An ad reminding women that they can vote differently from their partners — and aren't obliged to tell them about it — appears to be touching on a very real phenomenon. According to a YouGov poll, 1 in 8 women voted differently from their partners in an election without telling them.
That's about the same percentage as men who said they've done so. In 2016, when Donald Trump had not yet completed his takeover of the Republican Party, his "shy" supporters maintained that no one is obliged to share who they voted for.
In an election where women's rights and health have moved to center stage in wake of abortion bans and Trump's threats to "protect" women against their will, disagreements within opposite-sex relationships might be more common. Women have typically voted for the Democratic candidate at a higher rate than men, but polls have shown an even wider gender gap in this election cycle, with women backing Vice President Kamala Harris by as much as 12% over Trump.
That's a stark contrast to the 46% of men in the YouGov survey who believed that their partners would be voting for Trump, versus the 40% who said the same about Harris.
For many Trump supporters, the idea of Harris winning would be infuriating enough, but conservative TV figures and activists added another dimension to the rage in MAGA circles: a woman daring to challenge the primacy of a man, who is none the wiser. The woman with a hat and American flag in the offending pro-Harris ad, Charlie Kirk complained, “coming in with her sweet husband, who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provides for the family, and she lies to him saying I’m going to vote for Trump, then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.”
