Opinion: Voting Republican doesn't make me a traitor to my gender
Republicans have adapted to the changing nature of women’s lives in the 20th and 21st centuries. Democrats often operate as if we are stuck in the past.
Briones Bedell is a nonprofit fundraiser and communications professional residing in Columbus.
I am a 21-year-old, college-educated white woman. The left feels entitled to my support, and it is driving voters like me away.
I have been a registered Republican as long as I have lived in Ohio.
Still, as the election drew closer, the Ohio Democratic Party sent me upwards of five pieces of mail per week. I was sent letters about gun control, on rescinding access to abortion — and above all I received fearmongering, sensationalized claims that my rights as a woman would be taken away if I didn’t vote for Democrats.
The assumption that I would support Kamala Harris because I am young, female and educated was incorrect.
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Democrats operate with an attitude of entitlement toward my demographic, and this is why they lost Ohio, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency.
As a Republican woman, I am eager for the day we welcome a female president to the White House.
I am not a traitor to my gender
Jo Ann Davidson, a Republican and the first — and only — female Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, ranks among my personal heroes. I commend President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint the first female chief of staff — the highly qualified and competent Susie Wiles — to his cabinet. But I do not share policy priorities with Harris simply because we share a gender.
And I am not a traitor to my sex for rejecting her proposals, despite the media's branding of female Republicans as “weak sisters,” “Karens,” “selfish," “racist” and even “sexist.”
Progressives argue that their policies will create a better, more equitable and respectable future for the young women whom they claim to support. But in their supposed quest to lift women up, they have reduced the scope of women’s lives to what they do with their bodies. They have told young women that abortion issues are the most important initiatives for them to engage with. They have campaigned on the belief that the best measure of a candidate’s ability to govern is their stance on “reproductive rights.”
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But these are not new or exciting messages to young voters.
Women more often buy groceries
Recall that in January 2017, just after Trump’s first inauguration, droves of women donned “pussyhats” for the Women’s March. The most widely adopted symbol of a movement purporting to represent the interests of women reduced them to a body part. It was disappointing and uninventive. Young women like me remember this, and the strategies employed by the failed Harris campaign that echoed the ineffectual messaging of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid.
The ordinary woman sees this messaging as off-putting and patronizing. The morning after the election, a friend of mine posted on Facebook: “Do Democrats realize that women more often buy groceries and pay taxes than they get abortions?”
In 2024, the economy was the single most important issue for voters across the political spectrum — not abortion. Measures to expand abortion access failed in three of ten states. A nation which since 2020 has been rocked by economic downturn, extended periods of lockdown and geopolitical instability, is one that is chiefly concerned with the details of daily life. The moral grandstanding and hyperbole of the left was stale in 2016, and it certainly falls on deaf ears today.
If Democrats want to win the support of women, they need to understand that their attitude of entitlement toward this demographic has driven many away.
The hyperbole employed by Harris’s camp was not only ineffective, it was insulting.
Women are not one-dimensional, single-issue voters. Their priorities are as dynamic and variable as their lives have become. They are leaders in the public and private sectors. They are authorities in their communities. They support their families inside and outside of the home. The priorities of a woman are not confined to pregnancy and childrearing, and they never were.
Democrats must come down from their ivory tower
Republicans have adapted to the changing nature of women’s lives in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The first woman elected to Congress, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and now the first woman to be White House chief of staff were all Republicans.
Democrats often operate as if we are stuck in the past, and they threaten that if we do not put them in office, we will go “backwards” as a gender.
They evoke Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel of female suppression “The Handmaid's Tale," offer up visions of 1950s “tradwives” and insist that women’s rights are inextricable from “reproductive rights.”
If they want their people and policies to excite and activate young female voters they have taken for granted, they will need to lay off the hyperbole, come down from the ivory tower and focus on the practical concerns of the women they purport to represent.
Briones Bedell is a nonprofit fundraiser and communications professional residing in Columbus.