Since Donald Trump arrived on the national scene, the women of America have been central to the fight to keep him from amassing power. On January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s thinly-attended inauguration, hundreds of thousands of women flocked to the streets of Washington, D.C. for the worldwide Women’s March, protesting the ascension of an acknowledged sexual predator who would be found liable for rape years later. In Downtown Las Vegas, hundreds dressed in pink and donned pussy hats, carrying signs saying things like, “Healthcare is a human right,” “My body, my choice,” and “This pussy bites back.”
In the 2018 midterms, women voters largely contributed to what has been called a “blue wave,” in which Democrats gained a majority in the House of Representatives with a net 40 seats in the chamber—the largest Democratic House gain since 1974.
In 2020, 55% of women voters turned out for Joe Biden. Women of color, in particular, gave Biden a winning edge and pushed him to victory, with 90% of Black women voters and 69% of Latina voters casting their votes for him, according to exit polls. College-educated women also supported Biden in greater numbers than they had Hillary Clinton in 2016. And Democrats gained control of the Senate while maintaining control of the House.
Leading up to the 2022 midterms, women railed against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, made possible by Trump’s three conservative Supreme Court Justice appointments. One month after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, more than 1,000 Nevada women and their allies marched in 107-degree heat outside Treasure Island while Trump was inside praising anti-abortion Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Adam Laxalt. (Laxalt lost to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.)
In 2022, a record number of women members had been elected to Congress, at 28%. Also that year, voters in six states that had abortion-related questions on their ballots (Kansas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont and Kentucky) chose to secure access to the procedure or reject further limits on abortion.
But while women’s activism has delivered some victories for pro-abortion Democrats, far-right extremism has infiltrated every level of government in Republican-controlled states. From Trump all the way down to governors and lawmakers, the far right has shown a determined interest in using the state to control women’s bodies.
This is well illustrated in Trump’s selection of running mate JD Vance, the U.S. Senator from Ohio. The pronatalist characterized people who don’t want to have children as “sociopaths,” and has even suggested that people with children should be allocated more votes in elections.
In Texas, state lawmakers created and passed a near-total abortion ban that offers a $10,000 cash reward to private citizens who successfully sue anyone who performs or aids an abortion. The law has allowed for a Texas man to request a legal deposition that would investigate his former partner for allegedly traveling out of the state for an abortion.
Far-right conservatives have also floated the idea of repealing the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. In 2016, the hashtag #repealthe19th started trending after FiveThirtyEight posted a poll suggesting that Trump would win the election if only men voted. Taking cues from figures like Michael Walsh, pundit Ann Coulter and former Trump staffer John Gibbs, conservative Twitter has rallied behind the idea of women losing the right to vote.
These attacks on women’s autonomy are just the beginning, as Project 2025 waits in the wings. The blueprint for the next Republican president was created by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and former Trump staffers. Experts and civil rights groups say the plan would also undermine voting rights and democracy itself.
Project 2025 paints a grim picture for women. It would reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs that compose the abortion pill; make it illegal to mail abortion medication and equipment through the U.S. Postal Service; eliminate access to free emergency contraception; and establish a federal abortion surveillance program. The plan would also eliminate women’s and gender studies departments in higher education.
UNLV associate professor of political science Rebecca Gill says the elements of Project 2025 already exist in some parts of the country. And that likely will be a motivating factor for women to turn out and vote, especially in the 10 states where constitutional amendments to protect abortion are on the ballot, she says.
“In the reproductive health space, we’re getting previews of this. … And now, people are having to come to terms with what an abortion ban actually means in practice, and what abortion actually is in practice, and who needs that care,” Gill says.
In political messaging, Democrats have highlighted the strata of women who are impacted by abortion bans, including women living in poverty and mothers with children. Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have spoken about Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant and single parent who died after not receiving proper care for a complication from the abortion pill. After taking the medication to end her pregnancy, Thurman developed an infection and needed dilation and curettage (D&C), a procedure that is now criminalized in Georgia and is routine for abortions and miscarriages. According to reporting by ProPublica, it took doctors 20 hours to finally operate. But by then, it was too late.
