The post itself didn’t even describe what the bill did. All former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote was, “Are you a woman who changed your name when you got married? Congress is considering a bill that could make it much harder for you to vote. Call your rep — this is not a drill.”
Why would Republicans in Congress want to make it harder for married women to vote? Married women broke for President Donald Trump 51%-47% in 2020 and 52%-47% in 2024. This is not a demographic that the Republican Party would want to suppress.
But if you went online and searched #saveact on any social media platform, you would quickly discover who the real audience for Clinton’s post was: thousands of young single women who believe the Republican Party is trying to make The Handmaid’s Tale a reality.
“If you are a woman that has changed your name from your birth certificate, let’s say through marriage, and you took your husband’s name, you are no longer eligible to vote if this bill passes the Senate,” one TikTokker warned.
The legislation in question, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, does not make married women ineligible to vote. What it does is require voters to produce documentary evidence that they are citizens when they register to vote. The legislation does not even affect citizens who are already registered.
Documents deemed acceptable to prove citizenship include birth certificates, U.S. passports, and new Real ID driver’s licenses. What Clinton and her fellow Democrats are claiming is that because women often take their husbands’ last names when they get married, their birth certificates may not match their current legal names. But birth certificates are just one of the acceptable documents. More importantly, both men and women are already required to provide the same documents that the SAVE Act requires when they fill out an I-9 form to prove they are a citizen for employment.
Notice how none of the Democratic messaging on the SAVE Act is designed to help married women get the documents they need to register to vote or to get a job. Nope. Their only intention is to rile up single women with fake stories about how oppressive marriage, the patriarchy, and the Republican Party are.
And this is not an isolated incident.
During the 2024 presidential election, a Democratic group called Vote Common Good, which bills itself as “the alternative to MAGA Trumpism,” spent millions of dollars on an ad narrated by Julia Roberts insinuating that abusive husbands across the country were intimidating their wives into voting for the Republican Party. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know,” Roberts said in the ad as a married woman experiences a brief moment of freedom in a polling booth before being forced to return to her marriage prison.
Leaving aside the fact that the polling we have on the issue shows husbands are more likely to say they felt pressure from their spouses to vote a certain way than the other way around, the overall message of the ad is that marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution.
And the Democratic Party’s attack on men isn’t new. In 2014, the Democrats based their entire midterm campaign on a fictional rape epidemic that was allegedly victimizing women on college campuses across the country. Then-President Barack Obama started the hysteria himself with a White House speech and the creation of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
No one is denying that sexual assault happens on college campuses, but there had been no evidence of a surge. Democrats manufactured a crisis to rile up young single women. The result was new Title IX regulations that mandated kangaroo courts on campuses nationwide in which men could be expelled and have their reputations destroyed by a single complaint from a woman that could be made without any accompanying evidence. Defendants were not allowed to question their accusers or even know who they were. When it comes to illegal immigrants from El Salvador, the Democratic Party is all about due process. But when it’s Johnny from Iowa, due process is completely abandoned in the name of female empowerment.
And then there are the constant hyperbolic fundraising emails. For decades, women’s inboxes have been constantly barraged with messages such as “Women’s Rights Under ATTACK,” “GOP’s Abortion Bans Are HERE,” and “Devastating Setback for Women’s Rights!” Apparently, these messages work, at least in a financial sense, for the Democratic Party. Data show that scare-tactic emails have higher clickthrough rates than more sedate ones, which is why Democrats rely on them so much.
It also doesn’t help when leaders such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) undercut Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) with statements encouraging Schumer’s male colleagues to “listen to the women, for the people.” Such a message might be appropriate on abortion and child care, but when the issue is something that affects everyone, if Democratic senators filibuster a spending bill so the government shuts down, what special insight are women supposed to have? Or is the message that men just shut up and do what women tell them?
By turning every issue into a case of female oppression, Democrats have pushed women to the left and men out of the party altogether.
