Why some conservative women are keeping their votes for Kamala Harris a secret

This story originally appeared on NPR.

In political ads and campaign speeches, supporters of Vice President Harris have a message for Republican women: Your vote is private, and no one will know if you secretly vote for Harris.

“No one gets to know how you’re going to vote,” Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin said last week during a campaign stop in Michigan. “No one gets to check it. It’s not available online. Right? Your vote is your choice. You don’t have to tell anyone.” Slotkin, who’s running for Senate, was campaigning with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who’s also crossed the aisle to endorse Harris.

Their message is aimed at conservative-leaning women like T, whom we’re calling by her first initial. T, who is in her 60s and lives in Wisconsin, asked for anonymity to discuss how living in a politically divided household is affecting her marriage of more than 40 years.

“He’s frustrated with me that I won’t listen to him plead his case. I can’t and I won’t,” she explained.

T says she mailed her absentee ballot from another family member’s home to avoid a confrontation with her husband over her support for Harris.

“It’s not that he would ever stop me or anything, it’s just I just can’t deal with that animosity,” she said with an audible sigh.

Keeping quiet

T says she’d voted Republican her entire adult life — until Trump became the nominee in 2016. She describes Trump as “misogynistic,” and a “buffoon.”

“My husband will say it’s just what the media has fed me,” T said. “And I’m saying uh-uh. I watched it with my own two eyes. I listened to it.”

One of those moments, when Trump held up a Bible in front of a church near the White House after calling in police to shut down a protest in 2020, was also a breaking point for another woman, K.

“I was horrified. That was actually when I left the Republican Party,” K says. She lives in a red state in the Midwest and asked that we use her first initial because of fear of losing her job.

K says she hasn’t told most of her family, including her husband, that she’s voting for Harris.

“He assumes I’m voting Republican. I just listen to him talk about his views, and I just nod my head and go uh huh,” she said. “And I’m thinking, yeah and my nieces have less bodily autonomy and rights at their ages than I had.”

Avoiding conflict

Jackie Payne is executive director of Galvanize Action, which focuses on outreach to moderate white women on progressive issues. Because of the gender gap in voting patterns, she says it’s not unusual for women to keep their political opinions to themselves.

“When there is a conflict in the home, that can be very disquieting. And one of the things that we often hear from moderate white women is that they really hate conflict and they try to avoid it at all costs,” Payne explained. “For a lot of moderate white women, what that looks like is disconnecting from political conversation. So they will withdraw from the conversation to try to avoid the conflict.”

The idea that women can secretly vote for Harris without their husbands knowing is being repeated in new ads from anti-Trump groups including the Lincoln Project and Vote Common Good.

The ads have sparked pushback from conservative commentators. On the “Megyn Kelly Show,” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, a think tank focused on promoting conservative values with young voters, said women who vote secretly “undermine their husbands, and described one of the ads as “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family.”

Shy voters

But the desire to keep a vote private isn’t new, says Eduardo Gamarra, a political scientist at Florida International University.

“People are shy about expressing who they will vote for, particularly in close elections,” said Gamarra, who is also a pollster, with a focus on Latino voters.

Gamarra says in the past, political scientists have talked about shy Trump voters. But this time around, Gamarra says he’s seeing women who indicate in focus groups that they’re quietly supporting Harris.

“I think we’re seeing a similar phenomenon today and it’s largely being driven by abortion,” he suggested.

A, who’s 35 and lives in Illinois, asked that we use only her first initial because she’s worried about backlash from her religious community.

She says she voted for Trump in the last two elections, but after a period of soul-searching, decided to vote for Harris this time. She says she was “teetering” about whether to vote at all, in part out of fear of criticism if anyone close to her found out how she’d voted.

A says she’s keeping her vote a secret from her boyfriend and especially her father, a committed Republican. She says she thought about her daughters when she was making her decision.

“And as I was filling in that rectangle it was like, ‘Hell yeah, girl. You did something so powerful for yourself, and for a lot of women,” she said.

It’s impossible to know how many people — especially women — are secretly voting for Harris. This election is predicted to have a historic gender gap and polls indicate women and men are deeply divided on which candidate to choose for president.

That’s why even a small number of silent voters in either direction could make a big difference on the outcome Tuesday.