Charlie Kirk is Panicking about Women’s Power
And my prediction for who wins the Presidency
Lots of people have been asking me how I think the electoral map will land, I’ve included my prediction at the end of this newsletter! If you want to talk more about the election - share predictions, big feelings and excitement - I’ve opened up the subscriber chat here! Join us!
Nikki Haley recently told Fox news that the Trump campaign hasn’t asked for her help, “They’re very aware that we’re on standby,” she said. She added a warning that the ‘brotastic’ Madison Square Garden event isn’t a persuasive message to send undecided women.
It’s sort of like it had never occurred to the masterminds behind the Trump campaign that women might be people who need to be campaigned to separately from their role as men’s helpmates.
SHOCKING!
And look, my feed is FULL of hot (male gaze hot) conservative girlies repeating tweets and talking about how you aren’t Christian if you don’t vote Trump. And of course the House inHabit women are deep up their own conspiracy spirals in Trump world.
The Trump campaign has believed that it could GOTV people who do not usually vote to vote for Trump this time because he’s a special boy.
Elections 101 in America today teaches us that elections are won on the interior margins amongst moderates or fickle undecideds. Non-voters, the men who spend all their time on their PS2 and can’t manage to make a dentist appointment, are unlikely to get their shit together to order an absentee ballot and walk it to the mailbox. There are undoubtedly thousands of men who listened to the entire Joe Rogan podcast but will nonetheless not get off their ass to vote.
You know who will do those things? Women.
We are seeing the gender gap play out in early voting, according to Politico, “Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent.”
Trump has tried to pretend he’s not anti-choice. (he is) He’s built such a frenzied media strategy that his cases for sexual assault are somehow lost in the maelstrom, but he hasn’t done the work to GET moderate women’s votes. He’s relied on RFK Jr. and telling us that immigrants are to blame for every evil in the world.
And let’s be clear, the women we are talking about here are white women. According to Jackie Payne, the executive director of Galvanize Action, their data is showing that white women are focused on broad values — such as protection and patriotism — rather than their specific policy positions. According to the New York Times:
They are the country’s largest voting demographic, making up about 30 percent 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 Mr. Trump.
In the 2016 election, 47 percent of white women voted for Mr. Trump, compared with 45 percent for Hillary Clinton. Even more white women, 53 percent, favored Mr. Trump in 2020, versus 46 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
White women are critical voters - it’s just math. And even with the constant fearmongering, Charlie Kirk is panicking enough that he has this tweet PINNED to the top of his X:
Charlie Kirk (if you don’t know him by name you may recognize the creepy smile) is the head of Turning Point USA and its various affiliates. They are the messaging and organizing arm of MAGA. He’s besties (and former assistant of) Donald Trump Jr. He invented the outrage bait of the on campus debate clip that now floods my feed. His IG handle is “charliekirk1776” a common reference used amongst MAGA because they insist they are part of a revolution.
And he’s panicking about the women’s vote. He said in an interview with Megyn Kelly that it's horrible that women vote for someone other than who their husband dictates, that they “undermine their husbands” even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.”
He’s panicking because it’s happening. We are hearing plenty of anecdotes about conservative women voting against their husbands edicts. We have a whole episode of We’ve Got Issues with Tia Levings, author of A Well-Behaved Wife: My Escape From the Christian Patriarchy about it.
And this has the conservative men freaking out. Fox News host and noted troll Jesse Watters said that he would consider it a form of cheating if his wife voted for Harris. “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that's the same thing as having an affair,” Watters said of his wife, who at one point was his mistress during his first marriage.
Pastor, podcaster and author of “The Manliness of Christ” Dale Partridge was explicit about it: “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial.”
I’ve written in the past how JD Vance uses the term “family” to hide his misogyny. And Kirk uses the same language. He says a woman not telling her husband she’s voting for Harris “is the embodiment of the downfall of the American family. I think it's so gross, it's so just nauseating."
And that’s because in his view, a family means that the man is the ultimate authority. He calls a vote for Harris “undermining” one's husband.
This is the same line of thinking that led JD Vance to lament women leaving situations of domestic violence. The family is paramount and women’s experiences are secondary.
And what we owe our husbands, in return for their protection, is our vote. Protection, as Trump noted himself, we don’t want. He said:
My people told me about four weeks ago — I was saying, ‘No, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country …
‘Sir, please don’t say that.’ Why? …
Well, I’m going to do it. Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.
All of this rhetoric is deeply intertwined with christian nationalism/biblical conservatism. “You cannot, in my personal opinion,” Kirk said, “be a true born-again Christian and vote Democrat in 2024.” Turning Point has its own christian vertical and its political organizing arm has worked extensively with evangelical churches. In fact:
Turning Point Action, founded by conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk, has held GOP vote-chasing events with at least 22 churches in six swing states since March, according to research conducted by the progressive watchdog group Documented and verified by NBC News. It is part of Turning Point’s push to contact people likely to support former President Donald Trump to encourage them to vote.
“What they’re doing almost definitely violates the Johnson Amendment,” said Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University in Chicago, referring to the 1954 law that bars churches and other nonprofit groups from directly supporting political candidates.
But as Kirk knows well… while young men are moving to the church because it promises them power and dominion over women, women are leaving for the same reasons. And those same women appear to be showing up to vote.
Since it’s the Friday before the election, here is my prediction for how the electoral college lands and therefore who wins the presidential election: