They want to ensure that, this time, white women vote for a woman

NEW HOPE, Pa. — Armed with a clipboard and campaign literature, Liz Minnella strolled through a neighborhood in New Hope, Pennsylvania, optimistic that by the end of her day of door-knocking, the small town would live up to its name for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.

There wasn’t a political yard sign in sight, which Minnella, who had only recently become a Democratic activist, took to mean that she might find some persuadable voters. When a blonde woman in a Villanova sweatshirt answered one door with a broad smile, Minnella, a Villanova graduate, thought aloud, “This is my lady.”

The woman, a 52-year-old Republican, was eager to talk, even though Minnella’s voter list had highlighted her daughter, an independent. Minnella tried to steer the conversation toward reproductive rights, but it eventually circled back to the woman’s fears that migrants would bring violent crime to her wealthy Philadelphia suburb. The woman thanked Minnella for the “civil conversation,” but her mind was unchanged; she was voting for former President Donald Trump.

The episode reflected the obstacles that white women who support Harris are confronting as they try to persuade their ideologically diverse counterparts to join her cause, an effort that could potentially decide the election.

While much attention has focused on how Harris’ chances could be imperiled by groups like Black men — the second-most loyal Democratic voters after Black women — pollsters and strategists say the race is more likely to come down to white women.

They are the country’s largest voting demographic, making up about 30% of the electorate, and they consistently turn out at very high rates. They tend to swing in larger numbers toward the Republican in presidential elections — including in the last two contests for Trump.

In the 2016 election, 47% of white women voted for Trump, compared with 45% for Hillary Clinton. Even more white women, 53%, favored Trump in 2020, versus 46% for Joe Biden.

The 2016 contest drew attention to the power of white female voters in a way not seen in the century since suffrage. Afterward, many Democrats blamed and shamed them for stopping Clinton from becoming the first female president.

The sting of Clinton’s loss and the familiar notes of sexism (and racism) that Harris has faced this election season — especially from Trump — have mobilized many left-leaning white women to try to prevent history from repeating itself.

“I can’t see her lose,” Caroline McCarthy Pompizzi, who was canvassing alongside Minnella, said of Harris. “It’s not just about her winning. It’s about living the next four years of the worst of America.”

As the country holds its first presidential election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, a widening gender gap has again positioned white women as a potentially decisive swing vote. The two candidates are now neck and neck among white female voters, according to recent New York Times/Siena College polling, with Harris inching ahead slightly.

Like other groups, white women list the economy and inflation as their top concern: 29% said so, according to Times/Siena polling conducted last month. Close behind was abortion rights, with 24% identifying it as their No. 1 issue, followed by 14% who chose immigration.

As Minnella walked away from the house in New Hope, she was dispirited but resilient.

“You just have to take that you’ve planted a seed,” she said. “No one is ever going to say, ‘You changed my mind.’ But you never know if you’re the voice who echoes in their head.”

‘We Have an Opportunity to Vindicate Ourselves’

After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, identity groups like Black men and “White Dudes” raced to Zoom to rally around her, following the lead of more than 40,000 Black women who raised $1.6 million for her campaign within hours.

Among the largest video calls was “White Women Answer the Call,” which drew roughly 200,000 participants and raised nearly $11 million.

An organizer of the call, Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, called it more of a “reckoning than a rally.” She said she had consulted with Black, female organizers to shape her message: that white women, despite their privilege, needed to share the burden of fighting for democracy, as Black women had done for decades.

“White women, in particular, thought it was just enough to vote for Hillary Clinton, and there were a lot of regrets,” Watts said. “We have an opportunity to vindicate ourselves, and to elect a candidate that has not only our self-interest, but the self-interest of all women.”

Clinton herself has weighed in. In a September interview, she discussed the “double standard” that Harris had been held to by people “grappling with the idea” of a female president.

“This is particularly true, let’s just say it and underline it,” Clinton said, “about white women.”

White female support for Trump in previous elections broke down largely along educational lines, as he captured a majority of those without a college degree.

Pollsters and strategists say that is likely to bear out again this year — but that other factors could also be at play.

Harris has seen a groundswell of support from younger white women who are motivated to defend reproductive rights. Her campaign is also angling for white women without a college degree, who tend to lean Republican for economic reasons but are seen as more persuadable because of Harris’ focus on the so-called care economy, policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers. And the number of unmarried women has continued to rise, potentially diluting what some pollsters say is a significant influence — men — in how some women vote.

Celinda Lake, a longtime pollster and Democratic strategist, said some of these women could be “silent” Harris supporters — those who may vote for her privately without telling their friends or husbands.

