In early 2020, 20-year-old Sierra, a struggling new mom, followed her son’s father from a college town in Indiana to Alabama, where he had found a job. Though she and Derek were unmarried, Sierra thought it would be best for their toddler, Kailani, to have both Mom and Dad nearby, even if they weren’t living together. Things stayed tough for the family—until Covid relief began coming through.

“She could barely believe it,” the sociologist Jessica Calarco writes in her book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Sierra got her first Covid stimulus check in April 2020. (All the names in this section are pseudonyms.) A government program offered her rent and utilities relief. She got the expanded child tax credit for Kailani, and she could pay for car insurance and drive to the part-time job she’d found at a gas station. Meanwhile, despite layoffs in the region, Derek kept his job in a big-box store. Life became easier.

Many of the other mothers Calarco interviewed at the time benefited from Covid-era programs. Mandy appreciated the expanded child tax credits and student debt relief. Christine loved the free school lunch program her kids enjoyed during the pandemic. Laura used the money from Covid unemployment funding and stimulus payments to build a freelance marketing business. Others Calarco spoke with benefited from the eviction moratorium and the expansion of Medicaid and SNAP.

But when those programs, especially the child tax credit, were eliminated, many of these women’s lives were upended. In 2022, after the expanded child tax credit came to an end, the national child poverty rate leaped from 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent, above the pre-pandemic rate. Sierra couldn’t afford her car insurance anymore and therefore couldn’t get to her job. In 2022, she had to take Kailani away from Derek and move home to Chicago to live with her mother.

Current Issue

February 2025 Issue

When we wonder why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election and got a smaller share of the women’s vote than expected—smaller even than Joe Biden did in 2020—we seem to forget about these women. The media, and voters themselves, seem to have ignored the Biden administration’s economic wins—and overlooked Harris’s plans to develop a new “care economy,” in which Americans aren’t left entirely on their own to pay for and deal with childcare, elder care, and the other all-too-human needs we all deal with at some point or another. But we’re also missing this: We did have a care economy during Covid, and then it was pulled out from under the people who needed it most.

In the United States, “women have always been our care economy,” Calarco told me when I spoke to her after Trump’s reelection. “But for a while, during Covid, we had a real care economy. And then it went back to just being women.”

If you wonder why Democrats struggled with the women’s vote, that might be a clue.

One of the main reasons many Harris supporters believed she’d win the 2024 presidential election was the assumption that she would just crush the women’s vote. After all, women routinely vote in greater numbers than men, and since the 1980s they’ve favored Democrats. Since Donald Trump’s 2016 election, when women went for Hillary Clinton by 13 points, they’ve powered many successful Democratic campaigns, from Virginia statehouse races in 2017 and 2019, to the 2018 midterms, to the White House in 2020, and to unprecedented success in the 2022 midterms.

That year, a predicted “red wave” never reached shore: Democrats took control of the Senate and only lost the House narrowly, a surprisingly strong showing for a party in the first midterm after it had won the White House. Political analysts credited the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, which overturned a nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion, with driving the unusually high midterm voter turnout, especially among women. Once Harris became the Democratic nominee in July 2024, women showed a significant shift in her favor away from Trump. A Quinnipiac poll in late August found a “yawning” gender gap, with Harris leading among women 58–37 percent, while Trump led among men 57–39 percent. But on Election Day, Harris’s lead had dwindled to roughly eight points (exit polls vary a bit)—less than the 15-point advantage Biden enjoyed with women voters.

Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, and as the veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake attested, “it’s sobering how much variation there is this year.” But Lake believes the various polls showing the shift of women away from Harris are valid. To understand what happened, we have to look more closely at the vast bloc of women voters. Black women have long been the Democrats’ most dependable voters, and in November they were again: Exit polls consistently show that Harris won 92 percent of their vote. Support among Latinas dropped roughly 10 points—58 percent cast their votes for Harris, down from the 69 percent that exit polls say Biden received in 2020.

