I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because my husband did. I’m not going back

On November 8, 2016, I voted for Donald Trump. I was one of one large percentage of white women in the United States who voted for Trump.

I have never considered myself a political individual. I was born into a family that didn’t talk about politics at all, only about religion, and only in the context of our own denominations of Christianity and conversion. I grew up in a white, lower-class rural American family in the 1970s and 1980s. The only political terms I ever heard in my younger years were: Republican And “conservative”, and never in my own home.

Here’s my first political memory: It was 1988 and I heard Ted Koppel recap Republican George HW Bush’s presidential victory on ABC’s “Nightline” while losing my virginity on my parents’ couch the night before I was 17. age married.

At that point, I had given up hope of attending college or any of the ambitions I had previously given up in high school, such as studying law or teaching at the college level. Without money for college, there were few options in my Midwestern farm town. Maybe I could have been a bank teller, or worked on an assembly line at a local factory, or worked in retail. Or there was a wedding.

That union did not last. When I remarried in 2004, I was a single mother with a GED and one or two failed college courses under my belt. I also didn’t discuss politics with this man, except for one brief conversation before the wedding. I told my fiancé during the chicken bar special at O’Charley’s that I believed in women’s rights, even though in retrospect I knew very little about what that really meant. I told him I considered myself a “very liberal conservative.”

I have committed myself to a “tradwoman”, or a traditional evangelical christian woman. I was submissive to my husband, who was considered the head of our household according to Biblical Scripture. I have maintained and managed our home as required. I took care of the kids, worked at least part-time when childcare allowed, prepared home-cooked meals and baked goods, did laundry for our large family, and managed our finances, which was more of a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” kind of thing. company. If my husband wanted to see my breasts or have sex, and I didn’t, he would hold up his left hand and tap his wedding ring, and I would agree. I was told that God had assigned me to provide for His needs, for casseroles and the like. From an evangelical Christian standpoint, I did everything I could do to be a good God-honoring woman, except keep quiet.

In 2012 I started paying more attention to politics. I watched the Obama-Romney debate. That was also the year I returned to university to complete my studies. Eventually I would get my Masters. My husband also set out to complete his degree: a four-year leadership and ministry program to become a pastor. At that point I was still a political agnostic.

In 2016 I planned to do that vote for Hillary Clinton. I have never been a fan of Donald Trump’s brand of ostentatious wealth and womanizing. Something started to change in me during the last year of earning my bachelor’s degree. I was in my 40s, my children had left home, and I was working two part-time jobs on campus. By then my husband was a full-time pulpit minister. I was the first lady of a small church community in the countryside and I wanted more. I began to demand a fairer division of household labor, such as washing dishes. I stopped doing his laundry. These were my first signs of rebellion.

On Election Day, my husband and I met at a local Wesleyan church and went in to cast our votes together.

“Go on,” I told my husband when my voter registration was confirmed. Finally, he left for some empty booths on the other side of the room.

I stood behind the curtain, my palms suddenly sweating and my heartbeat galloping in my ears. Even though I was determined to vote for Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t do it. I knew I could never lie when my husband asked who I voted for. There was already some tension in the marriage in general, but especially around any conversation where I interjected my thoughts and opinions about Clinton or anything remotely “feminist.”

I wasn’t afraid of physical consequences. But verbal humiliation and the threat of a lengthy punishment of silence and dismissal stopped me.

“I don’t know if it was the best decision for you to go back to school,” he had said to me more than once. “You should stop reading so much” was another. I had to tread lightly.

He spent the entire election night scrolling on his phone, making the occasional joke as I walked around the living room as state after state was asked for Clinton. The popular vote put Hillary Clinton on course for the White House, but then came the stinging defeat when the electoral college votes tilted the election results in Trump’s favor.

“I’m going to bed, and so are you,” he said.

He turned off the television and then the lights as he left the room, as if I wasn’t there.

In 2020, I voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ballot by mail without my husband’s knowledge. This was after four years of an increasingly unstable Trump and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had been in school for several years and was involved in a diverse, educated community that allowed me to be more vocal about my opinions, political and otherwise.

I was encouraged across the board in my personal life. We moved to North Carolina so I could attend a graduate writing program. He was angry that I would even consider uprooting our empty nest for such a pursuit. Making the decision myself and forcing the issue contradicted his expectation that I would remain a submissive wife. But it was part of the slow burn of my rebellion, of a deconstruction of the woman I was meant to be.

The decision to leave that woman behind was not without consequences.

When Kamala Harris appeared on the cover of Vogue in January 2021, he turned the magazine over on the kitchen table after I got it out of the mailbox. Even today he claims that both sides were blamed on January 6. Like Trump, he deliberately mispronounces Kamala as “Ka-MA-la.”

Recently he tried to lure me into a political debate in the kitchen, claiming that saying Donald Trump is a threat to democracy is akin to inciting violence, and that the presidential debate between Harris and Trump was rigged. If I tried to give a fact-based rebuttal, he would say, “This is what they want.”

I no longer recognize the man I married twenty years ago. I left him once in 2020, and again last year, but had to return for financial reasons. For a while I harbored the hope that with time and credible information he might somehow escape the ultra-conservative, extremist-oriented, blind loyalty he seems to have embraced. I can no longer hold on to that hope. We get through the days, and I hope for the best as I imagine a stronger, brighter future for myself.

Now, in 2024, it feels like a gross understatement to say that the stakes are significantly higher than they were eight years ago. The threat of violence, the loss of personal freedoms, and the prospect of the implementation of Project 2025 make it impossible for me to consider casting any vote other than Kamala Harris. But I will not view my vote for Harris as a forced choice between the lesser of two evils. The hope and joy of the Harris/Walz campaign, along with Harris’ plans for her potential presidency, both economic and otherwise, compared to Trump’s vicious vitriol, incoherence, hatred and racism – to me there is never has there been a clearer choice.

I could still be a woman financially dependent on her evangelical husband. I’m working on that. But I’m no longer the woman who fears the consequences of not voting with him. I will not hide my voice. To remain silent is to be complicit. To remain silent means to continue to deny the intelligent, educated woman that I am. I have found my voice. My voice is my voice.