What They See In Him: The Women Who Know They’re Voting for Trump
Some women are still backing Trump, even though they don't love his behavior—and they're even more enthusiastic about JD Vance.
Chelsey Painter Davis is a bundle of energy. With two toddlers, a baby on the way and well over 53,000 followers on social media, she needs to be.
Blind Mom Life—her Instagram account, which details in short videos, essays and photographs what it’s like parenting after losing her sight—is a unique mixture of everyday humor and ideology. Her “most embarrassing mistakes as a blind mom” include, according to one of her videos, picking up her newborn upside-down and accidentally microwaving insect spray. Another video promises to show you how she knows one of her toddlers has peed on the floor—before cutting to footage of her slipping and hitting the floor, hard, while holding a laundry basket.
The videos are self-effacing, even charming. But this day-in-the-life imagery comprises only half of her online output. The other half is a litany of posts that outline her hardline stance on reproductive rights. “Facts I share that upset the internet,” begins one, before regurgitating a number of controversial claims made by anti-abortion groups.
To say that Davis has upset some people is an understatement. “I’m not shocked by the disagreements that happen on the channel,” she says during a phone interview, with a laugh. “That’s a risk when you’re saying things that you believe are true—a lot of people aren’t gonna like them.”
Davis is clear on one other thing, too: She’s voting for Donald Trump—in fact, this election will mark her third time doing so.
Davis, age 29, is just one of the millions of women in the U.S. who are planning to vote for the Trump-Vance ticket in November. She neatly fits a demographic that usually votes Republican—Christian, white, based in the suburbs. Indeed, she is part of the same group that successfully pushed Trump into office back in 2016, when 47% of white women voted for him. But while the goal is the same—to “make America great again,” if you will—their reasons are myriad and complex. They are not a monolith after all.
This time, the odds look different—although the 2024 election is so close that it’s hard to say for sure. Every poll so far has failed to be conclusive, and with margins of error between 1% and 3%, those tiny percentages could change the outlook entirely.
This also explains why both candidates have taken such a scattershot approach to campaigning, attempting to peel off slices of various demographics to their advantage.
Still, most evidence suggests women across the country of all races prefer Harris over Trump —and that young women in particular (those aged between 18 and 49) may be, more generally, moving away from the Republican party.
Plenty of them have stayed red, however. And it’s important to consider why.
Decisions ‘Based on Policy’
Davis is politically-active and informed. She watched the Harris-Trump debate in September and the Vance-Walz debate in October. She says she was happy that Vance and Walz in particular discussed the ins-and-outs of policymaking.
That’s because Davis makes her decisions “based on policy.” In addition to being anti-abortion, she says, “I like lower taxes. I like less [government] spending. I like being respected on the world stage… And also I am, as a mom, very concerned about the government's role in schools, about what books they're bringing to our kids.”
“It seems,” she says, “like I get more say as a parent with a smaller government approach from a Republican ticket than from the DNC platform.”
But here’s what she doesn’t do: Follow the MAGA-based cult of personality around Trump. She’s not a fan of name-calling, and she’s careful to explain that her decisions are based on her own personal, conservative beliefs: “So even though I might have a lot of issues with personality, behavior, things like that—that can come, honestly, from either side—it's policy running my decision.”
“I like lower taxes. I like less [government] spending. I like being respected on the world stage.”
Did anything she saw during the debates change her mind about any of the candidates? Davis takes a moment to consider, then says, “I think that Kamala Harris did better than we expected… because she hasn't been interviewed very much.” (The Trump campaign spent a long time before the debate talking about how few media interviews Harris had done, attempting to draw a contrast between her and the ever-rallying Trump.) Yet Davis says she was pleasantly surprised to see how Harris was able to handle herself in that environment, “but at the same time, when I disagree with almost every single thing in her policy, it is not going to change my opinion as far as voting.”