In 2023, 31-year-old mother of two Kate Cox gained national attention as the first woman reported to ask the court for permission to get an abortion. The Texas Supreme Court rejected her challenge of Texas’ abortion ban. The total ban would not permit her to end her pregnancy despite her carrying a fetus with a fatal condition, which jeopardized her health and ability to have more children. She ended up traveling out of the state to receive health care.
“I think there has been a successful campaign to define abortion and abortion patients in the popular mind,” Gill says. “People are really having to come to terms with the fact that this is actually what regular, everyday run-of-the-mill moms might need.”
These post-Roe abortion scenarios are increasingly playing out, driving a change in public opinion on abortion and also widening an existing gender gap—the difference between the proportion of men and women who prefer the leading candidate—Gill says.
Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, says the widening of the gender gap appears to be driven by younger voters.
“The gender gap certainly right now looks bigger with younger voters. And what that means is, there’s just a greater difference between what are increasingly progressive Gen Z women and Gen Z men, who at this point are more likely than older men and women to have that disparity in party alignment and vote choice,” Dittmar says.
According to Gallup, women ages 18 to 29 today are more liberal than previous generations on specific issues, particularly the environment and abortion. On the other hand, the Trump campaign has moved to appeal to young men by making appearances and getting cozy with manosphere figures like podcaster Joe Rogan and UFC president Dana White. They’re appealing to a certain male malaise, Dittmar says.
“I think that particularly with young men, the first part of that [is]: you go to college, and they tell you that white men are the problem. … The Trump campaign, over time, has been able to tap into white male sentiment that they don’t want to be blamed for these problems. In fact, they want to return to a time when their privilege was more secure,” she says.
When it comes to voting, the conservative movement among young men might be canceled out by the progressive movement among young women. “Will it be enough to make the difference or to counteract the progressive move and mobilization among other young voters? That’s what we’ll be watching for in the election,” Dittmar says.
Gill partly attributes the divergence in young women’s and young men’s political preferences to the “siloing of information environments” on social media, especially among younger voters.
“We’ve seen a lot more divergence in terms of the kinds of media that women and girls are consuming, as opposed to the kind of Barstool Sports side of the media ecosphere that men tend to consume. And we’ve seen the rise of these manosphere influencers that also have served to drive a bigger wedge in terms of policy preferences and partisan alignment by gender,” Gill says.
NEVADA WOMEN
Abortion is legal in Nevada up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. The law was overwhelmingly approved by voters in a 1990 referendum. Since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Nevada has become a haven for safe abortions, with Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains saying they’ve seen a 40% increase in abortion care in their Las Vegas health centers from 2021 to 2023.
Out of concern that the state law protecting abortion could be overturned by a one-time majority vote of the people, reproductive rights advocates have successfully petitioned to get a constitutional amendment protecting abortion, Question 6, onto this year’s ballot. Voters must approve of the question in 2024 and, if it passes, in 2026 again for the amendment to be approved.
“What we’re hearing from voters is that permanently protecting abortion rights and keeping extreme bans out of Nevada is absolutely top of mind,” says Tova Yampolsky, campaign manager with Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, the organization behind the ballot measure. “With ongoing attacks on abortion rights and reproductive healthcare, Nevada voters, particularly women but also their families, are very motivated to turn out and vote yes on Question 6 to keep the government out of our personal, private medical decisions.”
Gill says that having abortion on the ballot also prods politicians to pay attention to other issues that are important to women. “The fact that we have the abortion measure on the ballot this cycle is something that would tend to raise the salience of women’s issues up and down the ballot,” she says.
Voters tell the Weekly the issue of abortion is motivating them to get to the polls, as well as other issues including the economy, threats to democracy and immigration. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 24% of women cite threats to democracy as the “most important” issue in their vote for president.
Communications director Paysha Rhone, 53, has campaigned for Democrats ever since she moved from Massachusetts to Las Vegas in 2017.
“Trump is incredibly motivating for me,” she says. “I definitely feel the fear for my children and the future to be in a country where we might not have a democracy anymore, or we have rigged voting, or whatever it is that Donald Trump would come up with for us.”
She references a speech Trump gave in front of the conservative Christian group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he said, “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
“Those statements have been terrifying to me, because it’s kind of what we all fear, that we could end up in a dictatorship or lose our right to vote,” Rhone says.
