Why the GOP is 'Joking' About Women's Right to Vote

You’re not imagining it: more conservative men are quipping about repealing the 19th Amendment

You’re not imagining it: As we speed towards election day, conservative men are increasingly ‘joking’ about repealing the 19th Amendment or controlling women’s votes. We’re meant to believe that these are just quips from hilarious provocateurs trying to ‘trigger’ Democratic women. But in a moment when women are dying and going septic because the government deems them less a person than the pregnancy they’re carrying, the remarks don’t feel like punchlines as much as they do predictions.

Especially because those delivering the jabs are leading conservative voices, men who actually do have the ability to influence policy. Consider what former Donald Trump aide John McEntee said in a video posted earlier this week, delivered while eating chili cheese fries and smiling:

“So I guess they misunderstood when we said we wanted mail-only voting. We meant male m-a-l-e.” 

It would be easier to see this as a bad pun if McEntee wasn’t a senior advisor for Project 2025—the conservative agenda detailing how to strip women of vital rights and trap them in the home. 

Others don’t bother with any pretense of humor. Pastor Joel Webbon—a white nationalist whose bigotry often goes viral—argued recently for repealing the 19th amendment, and instead allowing for a ‘family’ vote decided by men.

“Where women get their voice is from their father, from their husband. If they’re not married it’s from their father. If they’re not married and their father is dead, it’s from their brother, it’s from their uncle. It’s from the men in their lives that love them.”

As much as I’d love to dismiss Webbon as an extremist agitator, we’ve been hearing watered-down iterations of this same argument all over conservative media this week: Republican men are furious over a progressive campaign reminding women that their votes are private and that their husbands don’t need to know who they support on election day. 

In response to women putting post-it notes in women’s public restrooms reading, “nobody will know who you vote for,” and a recent Lincoln Project ad featuring two women voting for Kamala Harris against their husbands’ wishes, conservative men are accusing Democrats of encouraging women to “undermine” their husbands.

Bafflingly popular pundit Charlie Kirk, for example, slammed Democrats for telling women to “lie to their husbands,” who “probably work [their] tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life.”

“It is the embodiment of the downfall of the American family. I think it’s so gross, it is so nauseating….Kamala Harris and her team believe there will be millions of women that undermine their husbands…”

And at Fox News, host Jesse Watters declared that he’d divorce his wife if she dared to vote differently than he did:

“If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as an affair. That violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What else has she been lying about?”

Here’s what’s telling: These men aren’t only angry over the idea of their wives secretly canceling out their vote, but of others cluing women in that such a thing is even possible. It reveals how much conservative men see marriage as a form of control—and how aware they are of the power of women’s votes.

And that’s the rub. It’s not a coincidence that Republican men are ‘joking’ about the 19th amendment and their wives’ ballots just a few days before the election. They know that women’s votes may very well bring home a win for Kamala Harris and elect the first woman president on Tuesday. For the men who’ve worked so hard to keep women subordinate, it’s a nightmare scenario—evidence that they can’t control the country or their wives.

As Rebecca Solnit pointed out in a characteristically brilliant column, “a lot of households are not democracies; they’re dictatorships.” It may be 2024, but there are still women who don’t feel safe opposing their husband’s political wishes—or who simply don’t want to deal with the domestic fallout from admitting they’re voting for a woman. I saw a TikTok recently of a woman in her 80s who was voting for the first time ever; her husband had disapproved of the idea, so she had to wait until he died.

Men have long relied on bullying women in the private sphere to assuage their panic over our public advancement. If they had to watch women be elected to office, at least they still had their wives to pick on! But now those pesky Democrats are telling women to vote however their heart desires. If conservatives can’t bully women from their oval office or their living room recliner, what’s an asshole to do?

Here’s hoping that on Tuesday, the joke will be on them.