Opinion | The Women Are Angry

There was a poll released late Saturday evening – the famously reliable, Ann Selzer-conducted poll from the Des Moines Register – that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points in the supposedly solid red state. 

The poll, rightfully, sent shockwaves throughout the political world, which had up until that point been unanimous in its belief that Trump and Harris were locked in a dead heat that might take weeks to sort out. The Selzer poll, which has been remarkably accurate for decades, changed all of that, potentially revealing a flawed system of aggregate polling nationally that weighted too heavily biased polls and skewed too far to the right in order to avoid missing another overperformance from Trump. 

Put more simply, the collective feeling was: Holy sh*t, if she’s beating him in Iowa, it’s gonna be ugly. 

Because of the women. 

And wouldn’t it be fitting, if Selzer’s poll proves to be even remotely accurate, that it was a poll conducted by a woman that shifted the national narrative for good? 

Honestly, I don’t know why it has taken so long for the national media and political consultants from coast to coast to properly weight the fact that women are pissed. Not liberal women. Not young women. Not once-had-an-abortion women. 

All women. 

Including conservative women. 

They don’t like the abortion ban. They don’t like the fact that women – more than 64,000 in red states alone at last count in the last two years – are being forced to carry rape pregnancies to term or travel hundreds of miles for an abortion in another state. They don’t like the fact that women are being left to die because of non-viable pregnancies that doctors won’t abort out of fear of prosecution. 

They really, really don’t like it. 

Last week on our podcast, Alabama Politics This Week, we had first-time candidate Elizabeth Anderson on to talk about her longshot campaign to unseat Rep. Gary Palmer. Anderson said she knew going into the race that she wasn’t going to win, and instead chose to take on the challenge for the experience and to potentially build out donor lists and increase support for Democratic candidates in the Birmingham area and across the state. 

But a few weeks into the campaign, Anderson said she made the decision to not limit her campaign’s outreach to only Democratic women. Instead, she purposefully pursued Republican women with a simple message: “I don’t want Republican women to die during childbirth anymore than I want Democratic women to die during childbirth.” 

All of a sudden, at fundraising events, Anderson’s campaign started receiving envelopes with $50 bills. 

No names. No addresses. Just $50 in cash. 

In a three month stretch, one candidate in deep-red Alabama, in a race that she had no hope of winning, took in more than $62,000 in anonymous donations – $50 at a time, almost all of which came from Republican women. 

“They didn’t want their husbands to know, didn’t want their names to be on a report,” Anderson said. “But they wanted me to know that they weren’t happy with what was happening with their health care.” 

And why in the hell would they? Look at what’s happening. 

Also last week, APR ran a story discussing the plight of the Costas. Tamara Costa was pregnant with her second child when the young family received devastating news – the fetus was not developing properly. In fact, it had no skull and its organs were developing on the outside of its body. She had a partial molar pregnancy caused by a genetic defect during fertilization. 

Terminating the pregnancy and moving on with life would be hard. But the state of Alabama, which has a full ban on abortions, made it even harder. 

The Costas had to travel hundreds of miles and pay thousands of dollars to abort the pregnancy and avoid potential health complications that could result in Tamara not being able to have a future child. 

And they’re not alone. 

By some estimates, hundreds of women have now been forced out of this state to receive necessary and potentially life-saving health care services that were being denied or stalled because of this state’s idiotic abortion ban. 

And that’s not to mention the kids. The young, pre-teen girls who have experienced sexual assault at the hands of family members, now forced in this state to carry those pregnancies to term. While at the same time, the people responsible for such callous legislation are telling the same girls that they’re not old enough to read books – BOOKS! – about sex. 

The lunacy is too much. And the women have had enough. 

If you doubt this, please, point me to the contested congressional race occurring since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, where abortion was even just one of the primary issues in play, and the Democrat didn’t either win or perform well above expectations. 

I’ll save you some time – there hasn’t been one. And Republicans’ attitudes about the issue – refusing to add rape and incest exceptions in many states, blocking fixes to the IVF bans, talking openly about prosecuting women for traveling for abortions, talking openly about a national abortion ban – have only served to make things worse. 

And now y’all are surprised that women are mad and turning to the female candidate who promises to fix this madness? 

You literally left women bleeding out on tables. What did you think was going to happen?