MAGA’s attack on female voters is no joke

If the polls are correct, Republicans will suffer a crushing defeat in the November 3 midterm elections, losing the House, likely the Senate and possibly even some key governorships across the country. If that happens, online discussions about repealing the 19th Amendment are likely to heat up again.

For a decade, MAGA social media users have been outraged that women have voted for Democrats at higher rates than men, such as when 53% of women voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, while Donald Trump received 55% of the male vote. They began addressing the imbalance in 2016, posting a parody hashtag on Twitter at the time: #RepealThe19th, a reference to the 1920 constitutional amendment that theoretically extended suffrage to all women but in practice primarily to white women. Since then, the label has faded away, but not for lack of interest. The idea has gone from a joke to a serious proposal and is moving from fringe Christian right circles into the Republican mainstream.

Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist and leader of Pete Hegseth’s church, became increasingly vocal in calling for the replacement of individual voting with a “household vote,” in which only the head of the household (presumably a man) could vote. The defense secretary praised Wilson’s performance in an interview with CNN in which he outlined his vision for a Christian theocracy that strips women of their rights. Other prominent pastors with large online followings, such as Texas-based Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, 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, political director of the College Republicans, was one of many young leaders who aspired to be the new Charlie Kirk and called for the end of women’s suffrage. On his Daily Telegraph podcast, conservative commentator Michael Knowles moderated a panel of young women and spent an hour defending arguments for repealing the amendment. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist podcaster with a large audience of young men, frequently calls for an end to women’s voting rights.

Most shocking of all, Turning Point USA, one of the most well-funded and popular conservative organizations in the country, now regularly advocates for opponents of women’s suffrage. Along with Schwimmer, the group recently booked Joshua Haymes, a Christian nationalist pastor and podcaster, on their new “Take the Mic” tour, who believes voting for women will harm families. Commentator Andrew Wilson, who often goes viral for arguing that women should lose the right to vote, has also been doing podcast interviews on behalf of TPUSA. TPUSA’s most popular female presenter Alex Clarke gave a platform to guests opposed to women’s suffrage, including one who believed it had a “net negative impact” on society. Savanna Stone, a popular MAGA influencer who opposed women’s suffrage, spoke at this year’s TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, a name whose irony grows stronger every year. Several attendees at the meeting told CBC they were happy to lose their right to vote.

“The discussion about whether women should vote used to be limited to some of the most extreme and patriarchal churches,” said Sarah Stankorb, a journalist, expert on women and religion, and author of “Damned If She Does: Why Women Are Exiting the Church and What That Means for the Future of Religion.” She told Salon that it was “no coincidence” that ideas once on the fringes of the Christian right “continue to reappear in public discourse.”

Steinkob noted that Christian nationalists are driving “partisan polarization” toward “denying basic rights to half the population not only a controversial point, but one with theological support.”

“Suddenly, patriarchal men were casually sitting in leather chairs, sharing thoughts about returning to the 19th, normalizing the conversation as if it were academic or even reasonable,” she said. Stankob worries that constant repetition on social media means the shock “diminishes over time”, bringing the once unthinkable “into the realm of ‘normal'”.

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To be sure, Christian nationalists are highly unlikely to repeal the 19th Amendment, which would require passing and ratifying a new amendment. There was precedent for this; after the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, was ratified, another amendment, the Twenty-first Amendment, overturned Prohibition. The process requires two-thirds of the House and Senate to approve a joint resolution, or a constitutional convention, and then approval by three-fourths (or 38 of the 50 states).

As extreme as the Republican Party has become, it’s hard to imagine the party (which has 11 current female senators) going that far, or being able to win a large enough majority in Congress if they even considered it. After all, feminist organizations have spent a century trying to get male leaders to even get women to vote, and since more than half of voters are women, it’s much harder to take away that right.

Most likely, most of the MAGA pundits and pastors pushing to end women’s suffrage knew full well that it would never happen. But their ideas should not be dismissed as nothing more than attention-seeking behavior. The larger goal here is to normalize the idea that women’s citizenship is illegitimate and instill the idea that women should feel lucky and should be “allowed” even if they have few rights. In fact, this notion is similar to the insistence of leaders like Vice President J.D. Vance that people of color should be “grateful” for the rights they have, words that imply that the way to demonstrate their gratitude is by not demanding full equality.

Wilson made clear the potential threat in April. “Women must appeal to men for their rights,” he told right-wing British political commentator Konstantin Kisin. “Anytime men want to take away women’s rights, they can, like this. And women can’t do anything about it.” Wilson went on to argue that male dominance will never end because if women get too lucky, men’s “benevolence” in allowing women any rights will end. His diatribe demonstrated the goal of anti-suffrage arguments: to scare women from seeking full equality or even trying to take back the rights they had.

While the 19th Amendment is unlikely to be repealed, it’s worth noting that other rights long considered safe have been stripped away in the MAGA era. For decades, abortion rights were widely considered untouchable, but it was overturned by the far-right Supreme Court in 2022. Driven by women’s anger and suffrage, many red states restored abortion rights through ballot measures, angering the right and amplifying calls to take away women’s votes.

The assumption that the justice system will protect women and children from sexual violence has also come under attack in recent years, from the Trump administration’s blocking the release of the Epstein documents to the attack on a Cornell University student whose only “crime” was reporting an alleged gang rape. There’s also a recent ad by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that featured the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. In 1978, after Acton reported that she had been raped by her stepfather, her mother sided with her husband and the two fled the state after his arrest but before his trial.

All of these violations of women’s rights are more easily accepted by the public, which has normalized the idea that women are not full citizens—that their right to vote is a privilege that can be taken away, and that suffrage is only a male right. The issue of voting rights was used as a rhetorical device against women in order to legitimize their views by implying that they were not even real citizens. This is intended to scare women into thinking that if they “abuse” their right to vote by demanding full equality, they will have no rights at all.