Another thing to note about Davis is that she does not live in an echo chamber. Her social media posts encourage those who disagree with her to comment; and she says that she has “no problem socially” with people with different political views. But there are few things that get her readers more riled up than her posts on reproductive rights. “I thought you were funny and not a pro-lifer,” wrote one woman below a post where Davis talks about her anti-abortion followers. “It’s cool if you’re a pro-lifer but I hope you don’t ever try to take that choice away from other women,” says another.
Although Davis personally believes the six-week abortion ban in Florida should be even stricter, she says that she doesn’t waste energy trying to challenge it when she knows she’d be unlikely to succeed. Instead, she takes comfort in the fact that the country seems to be going in her ideological direction anyway: “I don't really see the point of going to war with [people] over something that is progressing towards what I see as my moral ideal.”
(It’s true that the country does seem to be moving in Davis’s direction. But the loudest voices of the most conservative wing of the GOP aren’t necessarily reflective of reality. The overturn of Roe vs. Wade led to a slew of abortion bans or heartbeat bills supported by this wing—but it also led to some surprising developments, like ruby-red Kansas rejecting a bill in a landslide that would have banned abortion in the state. And it’s important to note that such bills existed even before the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. Polling shows that most Americans—63%—still support the right to access legal abortion in “all or most cases,” and the number of people who support reproductive rights has gone up since Roe was overturned.)
For her part, Davis admits she is not “the average American,” but still believes Harris’s approach to abortion is “offensive.”
“This demeanor that ‘it's not a big deal, it's fine, it's great, I had so much fun when I had my abortion’—that comes out of people like Kamala Harris and the Democrats,” she says. “It really makes a mockery of women. And I don't appreciate it at all.”
Rally-goers and ‘hardcore Republicans’
In North Carolina, outside a Vance rally, a woman named Diane Warner agrees with Chelsey Painter Davis’s views on abortion: “It’s a human being,” she says, “it’s a baby. It’s a lot.” But then she pivots slightly, saying that her real problem is that there seem to be “lots of incidents” of abortion these days. (The evidence does not bear this out: Although such data is somewhat difficult to come by, most shows that abortion procedures have been steadily declining since the ‘90s.)
Abortion, she believes, should only happen in “exceptional cases.”
Warner is excited by Vance, she says, and likes the fact that he is “very articulate.” She is looking for “lower taxes, more police, less government” and “getting rid” of illegal immigrants who she believes have changed America for the worse in the past few years.
Though the claims made by Trump and Vance about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people’s pets have been debunked—and Vance has even admitted himself were inaccurate—Warner isn’t fully convinced the stories she’s heard aren’t true.
“Lower taxes, more police, less government.”
In the same rally crowd, Eileen McIntyre—originally from California, but a North Carolina resident for the past 20 years—says she likes Vance because she believes he “speaks from the heart.”
“I know he has notes, but he didn’t have any teleprompter,” she adds, perhaps referring to the Trump campaign’s (false) claims that Harris conducts all her interviews off a teleprompter. Harris has used teleprompters at rallies, but that’s not unusual; Vance has made a point of eschewing them, though it’s led to some embarrassing mistakes.
Referring to herself as a “hardcore Republican,” McIntyre adds that she liked hearing Vance give “coherent” answers when questioned by journalists at the rally. The Ohio senator’s polished appearance onstage has clearly helped to smooth Trump’s rough edges for at least some women voters for whom Trump’s meandering rhetoric had become more worrying than charming.
McIntyre adds that “we all [Americans] want legal immigration, not illegal immigration,” and that she believes people’s communities are being taken over by illegal migrants. She says she wants a world where there is balanced immigration and where no one “runs roughshod” over each other.
Meanwhile, at a Trump rally in North Carolina, Debbie Noon says she wants “to make sure the economy is better” and “borders are being protected.” She notes that she is “pro-life” and that she expects “outright Christianity” from her politicians.
It seems clear to women like Noon that Trump is not a pinnacle of virtue, but—considering the fact that he delivered on promises like packing the Supreme Court with religious conservatives—many have decided that he’s the man to deliver Christian values anyway.
