In the scramble to understand where America’s head is politically this election season, the focus has been on the working class, on Hispanics and on young men. But the country’s single biggest demographic group — women — is still the main driver of voting and in this election is looking more Democratic than ever.
Women have been the backbone of the Democratic base for decades and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats most years.
In 2022, support dipped slightly, when 48 percent of women chose Democrats and 41 percent supported Republicans. But this year, support looks set to return to more typical results, with 56 percent of women saying they prefer Democratic candidates, compared with 37 percent who say they prefer Republican ones, according to New York Times/Siena University surveys.
Women are a potent political force because they vote at higher rates than men.
And this year, they are bringing a lot of energy to volunteer and get-out-the-vote efforts.
Lynda Hoving, a retired appraiser and longtime volunteer for the Democratic Party in Kent County, Mich., has been sending postcards and working the phones for Democrats.
She watched as her West Michigan county, home to Gerald Ford and a tradition of Republicanism, went from solidly red in the 1970s, when she and her husband moved there, to reliably blue in more recent political cycles.
“I was always trying to turn something from red to purple,” said Ms. Hoving, who spent years in Grand Rapids stuffing envelopes, door-knocking and making spreadsheets. “It has been my goal for my whole political life.” She said it was disproportionately the women in the county who “kept the balls rolling” for the slow, tedious work of local politics.
Now 73, she said she still reminded everyone to vote during election season, including, most recently, her orthodontist, who told her he had voted for Trump but was not happy with the way things had turned out.
But she didn’t get to try to pitch him on Democrats.
“Then they put the plastic in my mouth, and I couldn’t talk anymore,” she said. “That’s one way to force a Democrat to listen.”
Pat Smithson, 69, of Lenexa, Kan., has volunteered so much for Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Kansas, that he called out her name when he walked into a campaign event on Saturday morning. She had brought cinnamon rolls freshly baked by her daughter.
Ms. Smithson, a retired fund-raiser, has been calling voters all over Kansas since June and said that even her daughter, a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2024, planned to vote for Mr. Hamilton, too. “She listened to him on TV,” Ms. Smithson said. “She watches me volunteer, setting the example.”
Some of the shift away from Republicans among women in recent years has been driven by Donald Trump.
Annette Hunt, 58, who works in finance and lives in Dallas, grew up in a staunchly Republican family in East Texas.
“Reagan was almost like a God in our house,” she said.
She said she voted straight ticket Republican for most of her life. Then came Mr. Trump.
She thought he would be “like Ross Perot — a businessman who shook up the Republican Party a bit,” but she couldn’t bring herself to vote for him, so she wrote in her father, who died that year. She has always regretted it, and ever since has voted Democratic to “stop the current agenda of the Republican Party.”
Last Saturday, she voted early for James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas. She said she did not feel at home in the Democratic Party either, despite voting for their candidates for the past 10 years.
“I’m a person without a party,” she said.
Jeanne Russell, 77, who owns a farm on Verona Island, Maine, said she grew up in a Republican household but was shaped by the politics that defined her young adulthood and ended up a liberal.
“I was a child of the ’60s and ’70s,” she said. “I was aware of the injustices in the country. It bothered me. So I’ve always been a Democrat.”
She said she has never missed an election.
Murray Carpenter contributed reporting.
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