'I just couldn't be silent': How American women decided the 2020 presidential race

Women appear to have been crucial in delivering the U.S. presidency to Biden. They were at the forefront of the highest U.S. voter turnout in at least a century, casting ballots at higher rates than men. And more than half of female voters - 56% - chose the former vice president compared to 48% of men, according to exit polls from the Edison Research firm.

It wasn’t just women who carried Biden: Trump lost ground among male voters in 2020 compared to 2016. But key to Biden’s success were his gains among white college-educated women in battleground states who turned out in higher numbers than for Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton four years ago.

African-American women, and to a lesser degree, Latinas, supported Biden’s bid for the White House over Trump by wide majorities nationally, and more so than African-American and Latino men.

Trump’s difficulties in appealing to women voters long predate this election and the pandemic. Accusations of sexual harassment and assault - which he vehemently denies - have dogged him for years. The day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, hundreds of thousands of people protested his election in a Women’s March in Washington D.C. and other cities around the country.

Still, Trump held strong with one female demographic across both elections: white women without college degrees, including some of Vadala’s relatives in Pennsylvania.

To capture a variety of opinions in the 2020 race, Reuters spoke to 42 women in 12 states - Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska and Indiana - where voters swung for and against Trump.

Some once-stalwart Republicans told Reuters they had, for the first time, crossed party lines to vote for Biden. Some were young, first-time voters, selecting Biden only because they saw the alternative as far worse. Others, whether Republican or Democrat, said they had never liked or voted for Trump.

Among Trump supporters, some women were enthusiastic fans whose votes and organizing on his behalf helped him outperform expectations in several states.

Regardless of their differences, many women threw themselves into political activism for the first time during this presidential campaign.

Biden backers said in interviews that they were motivated by back-to-back crises of the past year including the coronavirus pandemic, economic turmoil and widespread protests against racism and police brutality.

Paula McCabe, 44, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, who lost her job at a casino equipment manufacturer during the pandemic, said she was more motivated than ever to vote this year.

“I’ve never been through an election that literally meant the entire country was going to crash and burn or finally thrive,” said McCabe, who voted for Biden. “This to me is probably the most important vote I’ve ever been alive for.”

Shadow of the virus

Women in the United States have in many ways borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. They have left the labour force at starkly higher rates than men, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, as they juggle homeschooling duties and childcare. Those able to stay employed are more often working frontline jobs, especially in medicine or social services, according to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Reuters polling before the election showed COVID-19, the disease that has killed more than 236,000 Americans this year, was the dominant issue for all voters - but more so for women. The Edison voter exit poll said 52% of women voters said that Biden would be better at dealing with the virus compared with 44% who thought the same of Trump.

But views on how much the coronavirus mattered to their vote were starkly divided along political lines - 24% of Biden voters said it was the issue that mattered most to them compared to 5% of Trump supporters.

Making history

The fear of COVID-19 was ever-present for Denise Callaway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after she lost several friends to the disease. But her primary motivation for voting was different: the chance to elect Kamala Harris as the first female, and African-American, vice president.

Callaway, 64, said she cried when Biden announced Harris as his running mate. Looking at a portrait in her living room of her great-great grandmother, a striking figure with piercing eyes and high cheekbones, Callaway remarked that she had likely been enslaved. Callaway felt she had to help in this historic election, she said - for her ancestor, for herself and for her daughters.

Callaway, a retired public relations executive and consultant, connected with the Biden campaign in Wisconsin through friends at her Black sorority. She began canvassing by phone and participated in weekly Zoom prayer circles with other volunteers.

Black women, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and at higher rates than Black men, were never big Trump supporters. But they grew increasingly critical of the president this year, Reuters polling showed. According to the Edison data, 91% of Black women supported Biden, 11 percentage points more than Black men.

Racial justice issues were important to voters overall. More than half of all voters, and 87% of Biden voters, said they had a favorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. These activists helped launch national protests after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by police in Minnesota.

Callaway and her husband raised their son and two daughters - now adults - in Milwaukee County.

Callaway, the daughter of an auto executive, remembers Biden’s efforts to stabilize the auto industry in 2009 during the Obama administration, and says Trump has broken promises to bring manufacturing jobs to Rust Belt states.

This year, Biden flipped Wisconsin back by almost as narrow a margin as Trump won it in 2016.

After days of anxiously watching the votes trickle in, when the election was called in Biden’s favor on Saturday, Callaway wrote a one-line email: “Worth. The. Wait!!!”

Her first vote

In Arizona, young Latina voters like Yazmin Sagastume, 19, helped Biden pull into the lead. Their votes for Biden were the first they had ever cast for a president. Biden’s win makes him the first Democratic presidential candidate elected in the state since 1996.

Sagastume grew up in Phoenix, the youngest of five children born to a mother from Mexico and a father from Guatemala. Now in college, she became politically active while in high school.

Sagastume said she is not a big Biden fan. She supported the progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and relates much more to 31-year-old New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than a septuagenarian white male.

Nevertheless, for months she made calls to young Hispanic voters encouraging them to vote.

“We’re just trying to get Trump out,” she said. “That’s the only goal.”

To her dismay, she recently learned two older brothers supported Trump. And in some parts of the country, Trump did better than expected among Latino voters, a diverse population that includes many religious and political conservatives.

Trump won 45% of votes from Hispanic women in Florida - up 11 points from 2016 - where many voters of Cuban and Venezuelan heritage appreciated the president’s stance against socialist or communist governments.

In states along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Trump has implemented some of his strictest immigration policies, his support grew. In Texas and Arizona, Trump won 38% and 32% of Hispanic women respectively, substantially more than four years ago.

Teresa Mendoza, 48, a property manager in Mesa, Arizona, outside Phoenix, is the daughter of migrant farm workers from Mexico. But she said she was not turned off by Trump’s immigration stance. More security is needed at the border, she said, because it is more dangerous – with more drug trafficking and human smuggling – than when her parents migrated in the 1970s, she said.

In addition, she said, Trump’s policies, such as cutting taxes and regulations, directly improved her family’s finances, while Obama’s Affordable Care Act raised the cost of her private health insurance.

After the election was called for Biden, Mendoza said she would accept the results if there was an “audit” of the votes, citing unverified reports she had seen on the internet about glitches in voting machines and irregularities at some polling sites.

Faltering among farmers

Even among rural women, one of Trump’s strongest bases of support in 2016, the president saw his margins shrink.

Nationally Trump won 54% of the U.S. rural vote, according to Edison exit polling, 7 points less than in 2016. Slightly more than half of rural women supported Biden this year.

One was Rebecca Seidel, 37, who runs a small, sustainable dairy farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with her husband.

For most of her life, her views hewed closely to her Republican father’s. But after Trump was elected in 2016, Seidel left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat, partly because of what she saw as rising racism and Trump’s protectionist trade policies.

In the 2020 campaign, Seidel’s concerns kicked into high gear when she and her entire family contracted COVID-19. Her mom was hospitalized for four days and Seidel lost her sense of smell and taste, crimping her plans to open a small cheese-making business, she said.

At a local farm supply store recently, she noticed a group of men chatting as they bagged up animal feed. None wore masks - a sign to her that some in her community weren’t taking the pandemic seriously enough.

“It’s become a political statement,” Seidel said. “Some people believe if you wear a mask, you’re not for Trump.”