What Do Wives Want?

In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: sorting out the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic vote whipping saw women affixing stickers and sticky notes to places other women are likely to encounter privately: 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, meant to be read in secret with the promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign-season material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently took the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris-Walz video featuring Julia Roberts as narrator, saying: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen parting from her male partner to mark her ballot—and over the partition locks eyes with a second woman, about her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris and 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 glance with the second woman as the two pat on their I Voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Canny wife assures husband she’ll vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman voting for Harris and does the same.  

These invitations to quiet rebellion tend to lack a substantive pitch, though some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. The point seems to be not persuading conservative women, but rather providing permission to women who are privately liberal to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats are guessing that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris so long as they were certain their vote would be kept secret. If they’re right, they have unearthed a new source of liberal votes formerly presumed lost to the left. But that’s a big if.

[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters do not understand]

Conservatives have been predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out [my wife] was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” the Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on air. “I think it’s so gross,” the right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.” It is unsurprising that the same political faction obsessed with cuckoldry would see the ad through that particular lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: Implications of secrecy between spouses and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families as traditionally unified under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to account for much of the conservative backlash.  

The electoral prospects matter too, and both sides have the same interest in the votes of America’s tens of millions of married women. In this respect, conservatives have a historical advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of the 2016 electorate found that about half of validated voters (both men and women) were married, and that a majority of them—55 percent—supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute issued a report stating that 52 percent of married women had voted for Trump, compared with 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what backers of Harris’s campaign seem to hope is that some of these married women are in fact quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is a bit of evidence to that effect. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women have voted differently from their partners in secret. This is perhaps why CNN recently noted the rise of a Facebook group devoted to “wives of the deplorables,” who discuss their gradual alienation from their MAGA spouses. Prompted to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s politics in New York magazine, four women offered similar stories: Their marriage hadn’t been especially political in the beginning, but then their partner had been radicalized by right-wing media orbiting Trump. These anecdotes tease a broader phenomenon of women voters who find themselves at odds with their male partner.

The likelier scenario may be that women who have previously voted Republican are simply conservative. Marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-leaning pundits speculate that a difference in values between the married and unmarried 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 may push men and women to the right.” An analysis of American and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gender-linked fate,” or the notion that their fortunes are tied to those of their sex. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gender-linked fate, compared with 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

This micro-effort to get married women to support Harris is obviously  part of a much larger campaign for these voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknowable, but in an election that could be decided by minuscule margins, a secret Harris-supporting wife is a reasonable target. Traditional matrimonial advice may hold that no secrets should exist between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy preempt the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love—and the voting booth.