White Women: Here's How Glennon Doyle Influenced Your Vote For Biden
Doyle was told to "go get white women" for Biden's campaign.
Getty Images Glennon Doyle is a writer, activist, and the unlikely figurehead of white women in Biden’s 2020 Presidential campaign.
In the midst of the campaign trail, the Biden campaign called Doyle to enlist her help in garnering support from her white female followers and urging them to head out to the polls.
Her role may have been crucial in helping Biden and Harris take the election in the year women celebrated the centennial of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing their right to vote.
Doyle’s career began on her blog Momastery. She is what many would dub a “Christian Mommy Blogger,” though she rejects the term.
Her writing, for many years, has covered all the topics one would expect white suburban moms to latch on to: her faith, raising a family, getting sober, rebuilding a broken marriage.
But her career, and her demographic, took an unlikely turn in 2017 when Doyle announced she was ending the marriage that had been the topic of two best-selling memoirs and had started a relationship with women’s soccer star Abby Wambach.
In a recent interview, Doyle recalls being told that coming out and leaving her husband would be “career suicide,” but a best-selling book and a million Instagram followers later, the opposite has proved to be true.
She is outspoken on all of the issues where white women often remain complicit, from racism to economic inequality. But her demographic, she says, is still largely white suburban women. The same demographic that flocked to support Trump back in 2016.
But 2020 was a turning point for this group. Exit polls showed that women supported Biden in high numbers, winning their vote at 57% in comparison to just 45% of men.
Trump, meanwhile, had claimed 42% of women’s votes and 53% of men’s votes.
So, where does Glennon Doyle come in to all of this? Her 40-day activism campaign to rally white female votes for Biden was the makings of a presidential turning point.
How Joe Biden, Glennon Doyle, and Black women reeled in white voters
Black and Latino women had remained loyal to the Democratic side since before Trump’s election, but the white vote proved to be the most likely to sway.
In 2016, Clinton had been most popular with college-educated white women but not popular enough to take away from the 62% of women without college degrees who voted for Trump.
Doyle has critiqued the willingness of white women to stay silent on issues that impact other, less powerful groups and made it her mission to champion change.
By remaining silent, white women can only ever be adjacent to power, she says, and they become willfully ignorant to the injustices that don’t directly impact them.
“At what point did we decide to be so silent and so complicit? And what has it cost to us, right?” she says. “It’s cost us our humanity, is how I feel.”
Doyle says her work has allowed her to see the many women of color who have been at the forefront of every social justice movement, and it has become part of her mission to listen and learn from these women.
Her role has been to, “Go and get the white women,” as she puts it, in order to rally up meaningful allyship for the women of color leading these movements in which white women can learn to align themselves with their fellow females instead of choosing their whiteness.
How Trump lost white women
While the gender gap wasn’t particularly groundbreaking in the 2020 elections, Trump certainly lost out on vital female votes.
In 2016, he managed to take a shocking 53% of white female votes but the next 4 years would prove disappointing for female labor progress, healthcare, and more.
Trump rolled back legislation that required companies to disclose gender pay gaps. He provided just 3 of his 23 cabinet positions to women. He drastically cut funding for women’s rights and reproductive health.
Thus, by 2020, his pleas to suburban women to “Please, please like me,” fell flat. Equally, referring to these women as “housewives” before claiming that women love to be called “housewives” didn’t go over well, either.
Trump’s comments and his inaction on women’s rights undoubtedly set the stage for Biden to reclaim the white female vote in the election.
Trump's presidency, and its impact on women, are a testament to what Doyle is trying to work against. By choosing to support a president who prioritizes white men above all else, white women can never actually achieve power of their own.
Alice Kelly is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Catch her covering all things social justice, news, and entertainment.