But the big problem was white women. This time around, there was reason to hope that even though a majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, they might finally break ranks with the candidate who was an adjudicated sex offender and who bragged about appointing justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and vote for a woman who made restoring abortion rights the centerpiece of her campaign. After Harris became the nominee, a number of polls found her gaining ground among white women specifically, with a mid-October Reuters/Ipsos poll even finding her in the lead.

It didn’t happen. Though exit polling is hard to compare from election to election because the methodologies and targeted states change, it appears that roughly the same share of white women voted for Trump in 2024 as in 2020. (Pew Research found that in 2016, white women only supported Trump 47–45.) But again, zooming in on this demographic yields interesting distinctions. Harris overwhelmingly won college-educated white women, doing roughly four points better than Biden, and also won young white women and unmarried white women under 55, according to Lake. Jackie Payne of Galvanize Action, a group focused on organizing moderate white women, says the 6,000 voters they tracked went 48–44 for Harris. Jewish women, most of whom identify as white, went 89 percent for her.

Conversely, Trump won an overwhelming 83 percent of white evangelical Protestant women voters, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. In 2020, PRRI found that if you subtracted that overwhelmingly pro-Trump subset from white women voters, more white women overall supported Biden than Trump, roughly 58–42. According to PRRI’s first 2024 postelection survey, a similar share of non-evangelical Protestant white women voted for Harris in 2024: 56 percent versus 43 percent for Trump. “In both 2020 and 2024, the presence of white evangelical women voters, eight in 10 of whom support Trump, are the critical mass pushing white women over the top into majority territory for Trump,” Robert Jones, PRRI’s director, tells me. In other words, evangelical white women broke for Trump, and various other subsets of white women voted for Harris—but not by a wide enough margin to swing the overall demographic toward her.

That might help explain why abortion appears to have been less of a motivating issue than many assumed it would be: 73 percent of all white evangelical Protestants say abortion should rarely or never be legal, after all. But what happened to the other white women voters? Why didn’t Harris’s appeals on abortion, the fate of democracy, and more support for caregivers win more of them over?

In more than a dozen interviews with advocates trying to motivate women of color as well as white women to vote for Democrats, two top-line reasons stand out. First, abortion played out differently than many expected. During the campaign, Trump sought to neutralize Harris’s significant advantage on an issue that had been politically toxic for Republicans with his promises of moderation. Shadow president and billionaire Elon Musk brazenly invested $20 million in RBG PAC, named after the late liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in order to spread the word that Trump had “softened” on abortion. And it worked: “Abortion won big,” Gretchen Borchelt, the vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, declared at a press conference the day after the election—but Harris, who made abortion rights and reproductive justice central to her campaign, did not. Seven of the state ballot initiatives to secure abortion rights passed, including in swing states like Arizona and Nevada that went for Trump—yet nationally, exit polls show that roughly a quarter of voters who said abortion was their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. In Arizona, 24 percent who voted “yes” on the state’s initiative also voted for Trump; in Nevada, it was 28 percent. Voters in those states also elected to the Senate abortion rights supporters Jacky Rosen (in Nevada) and newcomer Ruben Gallego (in Arizona). “In 2022, the abortion issue was nationalized, and the economy was localized,” Celinda Lake explains. “In 2024, it was the opposite.”

And it wasn’t just in Arizona and Nevada. Voters in other swing states felt that they could count on other protections. “Michigan [had] already passed an initiative [protecting abortion rights],” Lake says. “Wisconsin had a Supreme Court decision [that did the same]. In Pennsylvania, nobody believed [Governor] Josh Shapiro would let anything happen.” The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein looked closely at the exit polling of “pro-choice, economically pessimistic voters” and found that most went for Trump. Among white women without a college education, two-thirds supported Trump, Brownstein reported, citing CNN’s exit polls.

