"I started to learn what patriarchy was": How Donald Trump pushed Republican women out of the GOP

[marmar]

"I started to learn what patriarchy was": How Donald Trump pushed Republican women out of the GOP
Former Republican women explain why they finally broke with Trump: "I was ashamed"

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published October 21, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) PHILADELPHIA — Melanie Barton-Gauss, a retired teacher from Florida, traveled to the City of Brotherly Love just weeks before the presidential election to spread her message of political conversion. "After Jan. 6, I did what in my family is considered unthinkable: I left the Republican Party and joined the Democrat[ic] Party. And I left the church."

Barton-Gauss is part of a bus tour across the key battleground state hosted by Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT). The group teamed up with The Bulwark, a political outlet founded by Never Trump Republicans, for a series of podcast tapings and other events highlighting Republicans and former Republicans supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Targeting lifelong members of the GOP who harbor doubts about another Donald Trump term is a central strategy of the Harris campaign. RVAT's organizers believe there are just enough of these right-leaning voters to push dead-heat swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin over the top for Democrats.

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"I remember thinking before I cast that vote, what do we have to lose?" Rebecca Foster, a Floridian who voted for Trump in 2016, told Salon. She recalled a sense of relative apathy about politics before Trump, but realized "pretty early on that I had made a serious mistake." In the years since she's been working to end Trump's political career out of "part guilt and part determination."

"I was ashamed," Ursula Schneider of Arizona said of her 2016 vote for Trump. "I was always a strong woman. I always believed in women's rights, and yet I had lived in this misogynistic culture for all of this time."

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In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris is winning 9% of Republican voters, which is surprisingly high in these polarized times. (Trump, in contrast, only gets about 3% of Democrats.) John Conway, the director of strategy for RVAT, explained that the biggest obstacle to getting Trump-wary Republicans to cross over is identity: "Voting is so tribal" and "Republican identity is still very powerful." So his group elevates "the stories of these former Trump voters," to "give permission to other voters that share that same Republican identity" that it's okay to vote for Harris. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/21/i-started-to-learn-what-patriarchy-was-how-donald-pushed-women-out-of-the/