“The purpose of a system is what it does,” goes the saying most often attributed to British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. And lately, it appears that the purpose of the Democratic Party is less about electing Democrats, which it failed spectacularly at in 2024, and more about driving young women further to the left and away from men and marriage.
As Democrats have ramped up their attacks on men, young women have moved steadily leftward. As recently as 2007, young men and women were not that far apart politically. According to Gallup, just 28% of young women aged 18 to 29 considered themselves “liberal” as recently as 2007, compared to 25% of young men the same age. That’s just a 3-point gap. Now, however, 40% of women aged 18 to 29 consider themselves liberal compared to an unchanged 25% of young men.
And as women have moved to the left, they have become more partisan about who they date.
A 2020 Pew Research Center poll found that 70% of single Democrats would not consider dating a Republican, while just 47% of Republicans said they wouldn’t date a Democrat. And according to the Survey Center on American Life, no demographic is more likely to say they have ended a friendship over politics than liberal women. A third of liberal women admit to having ended an existing friendship due to politics, compared to just 10% of conservatives.
Democrats have even managed to convince women that marriage makes people unhappy. As recently as 1988, 54% of Democrats believed married people were happier than single people. Today, just 21% do. Democrats simply no longer believe that marriage is a valuable institution. Asked in 2023 if they agreed with the statement that “marriage improves partnerships by strengthening the commitment to one another,” more than two-thirds of Republicans said “yes” compared to just 30% of Democrats. Democrats are also far more likely to agree with the statement that “marriage is an outdated institution” and are far less likely to say they hope their children get married someday.
Considering their disdain for men and their negative view of marriage, it is not surprising that Democrats are now far less likely to be married than Republicans. According to Gallup, as recently as 1980, Republicans and Democrats between the ages of 30 and 50 were equally likely to be married. Today, while more than two-thirds of Republicans in the age bracket are married, less than half of Democrats are.
Unfortunately for single Democratic women, married people are happier than single people. According to the 2022 General Social Survey, 40% of married women with children consider themselves “very happy,” compared to 27% of unmarried women with children. Taking a longer look at women’s lives over time, Harvard researchers tracked 11,830 American female nurses over 25 years and found that those women who got married were healthier, happier, and lived longer than those women who remained single.
The Democratic Party’s antipathy toward marriage might stem from the fact that the institution has become an existential threat to the party. The simple reality is that research has demonstrated that women are more likely to become conservative and vote Republican after they get married. They are even more likely to become Republicans after they start having children. Considering that college-educated single women are far more likely to vote, volunteer, and donate to political parties than men, this means every time a single woman gets married, the Democratic Party is in danger of losing not just a voter but a committed donor and activist as well.
Democrats know they have a man problem. But they have no clue how to address it, and when they try, they only make it worse. Just look at former first lady Michelle Obama’s speech for then-Vice President Kamala Harris that was directed at men last October.
“Look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel,” Obama said. “So let me take a minute to help folks, especially the men in our lives, get a better sense of what could happen.”
“Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through,” Obama continued. “The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women.”
At no point in her speech did Obama recognize that American women today are the healthiest, wealthiest, and best-educated not only in U.S. history but in world history. There was no acknowledgement that women now make up 60% of college students and 66% of college graduates. Instead, she only made women out to be victims of male oppression.
There was also no acknowledgement that men are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to die on the job, more likely to be in jail, and more likely to commit suicide than women. There was no empathy for men or the problems they face, only a demand that they blindly vote for the Democratic Party because they simply were too clueless to understand how difficult women’s lives are.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING A TRILLION DOLLAR MISTAKE
Democrats don’t necessarily need men to win elections again. Thanks to the continued decline of marriage, single women are one of the fastest-growing voting demographics. And as mentioned before, single women, especially college-educated single women, are far more likely to vote, volunteer, and donate than men are. There is a path for Democrats to succeed by pushing women further and further away from men.
But if Democrats want to become a party that attracts both sexes again, it is going to have to stop turning every issue into an example of women’s oppression and start taking the difficulties that men face seriously.
