'I made a horrible mistake': Suburban women are rallying against Trump and slamming his belief that they'll vote for him

ichoi@businessinsider.com (Inyoung Choi)
Updated ·6 min read
suburban women - trump
Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue, poses as part of the "housewife challenge."

Katie Paris

  • Women in US suburbs are rallying against President Donald Trump's re-election efforts despite his claims that "suburban housewives" will be voting for him in 2020.

  • But Trump's image of voters in the suburbs is incredibly outdated, experts and women in the suburbs told Insider.

  • Suburban women, including those who voted for Trump in the 2016, told Insider how they are mobilizing collectively to remove a president they said goes against their values.

  • Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

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Four years ago, Erin Rosiello, a resident of the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, voted for Donald Trump.

"But within weeks I was so sorry for my decision and have been kicking myself ever since," Rosiello told Insider.

In 2016, Rosiello was trying to start her own business and said she was convinced that the US needed "somebody with a good business sense" instead of a "lifelong politician" running the country. At the time she had also been diagnosed with lung cancer.

After the election, she had to undergo chemotherapy and a lobectomy. She said the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has pledged to get rid of, and the "little piece that's left (has) kept me alive."

"I still fear every day that he's going to pull the plug on ACA, which will take away preexisting coverage — which would cost me my life," Rosiello said.

Rosiello is currently running as a Democrat for election to the Ohio House of Representatives. Prior to 2016, she said she had never voted Republican.

"I've changed my opinion, I made a horrible mistake. So much so that I'm willing to run for office in this very tumultuous time," Rosiello told Insider.

While in early January, Trump took the lead over suburban men and women, with 63-35% and 68-30%, respectively, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, the suburbs have begun shifting away from Trump.

Polls in June showed that Biden currently leads in those US regions — a CNN poll showed Biden lead with a 14 point lead and a Fox News poll marked him with a 49% to 38% lead among suburban voters. More specifically, a majority of women in suburbs and small cities said they disapproved of the job Trump is doing as president, according to a recent Marist Poll.

Meanwhile, Trump's re-election campaign has attempted to re-stake a claim into the suburban voter bloc, which was an important base for Trump in 2016, according to exit polls. (To date, Republicans have won in the suburbs all but 3 times since 1980.)

In July, Trump tweeted to the "Suburban Housewives of America" that Biden would "destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream." Earlier this month, he wrote, "The 'suburban housewife' will be voting for me," citing safety and the preservation of their neighborhoods. And at this week's Republican National Convention, the party appeared to give a nod to suburban housewives.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Since Trump's election, suburban women have continued to enter the political arena, mobilizing on a range of issues such as gun control, healthcare, education, and housing.

Julie Womack, a resident in the Midwestern suburbs of Cincinnati, for example, said she had "very little political involvement" in her life leading up to the 2016 election.

"I was pretty much just running my life, running my kids around, being a 'soccer mom,'" said Womack, who voted for Clinton in 2016.

But when Trump won the election, despite losing the popular vote, Womack said she "realized that I probably should have done more." A white woman with an interracial family she said did not think America would elect Trump, so the fact that he did set off an alarm for her.

"We had this expectation that our country would not buy into that," Womack said about the racism and xenophobia Trump ignited during his first presidential campaign. "And then they did."

In the past four years since the 2016 election, she's been a part of a "secret" Facebook group through which she's connected with women in her suburban area to promote progressive platforms. Together, they've started a PAC called "Organized Progressives Standing United."

After years of being a stay-at-home mom, Womack, a former practicing attorney, returned to work at an organization in Ohio called "Red Wine and Blue," which formed in 2019 and functions as a social and political group that mobilizes women in the suburbs, many of whom do not have a political background.

Katie Paris, the organization's founder told Insider that Trump's perception about American housewives is the president "describing someone who no longer exists."

Trump's image of women in the suburbs is outdated, experts say

Dolores Hayden, a professor of Architecture Urbanism & American Studies at Yale, called Trump's "suburban housewife" tweet racist, classist, and misogynist, and suggested that "he really doesn't have a good feeling for demographics."

Hayden said the outdated image and narrative of suburban housewives dates back to the post-World War II era, when mortgages in suburbs were mostly available to white male-led households.

During those times, she said, "The man was the homeowner. The woman was the consumer, and they were raising their kids in a white suburban setting."

"But that's an idea of the 1940s," Hayden continued. "And that's really not the way suburbs look today."

The demographics of suburbs have shifted vastly in recent years. Historically, American suburbs were predominantly comprised of white populations. But that majority shrank 81 percent in 1990 to 65 percent in 2010, according to the Brookings Institution. Around one-third of suburban residents were people of color by 2016, according to Pew Research Center.

Tracy Johnson, a Black woman who lives in a majority-white suburb that has seen a slight increase in its people of color population, is a Democrat who says her community does not reflect the image Trump portrays of women living in the suburban parts of the US.

Tracy Johnson
Tracy Johnson marches in a Black Lives Matter protest organized by her neighbors in Mason, Ohio.

Tracy Johnson

Johnson said the president's comment that women fear that "low-income housing would invade their neighborhood" is reminiscent of what her father told her about living through white flight, a trend in which white people move out of culturally diversifying communities en masse, something largely fueled by racial profiling.

"I'm a 'suburban housewife' who doesn't fit his demographic, who he's reaching out to," Johnson told Insider. "It's blatantly racist what he's trying to do."

Read the original article on Insider