"I started to learn what patriarchy was": How Donald Trump pushed Republican women out of the GOP

PHILADELPHIA — Melanie Barton-Gauss, a retired teacher from Florida, traveled to the City of Brotherly Love just weeks before the presidential election to spread her message of political conversion. "After Jan. 6, I did what in my family is considered unthinkable: I left the Republican Party and joined the Democrat[ic] Party. And I left the church."

Barton-Gauss is part of a bus tour across the key battleground state hosted by Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT). The group teamed up with The Bulwark, a political outlet founded by Never Trump Republicans, for a series of podcast tapings and other events highlighting Republicans and former Republicans supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Targeting lifelong members of the GOP who harbor doubts about another Donald Trump term is a central strategy of the Harris campaign. RVAT's organizers believe there are just enough of these right-leaning voters to push dead-heat swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin over the top for Democrats. 

The fact that the vast majority of former Trump voters are prepared to pull the lever for him again can seem incomprehensible for Democrats, especially after the former president's failed pandemic response and attempted coup. In discussions with women who previously voted for Trump and have come to regret it, however, it was clear why it can be so hard — even for those who know better, deep down inside — to walk away. In telling their stories, these women hope to persuade other Republicans that, as hard as it can be to rebel against your family and community, it's a price worth paying to be able to look at yourself in the mirror the morning of Nov. 6. 

"I remember thinking before I cast that vote, what do we have to lose?" Rebecca Foster, a Floridian who voted for Trump in 2016, told Salon. She recalled a sense of relative apathy about politics before Trump, but realized "pretty early on that I had made a serious mistake." In the years since she's been working to end Trump's political career out of "part guilt and part determination." 

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"I was ashamed," Ursula Schneider of Arizona said of her 2016 vote for Trump. "I was always a strong woman. I always believed in women's rights, and yet I had lived in this misogynistic culture for all of this time."

Schneider described how she'd been a lifelong Republican and devout evangelical Christian her entire adult life. In 2018, however, "I had an issue with my church." Schneider was an extremely active volunteer but wanted more of a leadership role. But "because I had a vagina," she said, church leadership told her that was not possible. That sent Schneider on a journey of exploring new ideas, including voting for President Joe Biden in 2020. 

"Church was my whole life. We lost our entire community and we lost our family relationships,” Schneider explained. Still, she was happy about the change. "I was 44 years old when that started. I felt like I'd wasted a lot of my life," she said, but "I felt free for the first time."

In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris is winning 9% of Republican voters, which is surprisingly high in these polarized times. (Trump, in contrast, only gets about 3% of Democrats.) John Conway, the director of strategy for RVAT, explained that the biggest obstacle to getting Trump-wary Republicans to cross over is identity: "Voting is so tribal" and "Republican identity is still very powerful." So his group elevates "the stories of these former Trump voters," to "give permission to other voters that share that same Republican identity" that it's okay to vote for Harris. 

Amanda Becker at The 19th reported last week that "women over 50 have moved more than any other group of voters," because they are shifting from the GOP column to supporting Harris. (Young women were already mostly voting for Democrats.) The issue of reproductive rights best illustrates why this is happening. The women who spoke with Salon at the RVAT event in Philadelphia all reported a big shift in how they viewed the issue of abortion after the Supreme Court's decision ending abortion rights. 

"I thought I was a pro-lifer," Foster, who was horrified when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, said. "I have never felt like it was my place to tell another person what to do with their body."

This was a common theme. As long as abortion was legal, it was easy for women in conservative communities to regard the issue as a personal matter, not a legal one. With the right taken away, however, the difference between personal conviction and a legal mandate has come starkly into view. 

"I grew up pro-life, but I am very firm in my stance that my views on abortion are my personal views," Barton-Gauss told me. "Nobody else has any right either to impose our personal religious views on somebody else." She reiterated that the nation's founders "never intended for this country to be a theocracy."

As Conway noted, identity is a central part of voting choice. In the Trump era, many Republican women can't help but notice that their partisan identity conflicts with their self-image as strong and competent women. "I started to learn what misogyny was, and I started to learn what patriarchy was," Schneider explained about her move from the religious right to her current self-identification as a moderate. 

Barton-Gauss singled out the sexist comments of Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, such as his lambast against "childless cat ladies" and teachers who don't have kids, or when he agreed that the "whole purpose" or the "postmenopausal female" is to raise grandkids. "What does he think? That we're supposed to be barefoot and pregnant?" she joked. Vance, she contended, wants women whose "whole lives are nothing but as child bearers and carers." But, she said, "I did not go to college to be relegated to solely that role."

Foster lamented that the "dark cloud" that is Trump has blotted out what should be a moment "historic to women and girls" of the Harris candidacy. "It's sad," she said, that almost no attention is being paid to the possibility that the U.S. may soon have its first female president. She hopes to signal to Republican voters that there's no shame in voting for Harris to make such history.

There currently is a fear among Democrats of jinxing Harris' chances by making too much out of her gender. If Harris does win, however, that is likely to change. The threat Foster describes as "looming over all of us" will recede and this milestone will be celebrated. If that happens, Harris will owe her victory to a female-majority coalition, including women who dared to break with their Republican pasts to vote for a Democratic president.