Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own Interests?

It’s become something of a bleak election night ritual: assessing the exit polls and seeing that white women voters overwhelmingly threw their support behind conservative Republican male candidates. Again. They did it for President Trump, who won an estimated 53 percent of the white female vote in 2016. And they did it with Roy Moore, accused of sexually predatory behavior, in Alabama’s special Senate election last year. And while there were many thrilling, historic wins for progressive women and women of color in particular in the 2018 midterms, as well as data showing that some white women are peeling away from Trump, white women overall rendered more disappointment.

The latest gut punches, courtesy of CNN polling: In the Georgia governor’s race, an estimated 75 percent of white women—more even than white men!—voted for Republican Brian Kemp, who is passionately pro-life, over Stacey Abrams, a staunch protector of women’s reproductive rights, while 97 percent of black women supported her. In Texas, 60 percent of white women cast their ballots for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a supporter of alleged assaulters President Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, over Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is dedicated to improving women’s health care. (Ninety-four percent of black women backed O’Rourke.) The numbers were similar in the Florida governor’s race, where 51 percent of white women voted for Republican Ron DeSantis, who has voted against equal pay and the Violence Against Women Act, instead of Democrat Andrew Gillum, who wanted to protect no-cost birth control in the state. Just in case the pattern was unclear: Way more black women—82 percent—chose Gillum.

As sure as black women have proven themselves to be the often-underappreciated backbone of the Democratic party, white women voters are establishing themselves as maddeningly, confusingly . . . unsisterly.

The numbers are disheartening and disappointing and, for some progressive white women, shame inducing, that they are part of a demographic that has the power to decide key elections but continually uses it in favor of candidates whose policies are anti-women. We theorize and spitball: Are they so invested in their own white privilege that they simply don’t care about other women? Are they parroting their Republican husbands and/or brainwashed by Fox & Friends? Maybe and maybe. But either way, the rest of us shouldn’t be shocked, because if history serves, there is plenty of precedent for white women protecting their own power and status.

“Our perception that white women are going to vote the way ‘we’ think they should has been proven false over and over again,” Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, historian and author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, tells Vogue. She points to white women’s historic role in upholding racial segregation, from campaigning against the United Nations (on the grounds that it would upend the racial divide) to rallying against school integration after Brown v. Board of Education, including leading the charge against busing black students to new districts. The Confederate monuments that have caused so much modern-day controversy, McRae adds, were often funded by white women’s organizations, prior to the 19th Amendment.

And yet society at large tends to make an assumption about white women voters—that because they are oppressed by white men and the patriarchy they will stand with progressive social movements and rally in solidarity with the underrepresented. This lingering expectation has roots in the suffragettes of the 1910s and ’20s, who argued, according to McRae, “that women would bring a more moral, domestic, maternal, progressive outlook to the political arena, that they would clean up politics” and be an “inherently good” influence.

This presumption continues—that because “women want better schools for their children, that means they want them for everybody’s children,” McRae offers as an example, “but that is not the case.”

Look no further than all of the ink spilled and time spent investing hope in Ivanka Trump to be some sort of progressive heroine in her father’s White House, or reporters calling on Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be any more disgusted with the Trump administration’s family separations at the border because she’s a mother—never mind that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, among many other men in their ranks, are parents themselves. As McRae points out: No one looks at a family-oriented bill and says, “Oh, my God, how could fathers vote against this?”

Emotionally, though perhaps irrationally, we want to believe in white women’s better angels. We want to believe that certain issues should be universal to all women (and, really, all humans): a right to health care, to choose what’s best for our bodies, that our children should be safe at school. But, clearly, it’s not so simple. Even as we rightfully mourn their voting habits, we may be misguided to hold white women voters to a higher standard. Time and time again some of them have proven that they identify more strongly as Southerners or Christians or GOP members than they do as women—and they vote accordingly, even if and when that vote negatively impacts not only them (voting against equal pay) and their families (paid leave, affordable child care), but women in poverty, women of color, and queer women.

Whether we like or agree with them or not, “women’s political identities are complicated,” McRae says, “and they aren’t essentially tied to a particular expression of what we imagine for females.”

It’s tempting, in light of all this, to want to give up on white women. But even if we see history for what it is and adjust our expectations accordingly, the fact remains that white women make up a voting bloc that is too massive to ignore or simply write off. In both the 2016 general race and the 2018 midterms, white women made up approximately 37 percent of the electorate—more than all black, Latino, and other voters of color combined. Progressives may have no choice but to unglue from the face-palm position and try to connect with white women voters in the hopes of expanding their coalition.

“We abandon them at our peril,” says Jackie Payne, who this year founded GALvanize USA, an organization that is focusing specifically on engaging white women voters. “We can’t not connect with these women. We have to go and get them.”

