5 Ways to Right the Women’s Vote

Kamala Harris campaigned like she was running for the presidency of Planned Parenthood, not the United States, with abortion central to her campaign. She promoted a draconian future should Donald Trump be reelected. And it worked. At least for a large demographic of white, educated, single women.

Trump’s election quickly filled social media with unraveling women, including a plan of action for women to not have children, learn to camp, and divorce husbands who voted for Trump. Others are calling for women to withhold sex and shave their heads in protest.

Most conservatives avoid outwardly courting the women’s vote because it can be fraught with baggage and drama. But there are easy steps we can take to start winning the women’s vote now so future elections don’t hinge on the unhinged.

1. Identify the Indoctrination

On The View, host Sunny Hostin blamed “uneducated white women” for Kamala’s loss. The week before the election, billionaire Mark Cuban, also on The View, said, “Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women. Ever. It’s just that simple. They’re intimidating to him…” Their messaging is clear — smart women don’t vote Republican.

The elite class has long held the lever on what women think. The behavior of leftist women isn’t innate but the result of decades of indoctrination. What started with the fashion industry and what women should wear expanded widely into telling women what they should think. And women followed.

Most women consider themselves to be free thinkers, but free thinkers don’t usually think like everyone else. The intellectual lockstep cultivated by elites is breathtaking when you consider how women have come to believe, like no other group of women in all of history, that their own children are the enemy and an obstacle to their happiness. The elite have driven home the belief that abortion is the means through which women are free and without it life is a kind of drudgery and slavery.

Conservatives must recognize just how widespread the fashion of ideas has spread and restore a much more compelling, healthy, and attractive understanding of womanhood into the dialogue.

2. Engage the Culture

Decades ago, the Left looked to sway the culture to win the war of ideas. Conservatives stuck with argumentation and policy to make their points. Today, the Left owns Hollywood, TV, book publishing, and the fashion industry. Even today, after decades of living with this stark divide in approaches, few conservatives understand the power of culture. There are very few forays into culture, largely because conservative donors want hard metrics for their investments, but cultural influencing is difficult to quantify.

Meanwhile, the Left, who is bereft of meaty arguments (when was the last time you saw a debate about abortion?), is dependent solely upon culture. They do it well because it is all they have. But it has paid off in spades for them. Celebrity endorsements work on women because women get their ideas from celebrities 365 days a year. They trust them to help with everything from what to wear, to how to exercise, and where to vacation. When elections roll around, celebrities are naturally the people to whom women will listen.

Conservatives can help balance this by investing in magazines and media focused on women and lifestyle — particularly related to food, fashion, health, home, exercise, and travel. Women have very few role models of what it looks like to be a good woman because we have been inundated with women who are narcissistic, callous, vile, self-absorbed, cutthroat, and power-hungry. There are very few public women that we can look to and say, “She is a good woman.” Women don’t even know what a good woman is anymore. Engaging the culture can offer an off-ramp.

3. Recognize That Feminism Isn’t Helping

One of the long-standing conservative beliefs rolled out each election cycle is that we ought not to touch feminism — if we fight feminism, we won’t win any elections. But at this stage, particularly after seeing the women’s vote in this election and the many Dobbs-era pro-life defeats, one begins to wonder if this is wisdom or just fear. There isn’t clear evidence that avoiding the feminist ideology is working.

Since the early 1800s, the women’s movement has sold an ideal of independence and liberty. From its earliest days, women were taken in by the promise of what life could be like if they could just be people, without being a wife or mother. The problem is that women are well-suited to the life of wife and mother. This lie that women would be happier if they just existed outside of close and tight relationships has not served women well. Every happiness metric shows that women are less happy now than they were before the arrival of feminism’s second wave, with huge increases in depression, suicide, substance abuse, loneliness, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Continuing to ignore feminism’s bad fruits does not help us win elections. Moreover, it also pushes women into deeper brokenness and unhappiness instead of into lives of purpose, rich relationships, and genuine fulfillment.

4. The Crazy Cat Ladies Are Telling Us Something

Crazy cat ladies had their moment in this election cycle. Despite all the rhetoric about independence, women are made to mother. The crazy cat lady is that woman who is pouring her mothering into a pet. This is why there are now more pets in homes than children, with our four-legged friends being called fur babies while women are pet parents or dog moms. Plants are now also on the parenting spectrum. A local flower shop had a sign at its door that read: “Support Plant Parenthood.” Meanwhile, the fur parents just spent $700 million on Halloween costumes for their fur babies. (READ MORE: The Gospel of Discontent: How Feminism Shattered Our Understanding of Motherhood)

Pets and plants are taking the emotional place meant for children. But this isn’t the only vacuum created when children aren’t born. The U.S. now faces the lowest birth rate ever, creating a birth dearth that has far-reaching negative effects on future economies and civilizational sustainability.

5. Don’t Wait for 2027 to Start Thinking About the Women’s Vote

One of the myths conservatives believe is that the women’s issue is too big to fix. “It will always be this way,” is what most think, largely because it has been this way for as long as any of us can remember. But the winds are beginning to shift. The extremes have become too extreme, the anger unsustainable, and the suspension of belief untenable. We can move the needle with women, but it won’t happen overnight. It is very hard to convince someone on a dime that everything they have believed their whole life is based on empty lies. Starting early also gives new talking points a long runway to help ideas stick.

There is hope that the women’s vote can shift, particularly the youth vote: a remarkable 40 percent of women under 30 voted to elect Trump.

There is no reason conservatives can’t make inroads with the women’s vote starting now. As the next electoral frontier, women need help to understand that the seeds sown by feminism will always come up weeds. And despite the shiny appeal of a life of radical independence, true happiness isn’t found in what you have or do but in who you love and who loves you.

READ MORE from Carrie Gress:

Think the First Wave Is a Model for Women? Think Again.

The Gospel of Discontent: How Feminism Shattered Our Understanding of Motherhood

The Women’s Vote and Feminism’s Triumph

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