‘Listen, I’m with you. I’m on board.
‘I’ve already sent my vote off for Kamala Harris, but I’m not gonna change my husband’s mind. It’s just not gonna happen,’ Kerry in Easton, Pennsylvania, told me.
Then she leaned in and whispered: ‘But, listen, I might be able to get him to stay on the couch. I think I can get him to just avoid the whole thing.’
‘Leave it with me,’ she said with a cheeky laugh, wink and high five.
As I’ve been knocking on doors and talking with voters in swing states, trying to help elect the first female president, I’ve noticed something far more intimate: the decisions being made within divided American households — and particularly by wives.
Many, who are supporting Kamala Harris, aren’t bothering to persuade their husbands to vote for the Democratic ticket.
Instead, they’re convincing them not to vote at all.
Yes, you read that right.
After my interaction with Kerry, the door closed and I turned around to walk down the pathway. My mind was racing with the moral quandary of being a strong voting rights advocate who had just high-fived someone essentially committing small-scale voter suppression.
‘It’s an anomaly, a one off’, I thought to myself. ‘Move on.’ And I did.
Then, on the next street, another woman told me she’d been subtly dropping into conversations with her husband about all the ‘broken promises’ and ‘chaos’ of the Trump years.
She explained that she was challenging him by asking, ‘Do we really want another four years of that?’, adding ‘I don’t turn it into an argument, I don’t lecture him about supporting Kamala – I just let it sit there and move on.’
I quizzed her on the strategy and the mother of two wearily responded: ‘We’ve been married for 30 years now… I can’t go through 2016 or 2020 again.
‘It tore our family apart; we couldn’t talk about politics or anything to do with the elections. If it came on the news, we’d switch it off. It’s taken four years to get back to a place of ‘okay, we can watch the news without arguing now.’’
I found my mouth slightly agape as I struggled to apprehend the idea of living with someone you so ferociously disagree with.
She went on: ‘I’m not sure we’d survive another election like that, so I don’t mention Kamala. I love her — just you try to stop me from voting for her, but my husband? I just need him to stay at home… pretend it’s not happening.’
That one day alone, another four women explained their logic to me. Women married to men who have increasingly leaned conservative over the years, if not decades, now find themselves married to Trump supporters who, in one case, still believe Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.
No amount of fact-checking, policy talk, or debates over character is going to make their other halves change their minds and cast a ballot for the first female president.
Instead, the wives are planting seeds of doubt about Trump, pointing out the chaos and fatigue, and quietly suggesting that perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if they sat this one out.
And, anecdotally, it appears to be working. One man told me he would ‘never, never, never’ vote for a Democrat, ‘no matter how qualified you tell me she is’, but that he is probably going to ‘skip it this year.’
His partner looked up at me with a smirk.
This extraordinary unorganised phenomenon inadvertently taps into a sobering reality from the catastrophic 2016 result: if just 79,316 Trump voters in swing states had backed Hillary Clinton, she would have won the election.
This year, polls are even narrower. It’s a startling reminder of just how razor-thin the margins can be and how powerful individual conversations can become.
In just a few thousand households, the fate of the most powerful country on Earth can be decided.
Historically, men have been viewed as the more politically dominant figure. But things have shifted. Women are not only more likely to participate in activism but turnout out to vote in larger numbers.
Now, they’re influencing those closest to them. By reducing the overall votes for Trump, these women are forging a new era of electoral pragmatism.
In an election defined by theatrics, noise, spectacle and money – all $16bn of it – the quiet conversations led by these women could prove to be the key.
Campaigns may be measured by doors knocked on, mobiles called, dollars raised, TV debate scores, and social media ads, but the real battleground this time is much, much closer to home.
And in an election that could change the very fabric of American society from the ground up – that is incredibly fitting.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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