Why One Main Line Woman Is Lying to Her Husband About Her Vote
"I wish I didn't have to lie to him. But that's where things are right now."
Stock image of a woman voting in private (Getty Images)
Back on October 23rd, I received an email from Michael Millstein, a Bucks County resident who had recently returned from a Doylestown courthouse, where early voting was well underway. While he was in line, he says he witnessed an “overly intense MAGA man” pressuring his female partner to confirm for him that she’d be voting for Donald Trump for president.
Millstein described the woman as clearly “uneasy” about the whole thing. He grew concerned, since voter intimidation is illegal. And when it was her turn to fill out her ballot, the man insisted on going with her to the privacy booth. “He followed her to the voting area and crowded her,” Millstein told me. “And he was overlooking her vote as she cast it. He had his hand on her chair and was just glaring at her ballot.”
The man was also wearing a red Trump hat. Millstein shared with us a photo he took of the interaction. Out of respect for the woman’s privacy, we aren’t running the image. “It made me really uncomfortable,” Millstein tells me today. “He was putting a crazy amount of pressure on her. It was really bad.”
It is precisely this kind of pressure that one Main Line woman I spoke with on Monday morning says she’s been under for the last couple of months thanks to her husband. She describes him as a “good husband but an absolute lunatic when it comes to Donald Trump.” The woman, who spoke with Philly Mag on the condition of anonymity, says her husband, who is in finance, has always been a registered Republican. He used to be moderate. But she says that changed when Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The woman says she couldn’t bring herself to vote for Clinton and did, in fact, cast a vote for Trump. “Reluctantly,” she adds, citing the “grab ’em by the pussy” recording that came out shortly before the election. She wasn’t happy with the way Trump acted during his time in the White House. But she voted for him again in 2020. She says her husband and his family all pressured her to do so.
But now? It’s 2024, and she says she just can’t vote for Trump, whom she calls “disgusting.” And so, she’s voting for Kamala Harris on Election Day but telling her husband as well as his family she’s voting for Trump. Yes, she’s lying.
“I have no other choice,” she tells me. “If he knew I voted for Kamala, he would never let me live it down.”
I asked her just how serious things could get. Divorce?
“No,” she insisted. “But I would never hear the end of it. It wouldn’t be pleasant… I wish I didn’t have to lie to him. But that’s where things are right now.”
The Main Line woman and the woman in Bucks County aren’t alone in these complicated relationships. As NPR reported on Monday morning, there is a growing trend of conservative women who are, at the very least, keeping their votes secret from their significant others.
A recent commercial that has some conservatives in a tizzy features Julia Roberts reminding women that their vote is their business. “What happens in the booth stays in the booth,” Roberts says in the ad. Fox News host Jesse Watters outrageously said that his wife voting for Harris would be the “same thing as having an affair.”
There’s no telling just how many conservative women are secretly voting for Kamala Harris or how this might affect the outcome of the election. But one thing is clear: Republicans are nervous about the prospect. Prominent GOP activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, had this to say during an interview with conservative radio host Megyn Kelly: “Kamala Harris and her team believe that there will be millions of women that undermine their husbands and do so in a way that it’s not detectable in the polling.”
