of the conservative backlash.

The electoral prospects are also important, and both sides have equal interest in the votes of America's millions of married women. In this regard, the Conservatives have a historic advantage. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey of the electorate found that about half of confirmed voters (both men and women) were married and that the majority of them — 55 percent — supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute released a report that found 52 percent of married women voted for Trump, compared to 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, Harris' campaign supporters seem to be hoping that some of these married women are actually quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is some evidence of this. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women secretly voted differently than their partner. This is perhaps why CNN recently highlighted the rise of a Facebook group dedicated to the “wives of the deplorables” and discussing their gradual estrangement from their MAGA spouses. Asked to describe how they came to oppose their husband's policies new York In the US magazine, four women told similar stories: Their marriage was not particularly political at the beginning, but then their partner was radicalized by right-wing media that circled around Trump. These anecdotes draw attention to a broader phenomenon of female voters at odds with their male partners.

The more likely scenario may be that women who previously voted Republican are simply conservative. Marriage itself is tied to conservative politics. Right-wing experts speculate that a difference in values ​​between married and unmarried people explains the divide. “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.” A 2019 analysis published by the American and Australian voting behavior suggests that married white women have no sense of “gendered destiny,” or the idea that their fortunes are tied to that of their gender. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gendered fate, compared to 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and feel less connected to other women over the course of the marriage,” they concluded.

These micro-efforts to rally married women to support Harris are obviously part of a much larger campaign targeting these voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknown, but in an election that could be decided by tiny majorities, a woman who secretly supports Harris is a reasonable target. Traditional marriage advice may say that there should be no secrets between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy take precedence over the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love – and in the voting booth.