This Election Is Women's Work
If Republicans lose this week, it will be because they took women's contributions for granted—at the polls and in our private lives.
If the 2024 presidential election has featured a November surprise, it was a Saturday night poll of Iowa voters that found Kamala Harris to be leading Donald Trump by three points in the typically red state.
Political observers have issued all the expected caveats. Yes it’s only one poll, albeit a good one. Yes, a Trump Iowa win is within the poll’s margin of error.
Still: Harris’s gains are monumental in Iowa where Trump held an 18-point lead over Joe Biden in June. What’s changed? A more compelling Democratic candidate, to be sure. But the poll’s crosstabs revealed a stark gender divide, with Iowa women preferring Harris by a 20-point margin. Those numbers include a dramatic pro-Harris shift among independent and older women. And whether causal or coincidental, that shift tracks alongside Iowa’s implementation of a highly unpopular six-week abortion ban at the end of July.
This election is about women. That’s not just my read of countless polls that show the largest-ever gender divide in presidential polling. Both parties have made this election a referendum on women’s role in the world. In rolling back abortion rights, smearing childless women as incomplete, sexually harassing women in public life, and championing retrograde gender roles, the right has offered women a degraded position in the world.
This program stands to impoverish and kill women. To understand the stakes, we need not even revisit recent history, when women were unable to obtain credit or no-fault divorces or legal abortions. The stakes are playing out around us already. As a consequence of America’s first Trump presidency, women are dying of sepsis after being denied medical care. Women and girls who would have obtained abortions are abbreviating their dreams after being coerced into motherhood. They are poorer, with fewer options, and newly dependent on men and relatives from whom they might otherwise have sought freedom. These are not abstractions but real risks to our friends, our sisters, ourselves.
It’s little wonder, then, that in the final hours of the 2024 campaign, leading conservative voices appear less concerned about rallying Republicans writ-large than about stoking male-specific grievance and urging men to the polls. It’s little wonder that a growing babble of conservative voices have flirted with the idea of denying women’s votes or awarding them to their husbands. The GOP envisions an extractive gender hierarchy, by which men are empowered to compel women’s un- and underpaid work. And if women aren’t going to vote for that, the right is counting on men to make it reality.
On the opposite side of the aisle, voters have the opportunity to elect the nation’s first female president. And while Harris is an imperfect candidate, her presidency represents, at minimum, an opportunity to slow the bleed of women’s rights. It represents the forceful refusal of a misogynist platform and the elevation of a woman to the top of a public sphere that is constantly threatening to shut women out.
If Republicans lose this week, it will be because they took women for granted—at the polls and in our private lives.
Tomorrow I’ll take my sons to the polling station with me. They’re young and won’t remember much of the voting process. In a way, I hope there’s little for them to remember. I hope that, as men, the election of a female president will not seem like a watershed moment, but a normal episode in the course of the country’s politics. I hope tomorrow marks the start of something better, for their generation and for mine.