“One of the ways to empower them is to say, ‘You have your own way of doing things. You have a responsibility to vote for your daughters and granddaughters,’” she said.

She said Harris did not have to win over all of them, just enough to offset losses among white men.

“Win women more than you lose men,” she said. “That’s how Democrats win.”

Doing Something Other Than ‘Doomscrolling’

Every week, the organizers of “White Women Answer the Call” have kept up the meetings, plotting how to have the “hard conversations” with the 53% who backed Trump in 2020.

Groups of women have hosted gatherings with neighbors in their cul-de-sacs, participated in postcard-writing campaigns, and papered public spaces with Post-it Notes urging other women to vote for Harris — a “whisper campaign” to reach women who fear their votes will not be private.

During a sunny weekend last month, more than a dozen women joined Minnella in the Philadelphia suburbs to have some conversations face to face.

Several, like Christina Romano, 39, of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, were nervous first-time political activists. “I want to tell my 4-year-old daughter one day that I did something other than doomscrolling,” she said, her voice shaking, as she prepared to knock on her first door.

Many canvassers encountered women who had already voted early for Harris.

“Oh, Kamala, 100%,” Nicole Morrison, 52, a small-business owner who is white, said within seconds of opening her door. She had already sent 1,200 postcards to Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, an outreach strategy by Democrats and liberal groups.

Morrison also revealed a more aggressive tactic that she had once avoided “to be polite”: confronting her Republican friends about the “chaos” that another Trump administration would bring. It has paid off, she said: Some of her female Republican friends have started accompanying her to Democratic rallies.

“I know die-hard Republicans who, at the end of the day, they know who they’re voting for — even if their husbands don’t,” she said. “It’s a thing. It’s remarkable in 2024, but honestly, they just don’t want the argument.”

Nicole Stone, 54, experienced this firsthand as she knocked on doors in Trouper, Pennsylvania. After leaving a town house where a man had declined to make his wife available, she heard him yell out the window, “My wife is going to vote for whoever her husband says she’s going to vote for.”

“I felt terrible,” she said. “It makes me wonder how many others are out there like that.”

Minnella and the other women concluded their canvassing over brunch at a restaurant, where they brought a Ziploc bag full of Post-it Notes to stick all over the bathroom. “Vote for all women,” said one.

But in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Harris still faces an uphill battle.

Kelly Olson, 41, a registered independent in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, said that she did not believe either option was “horrible or the greatest candidate in the world” — her views aligned more with former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — but that she would vote for Trump. She described herself as “pro-choice” but thought he would be stronger on the economy.

“A lot of people think he’s a misogynist or doesn’t have respect for women,” she said. “I think that might be a little bit true, but I just know that unfortunately, people that are in power are usually not the people you’d like to marry your mother or the people you’d invite to Thanksgiving dinner, but they know how to get things done.

“I’m sure Harris has an aggressive streak as well,” she added. “That’s politics.”

A Fierce fight for white women

Harris’ campaign has made an aggressive push for suburban, predominantly white women, especially moderate and conservative ones who have grown weary of Trump.

Jackie Payne, the executive director of Galvanize Action, a group focused on moderate female voters that formed after the 2016 election, said her organization had been surveying 6,000 moderate white women in 10 politically competitive states since June. Its most recent findings, from September, showed more moving toward Harris. The economy was the top issue, followed by preserving democracy, immigration and reproductive freedom.

Payne suggested that many white women were leaning toward the candidate who aligned with their broad values — such as protection and patriotism — rather than their specific policy positions.

“Trust is really important to moderate white women,” she said.

Both campaigns have taken notice.

At a dinner last month, Trump taunted one of the pro-Harris affinity groups. “There’s a group called ‘White Dudes for Harris,’” he said, “but I’m not worried about them at all, because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me.”

Still, Trump appears wary of losing support among white women.

Despite proclaiming early in the race that he was “proud” to have helped overturn Roe, Trump has tried to soften his opposition to abortion rights, dodging questions and calling himself “the father of IVF,” referring to in vitro fertilization.

He has also tried to appeal to women by playing to potential fears about safety.

“I want to protect the women of our country,” he said at a rally Wednesday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, adding, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”

Harris seized on his comments, saying Thursday that they were “very offensive” to all Americans.

The vice president, who has made “trust women” a central theme of her campaign, has notably declined to focus on her gender. And speaking last month at a suburban Michigan theater, she sidestepped a question about how she would seek to sway white women specifically, saying her message was for “all Americans.”

But some of her supporters are doing it for her.

Posted in a bathroom stall at the same theater was a hot-pink Post-it that read: “Woman to woman — your vote is secret. Support reproductive rights this November! We’re not going back.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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