Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.” Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history. > VA Voter: Spanberger. She out there doing what she's supposed to do. That > other lady? She needs to go somewhere and sit down. pic.twitter.com/72dNcvPWCT > > — Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2025 Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year. For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge. Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer preserve the Women’s Bureau following recent reporting from Mother Jones that the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the 105-year-old, congressionally-mandated office charged with supporting women in the workforce. On Monday afternoon, 34 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus sent Chavez-DeRemer a letter demanding the Labor Secretary “immediately restore the Women’s Bureau to its full function and funding, fulfill the terminated grants, and abandon all efforts to eliminate the Bureau.” The letter cites Mother Jones‘ story from earlier this month, which was the first to report that both the White House’s and Department of Labor’s (DOL) budget requests to Congress propose eliminating the Women’s Bureau. It also cites a Mother Jones story from last month that was one of the first to report that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) killed more than two dozen grants administered by the Bureau, many of which were congressionally-mandated and aimed to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology. “The proposed elimination of the Women’s Bureau and termination of grants that support women in the workforce is a total betrayal of women across the country,” the letter states. The letter is the second the Democratic Women’s Caucus has sent Chavez-DeRemer expressing their concerns over the gutting of the Women’s Bureau: They previously wrote to her in April urging her “to preserve current staffing and strengthen the Bureau’s capacity to fulfill its mandate, as Congress intended”—but she never responded, according to several lawmakers involved. (Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday.) The Trump administration has already managed to undermine the Bureau’s work without eliminating the office entirely. Nine current and former Labor Department staffers previously told me that the Bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations, and that their work has essentially been at a standstill since Trump resumed office. In the past, the Bureau’s critical work has included regularly researching women’s workforce participation by county, the gender wage gap by race and occupation, and child care prices nationwide; briefing federal lawmakers to help inform policies to support women workers. The Bureau’s work helped pass laws, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The office also hosted in-person training sessions nationwide to help workers learn their rights, and partnered with other federal agencies to implement programs to support women’s well-being and equity at work. Despite all this, in the budget brief calling for its elimination, the Labor Department dismissed the Women’s Bureau as “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past.” The current and former DOL staffers previously told me they see the move as reflective of the Trump administration’s ambitions to drive women out of the workforce and back into their homes to raise children. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), one of the lead authors of the letter, sees the administration’s attack on the Bureau as “turning back the clock in ways that are really pretty outrageous,” she told me by phone on Monday. The Women’s Bureau, she added, is “just as important [now] as it ever was.” Data supports this. The gender wage gap widened for the first time in 20 years following the pandemic, and women’s labor force participation rate has decreased since peaking in the 1990s. Citing these facts, the letter states that the DOL characterization of the Bureau as “‘a relic of the past’ is not only incorrect, it is completely ignorant to what the data shows and the struggles of working women everywhere.” Bonamici, who has advocated for expanding access and affordability to childcare, said she has relied on the Bureau’s database of prices of childcare by county, which the DOL has said is the most comprehensive database of its kind. “When we have this information, it helps us pass policies,” she said. Bonamici also pointed to the important work of the Oregon Tradeswomen, a nonprofit organization that has relied on the now-canceled Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants that the Bureau administered to enter the trades. “You can see women getting good jobs to turn their lives around,” she said. “That, to me, is a great use of federal resources.” Both Bonamici and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), another lead author of the letter, said they want to see their Republican colleagues step up to oppose the efforts to eliminate the Bureau. “We need our Republican colleagues to be forceful with the constitutional responsibility that we have to be the lawmakers and to be the overseers,” Houlahan said, adding that she is “enormously disappointed” in her GOP colleagues. “They’re allowing the president to run roughshod over the country.” But asking them to reverse course to defend the Women’s Bureau could be a tall order. House Republicans unsuccessfully tried to eliminate it for the first time in at least a decade back in 2023. Project 2025, which has proven to be an instruction manual for how the Trump administration is running the government, alleged the Bureau “tends towards a politicized research and engagement agenda that puts predetermined conclusions ahead of empirical study” and said it should “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to dissentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” The DOL admits in its budget brief that department officials aim to work with Congress to repeal the statutes mandating the existence of the Women’s Bureau as well as the WANTO grant program that was already canceled. The Democratic lawmakers say that would be their best shot at fighting to preserve the office, and recruiting their GOP colleagues to join in. “If they bring a bill forward to eliminate the Women’s Bureau,” Bonamici said, “we will fight it with everything we have.”