Along with more than one-third of women surveyed by Kaiser Family Foundation, UNLV student Carolyn Salvador Avila, 20, says the economy is her most important issue in the presidential election. Harris’ plan to provide $25,000 in down payment support to first-time homebuyers is promising to her.
“To see a candidate who doesn’t even have concepts of a plan in place, like [Trump] said at the debate, and then on the other hand to see Kamala Harris, who’s got a plan not just for the economy as a whole is a contrast. I am looking to be a first-time homeowner relatively soon, and she’s trying to make that happen,” Avila says.
UNLV student Jiromi Peña Martinez, 19, has been canvassing for Harris with the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road Action Nevada. As a first generation Hispanic, she says immigration is her top issue—specifically how candidates talk about immigrants. Along the campaign trail, Trump has preached about self-coined “migrant crime,” the idea that migrants commit crime or are incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans. According to numerous studies, migrants are typically associated with lower crime rates.
“[Harris] has been really good at defending immigrants. She’s been making sure that when it comes to the media and people and other candidates calling immigrants illegal, and basically calling them criminals, [saying] that immigrants were eating people’s pets, she’s defending the immigrant community,” Martinez says.
At a Nevada National Organization of Women letter writing and phone banking event, 63-year-old veteran and poll worker Robbie Moore says this is the first election she’s getting politically active in, and points to a sticker on her shirt that says “Keep abortion legal.”
“I’m not a single-issue voter. But the overturning of Roe, it shook me. I’m sure it did a lot of women, girls, nieces, kids who are coming up and don’t have the same rights I had as a young woman,” she says.
Nevada women are also paying attention to state races. And with a Legislature that was the first-ever female-majority Legislature in the country, Nevada lawmakers have delivered for women. In 2023, they passed a law that made it illegal to assist other states seeking to prosecute women who travel to Nevada for abortions. They also passed a senate joint resolution that would need to pass out of the Legislature again in 2025 and then go before voters in the 2026 general election to add abortion protections to the state constitution.
However, during Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo’s first legislative session in 2023, he vetoed a 75 bills passed by the Democratic majority, including The Right to Contraception Act supported by Republicans Sen. Carrie Buck and Sen. Heidi Seevers Gansert that would have locked the right to contraception into state law, as well as a bill that would have provided state-funded health care coverage to pregnant people who don’t qualify for Medicaid because they are undocumented.
That’s why it’s important to Democrats to gain a supermajority, which would allow them to override vetoes. And they’re hoping to do that by flipping at least one Senate seat in swing districts like District 5, where the incumbent Buck faces off against Democratic newcomer Jennifer Atlas.
WOMEN’S ‘PROTECTOR?’
Amid polling showing that Trump is struggling with support among women, the candidate has added a bit to his stump speech in an attempt to appeal to them.
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” Trump said in a September 23 speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania.
“Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” he said.
His comments are tactless, considering that citizens and lawmakers in 16 states have considered the issue important enough to be on the ballot since the Dobbs decision.
“The universal response from women is, ‘Ugh.’ I mean, it’s really off-putting. It does not land. … And I think attempts to reach out to women demonstrates the misogyny that underlies his overall approach,” Gill says.
It’s a continuation of Vance’s “childless cat lady” trope that all childless women are depressed and “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
In a 2022 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance bemoaned that prominent Dems “without children,” including Harris, were in positions of power. His obsession with women bearing children also underlines his view that they’re unfit for leadership.
“It wasn’t just about women who have cats, but no kids. It was about, ‘How dare they have anything to say about our lives? And how dare they presume to be in positions of authority?’” Gill says.
Despite what Trump, Vance and the far right believe, women have the wisdom, skill and strength to determine their own future. And their greatest strength is their vote. Women are the largest group of registered voters and since 1980 have turned out in higher numbers than men. In 2020, 68.4% of eligible women voted compared to 65% of men, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. And in the swing state of Nevada, they have undeniable influence over the presidential and congressional elections.
Women’s vote will help determine which version of the future becomes reality—a dystopia in which the state controls women’s most private reproductive decisions and silences their voices; or a progressive future in which women have self-determination. They are a powerful voting bloc that shouldn’t be dismissed or underestimated. And they have the power to pull America over the finish line in rejecting MAGA government for good.
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