Are White Women Going to Do It Again?

In the final stretch before election day, former president Donald Trump has made a desperate play for women voters by suddenly re-framing himself as a champion of our bodily autonomy. He posted on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” despite having bragged about personally getting Roe v. Wade overturned. He insisted in an all-caps rant, mid-Vice Presidential debate, that he would veto a national abortion ban, despite his own running mate saying in the same debate that their ticket supports a “minimum national standard,” which is the same thing. And his wife, Melania, suddenly came out as passionately pro-choice in a new, well-timed memoir.

Trump knows he needs to make up ground with women in order to have a fighting chance this cycle. He lost his re-election bid in 2020 thanks to a 15-point deficit among women voters—particularly Black women, who preferred Joe Biden by a margin of 91 to 8 percent. And the polls this cycle are predicting an even bigger, potentially historic gender gap in the wake of the former president being found civilly liable for rape and the fallout from Dobbs—that is, if white women don’t break for him again this time around.

“The fake news keeps saying women don't like me. I don’t believe it,” Trump said at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in early October. He added that he would be women’s “protector” as a president and that his second term would be so great for us that we will no longer be “lonely or scared” or even “thinking about abortion.”

Trump’s latest attempts to gaslight women into supporting him feels pretty delusional, given the barrage of horror stories we’ve been reading for the past two years about women suffering and even dying as a result of the abortion bans he enabled. But he is right about one thing: White women, the largest voting bloc in the country, have favored Trump in the past two elections, over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (47 percent to 45 percent) and notably more strongly for Joe Biden (55 percent to 43 percent) in 2020. In fact, white women have voted majority Republican for the past 70 years in all but two presidential elections—Lyndon Johnson’s in ‘64 and Bill Clinton’s in ‘96. Democratic candidates have only managed to win in recent years, frankly, on the backs of women of color. And Black women are tired of having to carry the burden, and frankly, as they should be.

“We marched. We organized. We mobilized. We cried. We screamed. We wrote anti-racism book lists (that none of y’all read). We went above and beyond, and what did we get in return?” Taylor Crumpton, a Black journalist, wrote in a searing Washington Post column in 2020. “Numerous reminders that 94 percent of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that we’d better replicate our previous voting behaviors if we wanted to head off another disaster.”

Four years later, it’s looking quite possible that Kamala Harris may be the first candidate in nearly three decades to actually peel white women off from the Republican Party. While polls are certainly imperfect predictors of voting outcomes, a new Suffolk University/USA Today poll taken six weeks out from election day shows Harris leading Trump by a whopping 21 points among women, and a separate 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll finds that white women prefer Harris by six points. (White men favor Trump by 14 points in the latter survey, while Black women and men favor Harris by margins of 59 and 30 points, respectively.)

The tides may be turning this year in part because activists are specifically targeting and galvanizing their white women peers, trying to course correct a voting trend that’s become especially baffling in the era of Trump. In July, just after Biden dropped out of the race and made way for the Democratic Party’s first-ever Black woman nominee, activists Shannon Watts and Erin Gallagher organized a “White Women for Harris” Zoom call that grew so massive, it crashed Zoom several times and even broke the Democratic Party’s website. 164,000 white women joined the call, and together they raised $8.5 million for Harris. (It's important to note that call was preceded by the historically-attended Win With Black Women Zoom event.) “We were just, like, ‘We have to own this,’” Gallagher told 19th News after the event. “We need to own the fact that white women have deeply fucked this up every fucking time.’”

Beyond even considering the historic nature of Harris’ presidency, the stakes this election cycle for women are higher than ever. Since Trump was able to appoint three Supreme Court justices in his first term, solidifying a conservative supermajority that scrapped half a century of reproductive rights, red states are tripping over themselves to pass the most restrictive, draconian abortion bans possible. The six-week ban in Georgia has already killed two Black women whose deaths the state deemed “preventable,” leaving their four children without mothers, and emergency rooms across the country are refusing to treat women having miscarriages for fear of running afoul of the new laws.

Republicans are also openly coming for IVF, birth control, and no-fault divorce, in an effort to redefine the American family and women’s role in it. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has mocked women without children as “miserable cat ladies," said working mothers aren’t “normal people,” and suggested that women must stay in violent marriages for the sake of their kids. And Trump, of course, has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by over a dozen women and spewed so much sexism over the years that it’s impossible to fully catalog.

And yes, women of color are notably worse off than white women in this country under Trump’s policies. Abortion restrictions enabled by Trump’s Supreme Court have disproportionately hurt Black women, whose maternal mortality rate was already nearly three times that of any other race. Children of color have to be escorted to school right now, amid bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, because JD Vance made up (and Trump amplified) a fake story about Haitian migrants there eating people’s pets. It’s also communities of color who are hit the hardest by the climate crisis, which Trump continues to deny, and by the worsening income inequality thanks to his tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.

But if white women think that their whiteness somehow insulates them from the patriarchy—or from the corporate greed fueling climate change, income inequality, the housing crisis, the unaffordability of childcare—they are sorely mistaken. White women, too, are being left to bleed out with ectopic pregnancies and losing their ability to conceive due to state abortion bans. White women are also dying and losing friends and family in extreme weather crises shaped by human negligence. And while the Harris/Walz ticket is hardly a cure-all to all these ills, the contrast between Harris and Trump—especially on our collective right to bodily autonomy—is abundantly clear. It’s long past time for white women to join Black women in the fight to protect us all.