It’s especially bewildering to think about voters’ downplaying the threat Trump poses to abortion access after the recent outpouring of public testimony from women about being denied lifesaving medical care by doctors afraid of running afoul of abortion bans. I met one such survivor and activist, Kaitlyn Joshua, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Baton Rouge, Louisiana, resident was miscarrying at 11 weeks pregnant, just weeks after the state imposed a near-total abortion ban. In severe pain, spotting and passing what seemed to be fetal tissue, she visited two emergency rooms but could not get standard miscarriage care: removing the pregnancy tissue. “I was in pain—bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” Joshua said onstage at the DNC. “No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.” Suffering and still bleeding, she went home and eventually passed the rest of the tissue on her own.

In addition to speaking at the DNC, Joshua went on the Harris campaign’s Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour visiting battleground states. She met voters of all ages, races, and ideologies and shared what had happened to her. “We had beautiful conversations with them on the campaign trail, even conservative women who found themselves envisioning they could be in the same situation I was in,” she tells me. “And I think for whatever reason, when they got to the ballot box, it wasn’t enough.”

The longtime Planned Parenthood leader Cecile Richards believes that these heartbreaking stories of women being denied reproductive care are so new that we can’t expect them to make a difference yet. She cofounded Abortion in America, which is dedicated to telling stories like Joshua’s, in late 2024. “We’re just now getting maternal mortality reports, and in some states we’re not gonna find out about them ever,” Richards says. Texas, which had imposed draconian abortion restrictions and slashed spending on maternal care even before the Dobbs decision, saw a 56 percent spike in maternal mortality between 2019 and 2022, according to data from the Gender Policy Institute. This year, Texas announced it won’t review maternal mortality reports from the past two years. And after ProPublica reported on the deaths of two pregnant women in Georgia, that state fired its 32-member review board, alleging that at least one of them had leaked information to ProPublica.

“I think those stories are important, but it’s going to take time to get them out there,” Richards says. “People don’t hear things the first time you tell them.”

“That is the work of the next four years,” Joshua says. “Folks are gonna have to feel it to understand it.”

There was another big disconnect with women voters. Ai-jen Poo is president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which colaunched Care Can’t Wait Action with dozens of other groups, including unions and women’s groups, to do voter outreach. She and others involved in that effort told me they kept hearing something surprising from phone-bankers and door-knockers, and some pollsters heard it too: Working-class and middle-class voters told them about the difference that Covid-era relief had made in their lives, and how they struggled when it disappeared. These voters got Covid relief checks, generous unemployment benefits, an expanded child tax credit, and an eviction moratorium. More became eligible for Medicaid and SNAP, along with childcare subsidies. Childcare centers got funding, too, for a while.

But at various points in 2021 and 2022, those programs went away. And when Democrats tried to restore some of them through the Build Back Better Act, they were thwarted by Republicans, and two of their own: Senators Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema, both of whom opposed the “care agenda” elements of the bill. Thanks mainly to Manchin, Build Back Better was split into two pieces: The first invested $300 billion in climate and energy programs, including $60 billion for manufacturing renewable energy infrastructure. And Biden had earlier signed an infrastructure act that invested billions in building or rebuilding roads and bridges and railroad lines, as well as water and sewer pipes. All of it was important, but as Hillary Holley of Care In Action tells me, stimulating the construction economy was “the ‘men’s agenda.’” The rest of Build Back Better involved investments in the care economy—the “women’s agenda”—which included universal preschool, subsidized childcare for an additional 20 million children, an extension of the refundable child tax credit, four weeks of paid parental leave, and expanded home elder care through Medicaid. Many progressives initially objected to splitting the bill, and several voted against the climate-and-energy-only bill but eventually relented and helped pass it, on the promise that the care part would come later. As we now know, it didn’t.

