Editor’s Note: Tomorrow is election day and it seems like hyperbole to say this is the most important election of our lifetime (we always hear that), but as a referendum on women’s autonomy, it really does feel like the most monumental election women our age have ever seen. We at NextTribe are constantly confounded as to why some women seem to vote against their own best interest. Here, in an effort to address this issue, we’re publishing an updated story about women who vote like their husbands.

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In 1919, people were talking about this issue, and in the 21st Century we still haven’t figured it out: How much are married women influenced by their husbands’ vote?

The May 1919 issue of Ladies Home Journal ran a story with the headline, “Does the Wife Vote Like Her Husband?” One unidentified man thought he had the answer. “On moral issues the women vote independently–and always will,” he declared. “On political questions they vote with their husbands.” The article identifies moral issues as “education, health, prohibition, closing houses of ill-repute, the income tax” and local issues. Uh, it seems like that covers just about everything important.

53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2020.

But in any case, we’re pretty sure this confident expert on women’s voting behavior (before there even was a real track record of women’s voting behavior) couldn’t imagine that the consternation about women’s independence (or not) at the ballot box  would still be going on in 2022 .

Recently, Marie Stolis published a piece in Vice under the headline, “The Decades-Long Debate Over Whether Women Vote Like Their Husbands.” The story is comprehensive, prompted presumably by the 19th Amendment anniversary, and it’s a debate that has grown more urgent with the news that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2020, more than had voted for him in 2016.

Read More: Well, This is Depressing: Poll Says Most Women 50+ are Undecided on Election

The (White) Husband Effect

Just to be clear, the conversation these days over voting influence within a marriage is almost exclusively centered on white women. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is an obvious and regrettable tendency to put racial blinders on when discussing gender, as if what is true for white women is true for all. Also, Black women are a more consistent voting bloc, not the “swing” vote that politicians vie for. But this means they’re often taken for granted, which is certainly a mistake for Democrats since it was Black women who pushed so many progressive candidates across the finish line in the 2018 mid-terms.

What is about white women that suggests they are malleable to their husband’s views?

So what is about white women that suggests they are malleable to their husband’s views?

Hillary Clinton acts as if she knows what the problem is. “[Democrats] do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” Hillary Clinton said after her loss in 2016.

The way she puts this isn’t a very flattering picture of white women, ignoring the possibility that Clinton didn’t make an effective case for these women’s votes. But still Clinton has a point. Research shows that white women usually choose Republicans in presidential elections and have done so since 2004. Plus, a majority of white women without college degrees have backed the Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

Background Noise Brain Washing

Writing in 2018 in the Guardian, Rebecca Solnit relates disturbing accounts of husbands (white husbands) literally intimidating their wives on politics. These stories come from progressive door-to-door campaigners, and the men in them come off like Archie Bunkers, speaking for or over their timid wives. In these anecdotes, many doors are slammed.

If Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all you hear, then your sense of reality can easily be distorted.

The accounts seem a bit self-serving, though Solnit does bring up a very relevant question for the 2020 election about “whether voting by mail takes away the privacy of the voting booth and the ability for women to act on their beliefs without consequences.”

What’s much more likely happening is a subtler form of influence. For instance, I know several smart women who are at heart sensible moderates, but whose husbands are devoted to Fox News. Truly, if Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all you hear, then your sense of reality can easily be distorted. You have to have the time and determination to look up balancing opinions and facts, something I’m afraid these friends don’t have.

It’s About the Money

Some theorists offer practical explanations for why white women are more prone to vote with their husbands. “White women are much more likely to be married than women of other demographic groups. And married women are more likely to support traditional values, both culturally and economically,” says Eugene Scott in the Washington Post. Plus, it’s conceivable that wives in many of these marriages are from the same socio-economic class and religion as their husbands, which would make them predisposed to vote similarly.

It is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.

Probably the best explanation is economics. “Women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status,” wrote Kelsy Kretschmer, an Oregon State University assistant professor, in a study examining women’s voting patterns. Other studies have come to similar conclusions.