"Can my husband find out who I am voting for in the Presidential Election?"
Olivia Dreizen Howell, the founder of a website to help women get back on their feet after a breakup or divorce, tweeted last week, "We've been getting this question a lot," so she followed up with some facts. As the Washington Post confirmed with experts, the answer is simple: "No; it will be public record that you voted, but not how you filled out your ballot."
It's a useful reminder that secret ballots remain secret, even from nosy spouses. But that doesn't explain why the original tweet from Howell went viral, racking up over 8.5 million views and 14,000 retweets. As the comments under the post suggest, most people were envisioning a specific scenario: Thousands, perhaps millions of women, saddled with Donald Trump-voting jerks for husbands, who yearn to give their vote to Vice President Kamala Harris this November. "I think 'secret voting' by MAGA partners is a more widespread issue than most people think," one woman replied. Another man wrote, "As a poll worker, I have had to deal with husbands and fathers who want to join their wives or daughters in the voting booth to 'make sure they vote the right way.'"
Outside of anecdotes, it's hard to know how common it is for men to control the votes of wives or other women in their families. Exit polling data shows a 12-point gap between how married and unmarried women voted in 2020, but a smaller seven-point gap between how married and unmarried men voted. Still, the differences aren't all up to men forcing their wives to vote for the candidate of their choice. Some are due to age and other demographic differences between married and unmarried people. There's also a whole range of ways men exert power over women that fall short of outright abuse. Educating the public about their secret ballot rights is good, but don't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome.
The image of a downtrodden wife rebelling against her MAGA husband by voting for Harris resonates for symbolic reasons. Harris has only been the Democratic nominee for a few weeks, yet this election feels more shaped by questions of gender and power than any in the nation's history. The GOP ticket is led by a sexual predator who a jury found "'raped' [journalist E. Jean Carroll] as many people commonly understand the word 'rape,'" the judge in the case wrote. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has called for a national abortion ban, wrote the forward to a book that denounced contraception for making pregnancy "seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex," and repeatedly called women who haven't given birth "sociopathic" and "childless cat ladies."
Meanwhile, the Democratic ticket is led by a woman who chose "Freedom" by Beyoncé as her campaign song, and has dispensed with the mealy-mouthed language about abortion rights to declare she stands for "the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body." Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, her running mate, has decried "weird" MAGA Republicans of the "he-man woman haters’ club."
As Lyz Lenz, author of "This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life," explained to Salon, "Voting is personal, especially because Republicans want to pass laws that control your personal life ... And this is hitting us in our homes and our relationships."
Lenz said she "ended my marriage after the 2016 election" because "I watched someone who said he loved me vote for someone who had been credibly accused of rape and who spoke about women like they were trash." She implored women who disagree with MAGA husbands to ask themselves, "Why am I married to someone who doesn't respect my choices?"
There are intriguing signs suggesting that many women are asking that question and coming to the same conclusion as Lenz. As I wrote about last month, pollster Daniel Cox found that the biggest voting gap is not between never-married men and women, much less married couples. It's between divorced men and women. Divorced men are 14 points more likely to vote for Trump than their female counterparts. In contrast, single men prefer Trump by 9 points over single women, and married men are only 5 points Trumpier than married women.
Cox, who is conservative, offers a convoluted analysis pointed towards his wish more people would marry and stay married. The simpler explanation is the one Lenz offers: "There is a virulent male sense of grievance in the world fueled by conservative politics" and many women who "experience it firsthand" decide not to put up with it. More data is needed, but it may be less that men become more Republican after divorce and more that Republican men are more likely to run their wives off in the first place.
There's no doubt that the Trump campaign and the larger MAGA movement are increasingly pushing a message of bringing women to men's heel by force. Trump and Vance know that abortion bans are unpopular, so they're busy trying to conceal their anti-choice radicalism with mealy-mouthed claims that they want to "leave it to the states." Yet Vance, who has denounced no-fault divorce laws and describes it merely as "inconvenient" to force rape victims to give birth, keeps giving the game away. Close Trump ally Charlie Kirk, who is allegedly organizing the voter turnout effort, declared that birth control "screws up women's brains." Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who Trump endorsed in North Carolina's gubernatorial race, declared women should be "led by men," and said, "I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote."
Zack Beauchamp of Vox calls the MAGA agenda the "neopatriarchy." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., simply called it the "incel platform." After the Supreme Court ended abortion rights in 2022 with the Dobbs decision, the mask fully came off. The days of treacly language about "pro-life" policies have given way to yelling about how "childless cat ladies" must be stopped. But of course, the only way to "stop" childlessness is by forcing childbirth.
JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women pic.twitter.com/sGfZBpT5YF
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 28, 2024
Truthfully, I doubt many women want to vote for Harris and hide it from their husbands. Voting behavior, marriage, and identity don't work like that. People tend to be married to people they agree with politically. Even when women do become more Republican to conform to a husband's expectations, they often do so more to reduce cognitive dissonance and not because they feel forced. As Lenz experienced, if a couple does disagree, the questions of gender and dignity are so personal that the relationship often falls apart for reasons beyond just partisan affiliation.
Still, the picture of a wife thumbing her nose at her MAGA husband by voting for Harris is arresting. It reflects a larger sense among liberal women that they're standing up for themselves and their freedom in the face of men who want to take it all away. In reality, most of us don't have these MAGA men in our beds or our kitchens. But we're still stuck with them, as neighbors and fellow citizens who, like an abusive husband, are looking for whatever power they can to wield over us. One important step in wresting back control of ourselves: the voting booth.
