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 a large percentage of white women in the United States who cast their vote for Trump.

I’d never considered myself a political individual. I was born into a family that didn’t discuss politics at all, only religion, and only in the context of our own denominations of Christianity and proselytizing. I was raised in a lower-class, white, rural American household in the 1970s and ’80s. The only political terms I ever recall hearing in my younger years were Republican and “conservative,” and never in my own home. 

Here is my first political memory: It was 1988, and I heard Ted Koppel recap the presidential victory of Republican George H.W. Bush on ABC’s “Nightline” while I lost my virginity on my parent’s couch the night before I got married at 17.

At that point, I’d given up on the hope of college or any of the aspirations I’d had earlier in high school, like studying law or teaching at the university level. Without money for college, there were few options in my Midwest farm town. Maybe I could have been a bank teller or an assembly line worker in a local manufacturing plant, or worked retail. Or there was marriage. 

That union didn’t last. When I remarried in 2004, I was a single mother with a GED and a failed college course or two under my belt. I didn’t talk about politics with this husband, either, except for one brief, pre-marital discussion. I told my fiancé over the chicken strip special at O’Charley’s that I believed in women’s rights, though in hindsight I had very little knowledge of what that really meant. I told him I considered myself a “very liberal conservative.”

I committed myself to being a “tradwife,” or a traditional evangelical Christian wife. I was submissive to my husband who’d been deemed the head of our household by biblical Scripture. I kept and managed our home as required. I took care of the kids, worked at least part-time when child care permitted, prepared homemade meals and baked goods, did all the laundry for our large family and managed our finances, which was more of a “rob Peter to pay Paul” enterprise. When 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 band, and I’d acquiesce. I’d been told God commanded me to meet his needs, for casseroles and otherwise. From an evangelical Christian standpoint, I did everything I could do to be a good God-honoring wife except be silent.

In 2012, I started paying more attention to politics. I watched the Obama/Romney debate. That was also the year I returned to college to finish my degree. I would ultimately go on to get my Masters. My husband also set off in pursuit of 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 vote for Hillary Clinton. I’d never been a fan of Donald Trump’s brand of ostentatious wealth and womanizing. Something had started to shift in me in the final year of getting my bachelor’s degree. I was in my 40s, my children were leaving home, and I worked two part-time jobs on campus. By then, my husband was a full-time pulpit minister. I was “first lady” of a small country church congregation and I wanted more. I started demanding a more equitable division of household labor like 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 inside to cast our votes together.

“You go on,” I told my husband as my voter registration was confirmed. He finally took off toward a couple of unoccupied booths on the opposite side of the room.

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

I wasn’t afraid of physical repercussions. But verbal debasement, and the threat of an extended punishment of silence and dismissal, held me back. 

“I’m not sure you going back to school was the best decision,” he’d said to me, more than once. “You need to stop reading so much” was another. I had to tread lightly.

Throughout election night, he scrolled on his phone and made the occasional joke while I paced around the living room as state after state was called for Clinton. The popular vote set Hillary Clinton on a course for the White House, but then came the cutting sting of defeat as the electoral college votes swung the election results in favor of Trump.

“I’m going to bed, and you should too,” he said.

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

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

Across the board in my personal life, I’d become emboldened. We moved to North Carolina so I could attend a graduate writing program. He was angry that I even considered uprooting our empty nest for such a pursuit. Making the decision myself, and forcing the issue, was antithetical to his expectation that I continue to be a submissive wife. But it was part of the slow burn of my rebellion, of a deconstruction of the woman I’d been conditioned to be.

The decision to leave that woman behind hasn’t been without consequence.

When Kamala Harris appeared on the cover of Vogue in January 2021, he flipped the magazine over on the kitchen table after I’d brought it in from the mailbox. Even today, he claims that both sides were to blame on January 6. Like Trump, he intentionally mispronounces Kamala as “Ka-MA-la.”

Recently, he tried to goad 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. When I would try to present any fact-based rebuttal, he would say, “This is what they want.”

I no longer recognize the man I married 20 years ago. I left him once in 2020, and again last year, but was forced to return for financial reasons. For a while, I held out hope that with time and credible information, he would somehow snap out of the ultra-conservative, extremist-leaning, blind loyalty he seems to have embraced. I no longer hold onto that hope. We get through the days, and I hope for the best, imagining a stronger, brighter future for myself.

Now, in 2024, saying the stakes are considerably higher than they were eight years ago feels like a gross understatement. The threat of violence, loss of personal freedoms, and the prospect of the implementation of Project 2025 make it impossible for me to consider casting any other vote than for Kamala Harris. But I won’t consider my vote for Harris as being forced to choose between the “lesser of two evils.” The hope and the joy of the Harris/Walz campaign along with Harris’s plans for her potential presidency, economic and otherwise, compared to the malignant vitriol, incoherence, hatred and racism from Trump — for me, there’s never been a clearer choice.

I might 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 repercussions of not voting with him. I won’t hide my vote. To be silent is to be complicit. To be silent is to continue to deny the intelligent, well-educated woman that I am. I found my voice. My vote is my voice.