Playing the evangelical
At the end of August, a new Trump campaign ad dropped. Its tagline? “I’m not with her.” The minute-and-a-half-long video featured a handful of Black women from across the country—including swing states Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia, and the contentious Arizona county of Maricopa—proclaiming that they are “not with Kamala Harris.” The reasons they’re not with her are rather vague including the economy, funding law enforcement agencies, and, vaguer still, that “Donald Trump made me proud to be an American.”
But it is Christianity which seemed to be the real motivator: At least three of the women addressed the camera with Christian pictures and iconography featured prominently behind them. These included framed statements about God and serving the Lord, and a crucifix.
Is the ad a fair depiction? One recent poll showed that Black women across the country overwhelmingly see Kamala Harris in a favorable light—with a score of 83 out of 100 for Harris compared with a score for Trump of just under 11. The same poll found Black women are especially motivated to vote this year, with almost 90% saying they intend to do so.
But the Trump-Vance campaign ads “I’m not with her”—an inverted version of the celebratory tagline associated with the campaign group Black Women for Harris, “I’m with her”—is unlikely to pay dividends (at least among women). It’s precisely the kind of negative slogan that politicians are cautioned against using by strategists, and it doesn’t seem to have gained the sort of social media traction the campaign envisioned.
And therein lies the problem with this year’s Republican ticket: It has very little to offer women, besides stoking fear. “I am your protector. I want to be your protector,” Trump said during a deeply creepy aside at a September rally in Pennsylvania. Under a second Trump term, he said, women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Freedom, with caveats
The Women For Trump website—which is directly affiliated with the Trump-Vance campaign—details a number of accomplishments achieved by Trump during his first term on behalf of women. However, few of them are without caveats. The claim that unemployment for women hit a record low under Trump’s presidency, for example, is mostly due to policies that pre-date Trump. And women’s employment rates absolutely started to plummet while Trump was still in office, although that was also attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic.
So what are women Trump voters hoping to get from a Trump presidency?
On this point, Chelsey Painter Davis is abundantly clear: “America needs to take control of the world stage,” she said, citing the Middle East and Afghanistan.
“I really don't like seeing our allies being beat up on in the Middle East. It makes me very uncomfortable. I didn't like watching Afghanistan. My dad has worked in the Air Force for 40 years and I had to ask him: ‘Is anything that you made left behind?’ And that's just horrible to think that my dad's work, that's meant to be for and save Americans, might be used to hurt them. That's terrifying to me.”
But it’s difficult to square the idea of a strong for America on the world stage with Trump and Vance’s platform. How exactly does the U.S. end participation in the so-called “forever wars”—a key concern for many Trump voters—while also remaining the world’s global policeman?
Indeed, for every isolationist who sees the Trump-Vance ticket as a chance to focus on domestic issues, there’s a traditional hawkish Republican who believes the U.S. needs to stand by its allies militarily (see: the Republican response to the war in Gaza and Israel’s recent incursions into Lebanon.)
And for every evangelical who wants stricter laws on abortion, LGBT rights and public decency, there’s undoubtedly a libertarian who thinks the government has no business telling people what to do in their private lives.
Polling from this week and last show Trump and Harris in a dead heat, with college-educated women of all races leaning more toward Harris and a gender gap that’s widening as more men lean toward Trump. The centrist think tank Brookings believes this could be good news for Harris, considering that women tend to vote in slightly higher numbers than men. Unusually, most swing states look winnable for Democrats, according to the data—they’re hardly a shoo-in, but few seem completely off the table.
If Trump and Vance lose this November, Joe Biden has said he fears the possibility of a violent response. In the short term, that’s certainly a concern. In the long term, it’s likely that the well-connected women of Republican politics will look to their home states to start pushing through their agenda, including stringent abortion restrictions, book bans, and anti-LGBT legislation. That could create a very divided America, with a lot of lives caught in the crossfire.
Then again, you might argue that we’re already there.
Holly Baxter is the author of CLICKBAIT and an executive editor at The Independent in New York City.
Francesca Donner
Vicki Shabo
Holly Baxter
