Maybe the folks in Vice President Kamala Harris‘s campaign actually believe that a significant number of women are afraid to vote Democratic because somehow their husbands will find out and punish them.
That’s the literal interpretation of Harris’s 11th-hour ad. It features two women sneakily voting for Harris and one lying to her husband about it, as the narrator, Julia Roberts, intones that the franchise is the last right that women have left.
This wasn’t just a single ad, though. Democrats spent the whole general election campaign sending out messages along the same lines.
If Democrats believed there was really a serious threat to democracy from men knowing or somehow dictating their wives’ votes, you would think Democrats would be less enthusiastic to switch America from Election Day private ballots toward much less private mail-in ballots.
More likely, Democrats believe they can motivate young, unmarried women to vote by portraying a vote for Harris as a subversive act of feminism or something.
But there’s a deeper story here than a voting tale.
Marriage rates have plummeted in the United States. The biggest downstream effect of this retreat from marriage is the baby bust.
This has political valence: In the 2022 election, judging by exit polls, about one-third of Democratic voters were unmarried women. The 10 states with the highest birth rates are all Republican, while the 10 states with the lowest birth rates are all Democratic.
Consider America’s demographic and ideological clustering and the picture gets more worrisome: If a young woman lives in a city and doesn’t go to church, she’s very likely not only to be unwed and childless but to have little or no interaction with married people or parents. This deflates any desire to start a family.
And so a huge portion of one party’s base looks on marriage only from the outside — this lays the foundation for Democrats’ creepy-husband-voter ploy. Also, Democrats know that the best way to motivate supporters who might flake out is to make it sound like the other side is trying to suppress or steal the vote.
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So tell millions of college women and unmarried 20-somethings tales of downtrodden wives unsure if they can freely vote their conscience, and you might inspire these young single women to stand up and vote in their place.
Along the way, this campaign will also help convince the ladies that men are beasts and that marriage is a cage. This will further drive the parties apart into a party of family and a party of atomized individuals who see connection to others as mostly an intrusion on their autonomy.