In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’ campaign for president, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: resolving the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic vote-tapping had women placing stickers and sticky notes in places other women are likely to encounter in private: powder rooms, locker rooms and the backs of tampon boxes. All included a call for the Harris-Walz ticket: “From Woman to Woman,” one read: “No one will see your vote at the ballot box!” Vote for the women and girls you love!” Intimate little letters, meant to be read in secret with the promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But recently, a new pro-Harris ad spotlighted the private movement. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris-Walz video with Julia Roberts as narrator, which read: “In the only place in America where women still have the right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen saying goodbye to her male partner to mark her ballot – and looking across the divider at a second woman, about her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris and then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we assume, based on his patriotic hat) and assures him she made the right choice. She shares a private look with the second woman as the two caress each other I voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Canny wife assures husband she’ll vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman voting for Harris and does the same.

These invitations to silent rebellion often lack a substantive tone, although some grassroots messages refer to the right to abortion. The point doesn’t seem to be convincing conservative women, but rather allowing women who are privately liberal to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats suspect that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris as long as they were assured that their vote would be kept secret. If they are right, they have revealed a new source of liberal votes that the left was thought to have lost. But that’s a big one as.

Read: What Kamala Harris’ doubters don’t understand

Predictably, Conservatives are outraged by this story. “If I found out that (my wife) was going to go to the voting booth and pull the lever for Harris, that’s like having an affair,” Fox host Jesse Watters said on air. “I think it’s so disgusting,” right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I find it so sickening that this woman wears the American hat, she comes in with her sweet husband, who is probably doing his utmost to make sure she can have a nice life and take care of the family, and then she lies . to him and said, “Oh yeah, I’m going to vote for Trump,” and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth. It’s not surprising that the same political faction obsessed with cuckoldry would view the ad through that particular lens. Watters and Kirk seem to be provoked by the same themes: the implications of spousal secrecy and domestic pluralism both undermine the right’s preference for families traditionally united under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to explain much of the conservative reaction.

Electoral prospects also matter, and both parties have a shared interest in the votes of America’s tens of millions of married women. In this regard, conservatives have a historical advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of the 2016 electorate found that about half of validated voters (both men and women) were married, and a majority of them – 55 percent – ​​supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute released a report saying that 52 percent of married women voted for Trump, compared to 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what the supporters of Harris’ campaign seem to hope is that some of these married women are in fact quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is some evidence for that. A YouGov poll at the end of October found that one in eight women had secretly voted differently from their partners. This may be why CNN recently noted the emergence of a Facebook group dedicated to “wives of the deplorables,” who discuss their gradual estrangement from their MAGA husbands. Asked to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s politics New York magazine, four women offered similar stories: their marriage had not been particularly political at first, but then their partner had been radicalized by the right-wing media surrounding Trump. These anecdotes tease a broader phenomenon of female voters coming into conflict with their male partners.

The most likely scenario could be that women who previously voted Republican are simply conservative. The marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-leaning experts speculate that a difference in values ​​between married and unmarried people explains the gap. “We know that marriage is simply a higher priority for people with more conservative worldviews,” Peyton Roth and Brad Wilcox wrote for AEI, adding that “marriage can push men and women to the right.” An analysis of American and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gendered destiny,” or the idea that their fortunes are tied to that of their gender. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gendered fate, compared to 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

This micro effort to get married women to support Harris is clearly part of a much larger campaign for these voters. Whether this will reach dozens or thousands of women is impossible to say, but in elections that can be decided by minuscule margins, a secret woman who supports Harris is a reasonable target. Traditional marriage advice may imply that there should be no secrets between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy trump the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love – and in the voting booth.