Over the last year, in an effort to reach white women voters and “get them to see that our fates are linked,” Payne, an advocate who has worked at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Legal Defense and Education Fund and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has been holding focus groups and conducting one-on-one interviews with white women across the country, from Iowa to Maine, Arizona, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Payne notes that she’s not attempting conversion therapy (my words, not hers) with Women for Trump or passionate, partisan women on either side, but rather talking to sporadic and/or swing voters and moderate Republicans and Democrats, in hopes of building a progressive agenda “that works for everyone.”

“The women we’re talking to aren’t saying, ‘We don’t care about other folks,’” Payne says. On the contrary, some say, “All my husband cares about is how policy connects to him and his wallet. But I’m different. I care about people.”

Now after talking with hundreds of white women voters, Payne is in the somewhat tricky position of explaining what she has learned, without justifying their actions or denying the white privilege that is certainly at play for some. She says that while some see white women’s overwhelming tendency to vote for the GOP as a personal, moral failure, she believes it is a systemic problem, the result of a yarn ball of issues, including women voters having a lack of information and living with close ties to conservative men in communities that bleed red.

“White women in rural, small-town, and suburban America are connected to and surrounded by more conservative white men—fathers, husbands, pastors, uncles, brothers” who they are inclined to vote in tandem with, Payne says. Especially when those same men often “control the clicker”—tuned to Fox News, of course—and women, busy doing the lion’s share of domestic labor, tune out and end up with a lack of information about politics. A common thread among the white women she has met is that they feel isolated by politics, with some privately supporting gun reform, for example, but believing they are alone in that, either because women in their social circles don’t dive into political chats or because they don’t want to break from the community status quo—for fear of straining marriages or divorce, jeopardizing friendships, or even risking retribution. One woman whose family owns an auto body shop told Payne she was scared that customers—many who drive in with conservative radio pouring from their speakers—would shun the business if they found out she was merely moderate.

“They are swimming in the deep end of white male patriarchy,” says Payne.

This argument has its limits, of course. “Not to deny that patriarchy has power, but there is a danger to assume that women are operating under some kind of false consciousness . . . following the dictates of the men in their life or making all their decisions because of oppressed positions,” McRae says. “I say that because of the research that showed the daily, relentless work that white women did upholding the color line.”

I asked Payne why white women in prickly, patriarchal districts don’t just secretly cast blue ballots. Anecdotally, she says she’d been told that some do, while others plan to vote Democrat (and even tell pollsters as much) but at the final hour they fold. “These women aren’t talking to one another about what feels wrong,” Payne says. “Their perception is that they’re alone and it reinforces thinking ‘I’m wrong.’”

To counteract this cycle of low information, self-doubt, and isolation, Payne says that, based on her conversations with moderate white women voters in red communities, it is hugely impactful for them to find solidarity in one another. She knows of a secret women’s society in Texas in this vein, and points to a group of women who connected in traditionally conservative suburban Georgia after the 2016 election while volunteering at their children’s school: “It was on their faces; they’d been crying and looked like hot messes,” Payne says. They went on to build a network unified by a car magnet that read “LMRC”—Liberal Moms of Roswell and Cobb counties. The magnet was at first covert, a “bat signal,” Payne quips. But the moms from the group got more active, with one telling Payne she had gone canvassing for the first time, connected with an activist of color, and is striving to be a better white ally. “I needed to learn to advocate for myself,” the woman told Payne, “before I could stand with others.” In the LMRC’s long-red district, the Georgia 6th, Democrat Lucy McBath just flipped the House seat.

Of course, not all white women repeatedly voting for the GOP are underground liberals waiting for a sign on the carpool line. There are white women voters who willingly, and with all the information at their disposal, cast their votes in favor of politicians who blatantly do not have any of their best interests in mind, and many of those women believe that they are doing the right thing by themselves and their communities, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is hard to believe that any of their minds will be changed in any significant way by 2020. But there are shards of hope: The aforementioned shift away from Trump by white women voters in the midterms, for one. This week, an estimated 49 percent of white women voted for Democrats in House races, up from about 43 percent in 2016. CNN’s exit polls also show that college-educated white women, specifically, swung left, with 59 percent voting Democrat in the 2018 midterms, up from about 47 percent in 2014.

And now, in addition to head-hanging and hand-wringing and spurious, scolding tweets, the efforts by Democrats and progressives to understand and organize and reach out to white women voters continue. When we got off the phone on Wednesday, Payne said she was heading to Iowa to talk with white women who voted for Trump and then voted progressively in the midterms. Who knows? They just may be instructive for the future. As Payne says: “We need a larger share of white women standing up for progress for all.”