The Secret Lives of Democratic Women Married to MAGA Men

The distraught wives and girlfriends of Trump voters have built a community around my radio show

Days before the 2018 midterm elections, a woman named Lisa was driving on a remote road in sun-baked Eastern Washington. An area that encompasses all of the state East of the Cascade Range — which is to say, most of the state — Eastern Washington over the past decade has been home to several unsuccessful movements to secede from liberal Seattle and the Pacific Coast to become the 51st U.S. state.

Not surprisingly, it is ruby red Trump country.

On this particular day, Lisa was listening to the live call-in radio show I host weekday afternoons on SiriusXM. We were talking about politics but also about a topic that would soon emerge as a recurring theme on the show: the divide inside marriages that Donald Trump and his presidency had created. A woman was on the line from her kitchen in rural Michigan, recounting her struggles as a progressive Democrat married to a Trump supporter.

Lisa, a college-educated white professional in her forties, painfully related to what she heard. She pulled over to the side of the road and phoned in.

“Wow, I’m not even sure what to say,” Lisa began. “This hit so much home. I almost wanted to cry.”

It was an early instance of what would, over the next year, become a surprising — and strong — community of Democrats married to Trump supporters reaching out to each other through my satellite radio show on SiriusXM’s Progress channel. (All callers to the radio program use only their first names and locations, and I am using that convention for the women I spoke with by phone or through Facebook, too, so they could feel free to discuss sensitive marital matters.)

Lisa’s husband, a farmer from a family that had been in the business for generations, told her he was a registered Democrat when they first met. “Back then, six years ago, we didn’t talk about politics because it really wasn’t part of our relationship at that time,” Lisa told the listeners. “Then, when we went through the election, I voted for Hillary Clinton and he voted for Trump. And our relationship has been on the rocks ever since.”

I can’t count how many people affected by the 2016 election have called my show day after day. Before and after the election, these callers recounted tensions with parents, children, extended family, co-workers, neighbors, and friends who are Trump supporters.

But it wasn’t until the very jittery days before the 2018 midterms, in the wake of the horrific October 27th mass shooting in Pittsburgh at the Tree Of Life synagogue, that the plight of women (and some men) in marriages or intimate relationships with Trump supporters began to surface regularly on my program.

Noting how isolated she felt, Lisa told listeners: “My neighbors are all Trump supporters, too.”

Yet on the call-in show, connecting to a woman 2,000 miles away from the side of the road, that isolation started to lift. Today my show has a regular segment featuring their voices, their stories, and their efforts to negotiate life in the political minority, whether in their families or communities. The women connect on my show’s Facebook page, as well, reaching out to each other and to me directly.

White men have been the core of Trump’s support, and stories about them often imply a certain level of family political cohesiveness. Yet detailed analyses of the 2016 election show a far lower percentage of women than men voted for Trump in 2016. And both the 2018 midterm election results and other recent data show that women, both college and non-college educated, have only moved further toward Democrats. We rarely, if ever, hear discussion of the distraught women navigating tense relationships with these men.

The women I’ve heard from often not only have partners who demean them for their political beliefs and choices; they face hostility from other family members, including their own children. Some have ended their relationships or are headed in that direction. Others try to make it work, either because the couples have a strong bond despite the tensions or, sadly, because they believe they have little financial choice but to stay.

These are their stories.