When hubby decides who you vote for: Why Harris lost more than just an election
Americans vote in the 2024 presidential election at Doerfler Public School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US on November 5, 2024.
What you need to know:
- Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race has exposed an enduring global pattern where husbands significantly influence their wives' voting choices.
- Despite constitutional guarantees of voter privacy and women's right to make independent electoral decisions, evidence from both the US and Kenya shows widespread spousal pressure in voting booths.
Meredith Ralston, a professor of Women's Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Canada, noted in an article originally published in The Conversation that gender played a significant role in Donald Trump’s victory as the Republican candidate.
She highlighted a stance that bears a similarity to Kenyan elections. Ralston mentioned that Democrats supporting Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency ran videos advocating for women’s freedom to vote. One example is a short video featuring Julia Roberts, which underscores the constitutional guarantee that women have the right to vote as they choose, and that their choices in the ballot box should remain private.
According to Ralston, these kinds of messages faced backlash, suggesting that many men still believe their wives should vote as they do, and see it as a betrayal if they don’t. That Trump’s win may even reflect that some wives voted in alignment with their husbands' views.
Interviews conducted by Sky News, correspondent in the US soon after Trump's victory revealed similar sentiments among white men and women in the US. Sky News is a British global broadcast news service with headquarters in London.
One man stated that he couldn't imagine the US under a woman leader, while a woman commented that a woman with military experience would have a better chance of becoming president “than a woman who has served as a prosecutor in the Bay Area.”
Before her rise to the vice presidency in 2021, Harris began her career in the Bay Area as an Alameda County prosecutor. In 2004, she was elected San Francisco District Attorney, making history as the first woman, as well as the first Black and South Asian American woman, to hold the office. She served two terms in this position from 2004 to 2010.
In Kenya, studies have shown that men often make voting decisions on behalf of women.
Following the 2017 elections, the Carter Centre, which led an election observation mission in Kenya, held consultations with women from eight counties to explore barriers to their political participation.
The counties including Nyeri, Narok, Kisumu, Bungoma, Baringo, Kitui, Garissa, and Lamu, reported cases where husbands dictated whom their wives should support, often influencing them to vote for male candidates even when the wives preferred female candidates. In Narok specifically, women with no formal education faced intimidation from their husbands to support specific candidates.
In some cases, husbands decided who would accompany their wives in the voting booth, thus ensuring they voted according to their husbands' preferences. In the 2022 General Election, a husband literally voted on behalf of his wife at the Embakasi Girls Secondary School polling station in Embakasi South, Nairobi County, proving the reality that women’s electoral decisions are often bound by men’s preferences.
