Last week, Kamala Harris’ campaign released an ad featuring a blond woman in a sparkly American flag hat walking into a polling station behind her husband. She makes eye contact with another woman; the two smile, and fill in their ballots for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” says Julia Roberts in a voice-over, “you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.”
As tens of millions of Americans head to the polls, that’s a novel message for female voters partnered with conservative men: What you do in the voting booth is private, and no one—including your husband—will know. It’s a compelling pitch, and a valuable message. But it’s also a window into a troubling reality. Hopefully, the women who back Harris against their husband’s wishes will vote as they please today, and then do some serious soul-searching tomorrow.
It’s unclear exactly how many of these women exist, but Democratic canvassers say they come across them with some regularity, especially in conservative-leaning states. According to a YouGov poll, one in eight women (and one in ten men) have voted differently from their spouse and kept that fact a secret. The same poll found that 46 percent of men believe their wives are voting for Donald Trump even though Harris has a much more significant lead among women, suggesting that at least some of them are wrong.
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The mere suggestion that women may vote for Democrats on the down-low has sent some conservative men into a tizzy. Fox News host Jesse Waters opined on air that if his wife secretly voted for Harris, he’d consider it a major betrayal on par with an affair (something Waters knows a bit about). Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk complained of the woman in the Harris ad while also, of course, making it all about the man: “her sweet husband, who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provides for the family, and she lies to him.”
These are lazy arguments that have been made ever since suffragists campaigned to enfranchise women: That men are their households’ heads and political representatives, and their wives have no right to undermine that particularly male privilege. (And to be clear, being married to a man who thinks like this sounds exhausting and profoundly unpleasant.)
No election in my lifetime has made these gender divides clearer. This election isn’t just about a chauvinistic man running against a highly-qualified woman. Among other issues, it’s also a referendum on abortion, the banning of which Trump set into motion. Abortion bans, feminists rightly say, are less about protecting fetal life than about exerting control over women; there are a lot of right-wing men out there who want to oversight of decision a woman makes, whether that’s in her doctor’s office or in the voting booth.
Story after story of women losing their fertility, losing their uteruses or even dying because of abortion bans doesn’t change the minds of these men, or even engender much sympathy, let alone soul-searching. That’s because a deep commitment to life was never the motivation for these punishing abortion bans; control was.
Couples do not have to be perfectly politically aligned to have strong relationships, and the nation would probably be better off if more of us were close to people whose worldviews were quite different than our own. But differences of opinion on, say, tax policy or welfare support is very different than diverging on a woman’s basic role in the family and in the world. Being married to someone who does not believe you have as much of a right to an opinion, to political participation, and even to your own body as he does? That’s a matter of basic respect and humanity, which he is not according you.
No doubt some of the women being encouraged to vote for Harris against their husbands’ wishes are doing their best to survive abusive situations. Many others, though, are just married to jerks. Relationships don’t have to be abusive to be bad. And men who believe their partners are obligated to vote as they do? There is no good relationship to be had with them.
On Election Day, women are more than justified in voting for what they believe and want to see, rather than deferring to controlling men. But I hope they wake up on November 6 and ask what the heck they’re doing. And that they choose freedom again.