“One of the reasons I was so angry that people were saying [Harris] didn’t speak to the working class: Well, the working class I interact with every day are women and people of color, and boy, did she speak to them,” Ai-jen Poo says. She notes that Harris did slightly better than Biden among voters over 65, which could be evidence that her proposals got through to that demographic.

“I do believe that the Biden-Harris administration is the most pro-labor administration in history,” Poo says. “But truthfully, I think that when President Biden thinks of labor, he does think of a ‘working-class hero’ archetype of a different era.” Indeed, the white male working class got a lot from the Biden administration; white working-class women got a whole lot less. “To [Harris], I think the caregiver, the woman in scrubs, is just as much part of the working class as the man in the hard hat.”

The economy was nominally strong in the months leading up to the election—unemployment down, wages up—but many voters told pollsters they were worse off than they had been, either under Trump or early in the Biden presidency, because they were.

Harris had a number of plans to rebuild that safety net, including reinstating the refundable child tax credits, a $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns, capping childcare costs at 7 percent of family income, and of course her groundbreaking Medicare at Home plan, which would have provided in-home care for seniors. Those proposals were overwhelmingly popular, says Celinda Lake—the most popular among Harris’s policies—if voters heard about them. The New York Times found that of the more than 100 clips from Harris’s October media blitz that were tested for increasing her support, Medicare coverage for home health aides ranked at the top. Harris seems to have made some headway reaching voters with these proposals at that point in the campaign: An October Times/Siena poll found that she had an eight-point lead over Trump on the question of which candidate “cares about people like you”—and she had a 22-point edge on that question among women. But on Election Day, it wasn’t enough. In 2024, Trump ate into the Democrats’ share of voters of color, especially men. A majority of Latino men voted for Trump, as well as roughly 20 percent of Black men—a smaller share than some had predicted, but more than Harris could afford. Equally troubling, she saw her turnout in virtually every constituency decline from Biden’s large numbers in 2020. And unlike Biden, she lost voters who made under $50,000 a year. No matter what Harris’s platform was, the Democrats’ economic messaging did not get through, to men or to women. And on this point, it’s fair to at least partly blame the Democrats themselves, and the Harris campaign, which in its closing weeks emphasized gauzy slogans like “A New Way Forward” and “An Opportunity Agenda” instead of hammering away at economic hardship and injustice.

Some advocates for women of color are sympathetic to the complexities of what white working-class women face. “They suffered financially, and they chose to bet on Trump to improve the economy,” Hillary Holley says. Some Latinas joined them.

“We need to understand that white women are multidimensional,” Holley continues. “White working-class women voted for a change in the economy. Black women had the same worries, but of course racism drove us away.”

What about Harris’s gambit to campaign with former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney to win over conservative white women? In October, the pair visited Ripon, Wisconsin, and then did a one-day tour of three swing states. “They were trying to use [her] to elevate the risk of another Trump presidency,” Lake notes. But it didn’t work, she adds—and Harris’s “base” might have been turned off by her palling around with Cheney.

As I wrapped up this story, I found myself asking: Is my focus on how women voters failed to deliver Harris the presidency a form of internalized misogyny? During his campaign, Trump lavished attention on the so-called “manosphere,” allegedly directed to appear on influential podcasts by his 18-year-old son, Barron. It’s enough to make you think that the real story of the election is the way Trump capitalized on that media ecosystem. Since his election, Trump has nominated a cabinet of sexual predators and misogynists; this is a cultural backlash that we didn’t entirely foresee. That’s why, as I sketch out the way Democrats did worse than expected among women, I wind up frustrated at how few people are looking at how and why they did so much worse with men. Sure, it was mostly expected; we’re used to it—but is that OK?

White women regularly get told to “come get your people.” Why aren’t progressive white men told to go out and get theirs? Why do they instead complain about the first Black female presidential nominee “abandoning” the working class, which renders invisible the female working class she’s spent her career fighting for? “Remember,” Jackie Payne says, “if only women voted, Kamala Harris would be president.”