MAGA attacks on women voters are no joke

If the polls are correct, Republicans are set for a shellacking in the Nov. 3 midterms, losing the House and quite possibly the Senate, and likely some prominent governorships across the country. If that happens, there’s a good chance that online chatter about repealing the 19th Amendment will heat up once again.

For a decade now, MAGA social media users have been aggrieved at the way women vote for Democrats at higher rates then men, such as in 2024, when 53% of women voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, who received 55% of the male vote. Their solution to this imbalance began in 2016 as a trolling hashtag on what was then called Twitter: #RepealThe19th, a reference to the constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, that extended suffrage to all women in theory, but mostly white women in practice. The hashtag has faded since then, but not because of a lack of interest. The idea has morphed from a joke into a serious proposal that is making its way from fringe Christian right circles into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist who lead the church Pete Hegseth belongs to, has grown increasingly loud in his calls to replace individual voting with “household voting,” where only heads of households, who are presumably male, would be able to vote. The defense secretary has praised Wilson for a CNN interview he gave in which he outlined his vision of a Christian theocracy that disenfranchises women. Other prominent pastors with large online followings, such as Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, both in Texas, have explicitly denounced the 19th Amendment. 

Ending women’s suffrage is a hot topic among the right’s youngest leaders. Earlier this year, Kai Schwemmer, the political director of College Republicans of America and one of the many young leaders angling to be the new Charlie Kirk, called for the end of women’s suffrage. On his Daily Wire podcast, conservative commentator Michael Knowles hosted a panel of young women and spent an hour justifying the arguments for repealing the amendment. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has a large audience of young men, routinely calls for the end of women’s voting rights. 

Most alarmingly, Turning Point USA, which is among the most well-funded and popular conservative organizations in the country, is now routinely platforming opponents of women’s suffrage. Along with Schwemmer, the organization recently booked the Christian nationalist pastor and podcaster Joshua Haymes, who argues that women voting undermines the family, for their new “Pick Up The Mic” tour.  Commentator Andrew Wilson, who frequently goes viral by arguing that women should lose the vote, has also been representing TPUSA in podcast interviews. Alex Clarke, the host of TPUSA’s most popular women’s show, has platformed guests who oppose women’s suffrage, including one who argued it was a “net negative” for society. Savanna Stone, a popular MAGA influencer who opposes women’s suffrage, spoke at this year’s TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, a name whose irony gets worse by the year. Multiple attendees of the conference told the CBC that they would be happy to lose their right to vote. 

“Conversation over whether women should vote used to be limited to some of the most extreme and patriarchal churches,” said Sarah Stankorb, a journalist, expert in women and religion, and author of “Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion.” She told Salon that it’s “no coincidence” that ideas once on the fringes of the Christian right “keep popping up in public discourse.”

Stankorb noted that Christian nationalists are taking “partisan polarization” to a place where “denying the basic rights of half the population not only comes off as a debatable point, but one with theological backing.” 

“All at once, patriarchal men share think-pieces on walking back the 19th, while perched casually in leather chairs, normalizing the conversation as if it’s simply academic, reasonable even,” she said. Stankorb is worried that the constant social media repetition means the shock has “dulled over time,” putting the once unthinkable “in the realm of ‘normal.'”

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To be certain, it’s extremely unlikely that Christian nationalists will be able to repeal the 19th Amendment, which would require passing and ratifying a new amendment. There is precedent for this; after the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol, was ratified, it took another amendment, the 21st, to overturn Prohibition. The process would require a joint resolution approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate or a constitutional convention, followed by approval of three-fourths, or 38 out of 50, states

As extreme as the GOP has gotten, it’s hard to imagine that the party — which has 11 sitting female Senators — would go that far, or be able to win big enough majorities in Congress, if they even considered it. After all, it took a century of feminist organizing to get male leaders to even let women vote, and it would be a lot harder to take the right away since over half the electorate is female. 

In all likelihood, most of the MAGA pundits and pastors who are pushing to end women’s suffrage know full well it will never happen. But their musings shouldn’t be dismissed as nothing more than attention-seeking behavior. The larger goal here is to normalize the idea that women’s citizenship isn’t legitimate and to instill the idea that women should feel lucky to be “allowed” even the few rights they have. In fact, this notion is similar to the way that leaders like Vice President JD Vance insist people of color should be “grateful” for having rights at all, words which carry the implication that the way to prove their gratitude is by not demanding full equality. 

Wilson made the underlying threat explicit in April. “Women have to appeal to men for the rights,” he told Konstantin Kisin, a right-wing British political commentator. “Anytime men want to take rights away from women, they can, like that. And there’s not a damn thing women can do about it.” Wilson continued to argue that there will no end to male dominance, because if women push their luck too far, it will be the end of male “benevolence” in letting women have any rights at all. His diatribe shows the goal of the anti-suffrage argument: to scare women off seeking full equality, or even trying to claw back rights they do have.

While the 19th Amendment is unlikely to be repealed, it’s important to note that other rights that were long assumed to be safe have been stripped from women in the MAGA era. The right to abortion, which was for decades widely assumed to be untouchable, was overturned by a far-right Supreme Court in 2022. Because of women’s outrage — and suffrage — many red states restored abortion rights through ballot measures, which angered the right and amplified calls to take away women’s votes.

The assumption that the justice system will protect women and children from sexual violence has also been under assault in recent years with actions that range from the Trump administration blocking the release of the Epstein files to the attacks on the Cornell student whose only “crime” was reporting an alleged gang rape. Then there is the recent ad run by Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which features the estranged mother of Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent. In 1978, after Acton reported that she had been raped by her stepfather, her mother sided with her husband, and the pair fled the state following his arrest and before he could stand trial.

All these incursions on women’s rights are easier to sell to a public that has normalized the idea that women aren’t full citizens — that their ability to vote is a privilege that can be snatched away, and suffrage is only a right for men. The voting rights issue is used as a rhetorical cudgel against women, designed to delegitimize their opinions by suggesting they aren’t even real citizens. It’s about scaring women into thinking that if they “abuse” their vote by demanding full equality, they will be left with no rights at all.