There’s a unique message spreading through some of the final campaign commercials for Kamala Harris, and those made by PACs supporting her. There are of course those that highlight the danger Donald Trump is to democracy, and those that feature people who have been destroyed by Trump’s abortion bans, and much more.
But there’s a pair of ads, released right here at the end, one from the Vote Common Good PAC and one from the Lincoln Project, which remind women — specifically women married to Trump-voting men — that their votes are private, and that they are free to do the right thing in the voting booth without anybody ever knowing.
It’s powerful, but also kind of disturbing, because it assumes with 100 percent certainty that there are tons of women out there like this, married to bad men who would try to control their vote, and that those bad men are Trump supporters.
They’re not wrong, obviously.
The first ad, “Your Vote, Your Choice,” is narrated by Julia Roberts and it’s from Vote Common Good, a progressive evangelical group. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” it says, “you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” One of the idiot husbands asks his wife as she’s leaving, “Did you make the right choice?” “Sure did, honey!”
Roberts says “Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth.”
The second ad is called “Secret,” and it’s from The Lincoln Project, whose ad game right now is STRONG. (See here and here.) It’s a longer ad, and it focuses a bit more on the dumb Trump husbands, reassuring themselves and each other that their wives are voting for Donald Trump, even though they don’t like him. In this ad, women filling in bubbles for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz spreads around the voting location, not just with our protagonists.
“Your vote is your secret. He’ll never know.”
We love these ads. Firstly, any right-wing fascist Christian man who sees them is going to shit his big Nazi underpants. Hell, the current crop of “theobros” — the performatively bearded millennial Handmaid’s Tale Christian nationalist men who want to destroy democracy and who see in JD Vance a performatively bearded savior — wants to repeal the 19th Amendment entirely.
But again, it is a bit disturbing — or at least just very real — the way it’s taken as a given that this is a specific market of women that everybody knows exists, those in marriages to foul MAGA Christian men who attempt to control their every move. It’s like trying to get a message to a kidnapping victim.
The author Rebecca Solnit wrote on Facebook about these types of ads, noting that “Voter intimidation begins at home.”
She continued:
Lots of stuff out there assures women they can vote secretly and just seems to treat it as normal that lots of women live in fear of their husbands and are not free and equal at home — and yeah, in every case it seems to be white couples with a Trump husband. If women don’t have democracy at home, it’s harder to have democracy in public life, not least because people who are equal under the law, equally entitled to vote their beliefs, seem to be prevented from either voting at all or voting for their chosen candidates. In some parts of the country this may be enough to change election outcomes. I get why voting by mail (which used to just be for the elderly and incapacitated) is easier, but I like the civic rite of polling places, and, well, too many households are tyrannies. I’m glad people are reminding these women that voting in person gives them the privacy they need, but it’s disturbing just seeing a whole population’s lack of freedom and rights treated as a given, not an outrage.
She linked to a piece she wrote on the matter back in 2018, trying to suss out how many women’s votes truly are controlled by their husbands. She also included current tweets, reminding women that husbands will not be in voting booths and boyfriends don’t have to see ballots, plus a couple screengrabs from social media, dispatches from people canvassing, and the things they’ve witnessed in white conservative homes this year:
Yes, my brothers and sisters in Christ, it’s real.
But this is the first presidential election since Dobbs, and in every election we’ve had since then, Democrats have overperformed the polls, often wildly, and not one pundit has offered any reasonable explanation for why that shouldn’t carry through into the presidential. If there is any time for people to stand up — even in the quietest, most devious ways — against the MAGA Nazis attacking this country, it’s now. And some meaningful amount of that might come from inside their own homes.
It’s enough of a thing that Michelle Obama talked about it in her barnburner of a speech this weekend.
“If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter,” Obama said Saturday at a rally where she also said women’s bodies are on the line in this election. “You get to choose. You get to use your judgment and cast your vote for yourself and the women in your life. Remember, women standing up for what is best for us can make the difference in this election.”
That’s the same speech where Obama brought realness from every angle about the true stakes of this election. Where she said this:
So I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior, his obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known … a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse, all of this, while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.
It’s the same speech where Obama pleaded with any man who loves any woman, “I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously.” She added, “Please, please, do not hand our fate over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us.”
If you haven’t seen the full speech, we’ll include that below. Because this is yet another hell of a closing argument for electing Kamala Harris president.
And yes, it’s true, that any person with a conservative asshole MAGA husband is doing the morally upright thing to vote for Kamala Harris and lie to him about it. They should probably divorce those assholes too, but one step at a time.
Watch Michelle Obama:
[The 19th / The New Republic / Rebecca Solnit Facebook]
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