Even in its last moments, Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made this election about women in the most blatantly ugly ways—their sexism on grotesque display. In doing so, the two men brought into harsh focus why women, and anyone who cares about women and their rights, must vote for Kamala Harris.
Late Monday, Trump said of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “She’s an evil, sick, crazy...” Trump said, then breathed the words “bi...” before stopping himself. “Oh no,” Trump said, before mouthing words in to microphone. “It starts with a ‘b’ but I won’t say it,” he added. “I wanna say it,” he interjected. “I wanna say it.” The New York Times previously reported how Trump called Harris “bitch” repeatedly in private (his campaign denied it).
Brought on by Trump to be a hatchet man, up until Monday night Vance’s standout campaign moments were his “childless cat ladies” comment, and making up stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets. On election eve, he upped the ante on Trump’s garbage man metaphor and called Harris, “trash,” eliciting this response from MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
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“JD Vance you just f'’ed up in a way I’ve never seen in my political life and I worked for Sarah Palin,” the former GOP operator said.
Earlier Monday, when a rally-goer shouted that Harris should be put in the ring with Mike Tyson, who had a reputation for pummeling opponents, Trump ran with the idea, tantalizing the crowd with how “interesting” that would be. Previously, he vowed, incredibly creepily, to “protect” women, whether they “like it or not.” He even said former congresswoman Liz Cheney should have guns “trained on her face.”
Women watching this spectacle in the campaign’s final days are not titillated. They’re repelled. And if Harris wins this election, it’s because they turned out in record numbers.
The shy Harris voter who‘s a woman is a real thing, and if the Democrats hold the White House, it will be thanks to her. She has seen her right to accessible abortion taken away from her, sanctioned by a Trump-shaped Supreme Court—with possibly much worse to come when it comes to her reproductive rights. She’s everywhere. She’s someone’s mother, wife, sister, and we’ll know in a couple of days if we read the early signals right, that she exists in sufficient numbers to keep a felon out of the White House.
And if Harris wins by more than a couple points, pollsters will say, “What have we missed?”
“They missed that women are turning out in bigger numbers,” says Jim Kessler with Third Way, a progressive centrist group. He did the numbers for me. In the seven swing states, the female to male early vote is 55 percent female to 45 percent male.
“Male anger is a lot more vocal. MAGA males are loud dudes. They make a lot of noise and make their presence known,” says Kessler. “A lot of the Harris-supporting women are in the suburbs and towns and making their noise at the ballot box. They’re not carrying signs.”
The weekend release of the highly regarded Iowa poll suggests late-breaking deciders, the so-called double haters, were breaking for Harris, a sign that Harris had broken through with a little help from Trump, whose rhetoric was dark and dangerous as he veered off script.
The New York Times/Siena poll released Monday also had good news for Harris, showing she had a modest lead in enough of those swing states to win enough electoral votes to claim the presidency, though it’s close enough that her lead is within the margin of error.
Like most polls it assumed an electorate of roughly 52 percent female and 48 percent male with a huge gender gap. Kamala Harris is winning women by 15 points and Donald Trump is winning men by 15 points. “They would cancel each other out, but if women are 53 percent of the vote at least, she wins,” says Kessler.
This is the post-Roe vote, and Kessler’s bet is that the pollsters’ model doesn’t take that into account. In a way it should be obvious. In every election since Roe was overturned in 2021, women have voted their opposition.
The question before us in 2024: Does the fury of women only make a difference in states where Roe is on the ballot? In Ohio, a red state that Trump should win handily, voters approved new constitutional protections for abortion a year ago.
Cautioning that this is anecdotal, Kessler says his wife was in Ohio, a red state, and saw a sticky post-it note in a public place that said, “Your vote is secret. You don’t need to tell anybody.”
Those sticky notes are popping up in places women frequent: restrooms, dressing rooms, even on packaging of female-centric drugstore items. Groups organized on Facebook, including one dubbed, “Cat Ladies for Kamala,” are behind the reminders that amplify what Liz Cheney said when she was campaigning with Harris. “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”
Actress Julia Roberts entered the fray with her narration of a pro-Harris ad of two women conspiring to secretly vote counter to what their husbands were doing. The MAGA crowd took offense at such a personal insurrection.
Cheney predicts that millions of Republican women will quietly cast their secret ballot for Harris in the privacy of the voting booth.
“We won’t know it’s real until the election,” Kessler cautions, but the early vote is 60 percent of the total vote in 2020, when we were in the middle of a pandemic. Seventy-three million people have already voted, which is much higher than 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.
Bottom line: Women traditionally turn out slightly more than men. “If she’s winning women by 15 and more women show up than men, she wins.”
If there’s an historical analogy to what’s happening with women today, it is 1992 when women fueled by anger at the way an all-male panel of male senators demeaned Anita Hill for bringing sexual harassment charges against a candidate for the Supreme Court turned out in record numbers to elect a record number of women senators (4).
They made their point even though Clarence Thomas was seated and remains on the Supreme Court more than thirty years later.
Whatever the outcome of this election, women are making their case for themselves and all of us.