For abortion rights advocate Lizz Winstead, her work has never felt more urgent. But her path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and eventually as the co-creator of The Daily Show, which redefined television by deftly combining comedy and politics.  “I kept getting increasingly unnerved and also frustrated that I was just shelling people with information, even though it was funny, and not giving them a way to fight back,” Winstead says. Today, Winstead produces the Feminist Buzzkills podcast and is founder of Abortion Access Front. Again, she’s weaving together politics and comedy to educate people about abortion laws and provide resources on independent abortion providers. But this time, she’s also giving them the tools to fight. “I wanted to combine the effectiveness of using humor to expose hypocrisy and bad actors and then combine that with a call to action,” Winstead says.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

The harder Texas has worked to ban abortion, the more New Mexico has done to welcome patients fleeing the state—and vice versa. In the months after the Dobbs decision, as New Mexico became one of the most important reproductive health havens in the US, anti-abortion activists in Texas struck back by lobbying conservative communities in the state to pass local ordinances banning abortions within their jurisdictions. Those measures explicitly cited the Comstock Act, the long-defunct Victorian-era sexual purity law that prohibits the sending or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion—and they had a not-so-hidden agenda: to use “sanctuaries for the unborn” as a mechanism to force the imposition of a de facto federal abortion ban. The Texans met with success in a handful of towns and counties before New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general, Raúl Torrez, asked the state’s highest court to shut them down. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is not Texas,” Torrez declared at a press conference announcing the emergency petition. “Local communities are not empowered to regulate medical services. They are not empowered to regulate access to health care.” Now, more than a year after oral arguments, the New Mexico Supreme Court has struck down the local ordinances, ruling unanimously that they violate state law and “invade the Legislature’s authority to regulate access to and provision of reproductive health care.” But the decision in State of New Mexico v. Board of County Commissioners for Lea County also gives anti-abortion groups something they have been yearning for: an opportunity to put the Comstock Act—and their argument that as it remains the law of the land, the measure preempts state protections for abortion—before the US Supreme Court. “This is the best loss I’ve ever had in my life,” Michael Seibel, an anti-abortion attorney working on the case, told a Christian news outlet soon after the ruling was handed down last week. “We are thrilled,” echoed Jonathan Mitchell, the anti-abortion legal strategist from Texas who helped draft the New Mexico ordinances. Mitchell has been a leading proponent of using what has become known as “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost a half-century but remained on the books—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs. > “There’s this cloak of neutrality that gets attached to Comstock—’we’re just > applying the law that’s been on the books, nothing new,’ which is misleading.” It remains to be seen, of course, whether the New Mexico decision will lead to the epic legal showdown Mitchell and his allies are hoping for. But even if it doesn’t, anti-abortion groups have teed up plenty of other cases and legislation that invoke Comstock, with the same goal of getting the issue to the nation’s highest court as quickly as possible. That’s because, two-and-a-half years after Dobbs, abortion rights are more popular than ever in the US—and, thanks largely to the abortion pill, abortions actually have been increasing despite state bans. But Donald Trump—who waffled about his abortion positions during the presidential campaign—appears to have other priorities as he takes office that take precedence over instituting a Project 2025-style federal abortion ban. So anti-abortion groups are doubling down on using the courts to impose their will. This Comstock-focused backup plan has the added advantage (for the GOP) of insulating Trump and his Republican-controlled Congress from having to act, says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, letting the US Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority do the work for them. “There’s this cloak of neutrality that gets attached to Comstock—’We’re just applying the law that’s been on the books, nothing new,’ which is misleading,” Rebouché adds. “What the Jonathan Mitchells of the world claim Comstock did and does is, in fact, never what it did and never what it was supposed to do.” The Comstock Act of 1873, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” For decades, the statute was used to prosecute a broad range of so-called “crimes,” including the mailing of materials discussing birth control, medical textbooks depicting human anatomy, and even letters discussing dating among unmarried people. By the 1930s, Americans had largely repudiated what came to be known as “Comstockery” and courts had greatly narrowed the statute’s scope. In 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives.  But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot. When Roe was overturned, anti-abortion activists began arguing that Comstock was once again in force nationwide—even in states that sought to protect abortion after Dobbs.  This movement has been led by Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who has been a key architect of some of that state’s most radical and punitive anti-abortion laws, and Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Texas-based “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” movement. Mitchell and Dickson have been close allies for years, pioneering the “bounty hunter” strategy—the use of private civil lawsuits to enforce anti-abortion measures such as the 2021 Texas “heartbeat” law that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The tactic, which gives private individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation, has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions. Starting in late 2022, Dickson and Mitchell began targeting New Mexico border communities, urging them to pass local measures that were a variation of the Texas “sanctuary cities” ordinances. The New Mexico measures cited Comstock, asserting that the federal statute preempted the state’s abortion protections. Mitchell’s goal, he told The Nation’s Amy Littlefield in 2023, was to provoke a legal challenge from New Mexico officials. “I want to get Comstock to the [US] Supreme Court as quickly as possible,” he told her. Mitchell and Dickson had symbolic as well as practical reasons to go after New Mexico. The state has some of the strongest abortion protections in the country, including a bill passed in 2023 that guarantees broad access to reproductive health care and another that shields providers and patients from civil or criminal liability for abortion or gender-affirming care. Abortions have more than tripled in the past two years, with most new patients crossing the border from Texas. Yet many rural New Mexico towns are more aligned politically and culturally with their Texas neighbors than with the Democrats who dominate state government. Four conservative New Mexico towns and two counties eventually passed broadly similar ordinances. Some of the laws contained bounty-hunter provisions that echoed the draconian tactics previously championed by Mitchell and Dickson in Texas; several also imposed restrictive licensing rules for abortion clinics and physicians. According to emails obtained by the independent news outlet Source NM, Mitchell and Dickson wrote the templates for the legislation and promised to defend the towns in court free of charge—but only if they obtained Mitchell’s approval in advance for any tweaks in the ordinances’ language. Mitchell, representing Eunice (population 3,020), eventually filed suit against Attorney General Torrez, urging a local court to declare that Comstock was still in force and “trump[s] any state-law right to abortion.” Torrez filed his own emergency writ directly to the state Supreme Court. The New Mexico battle has drawn leading conservative groups into the fray, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal powerhouse that has played a pivotal role in most of the big anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ court and policy fights of recent years. But the five state Supreme Court justices—three of whom are women and all of whom are Democrats—clearly didn’t want to play Mitchell’s game. They made a point of keeping their ruling as narrow as possible, rejecting the chance to opine about Comstock or federal law. “We…decline to address Respondents’ arguments with respect to the Comstock Act and federal preemption, which we deem unnecessary to the resolution of the issues before this Court,” Justice Shannon Bacon wrote in the January 9 ruling. Instead, they found that the ordinances were preempted under state law, including the 2023 Health Care Freedom Act, which prohibits any public body from interfering with access to reproductive or gender-affirming health care, and statutes regulating the licensing of medical facilities. Its decision, the court said, “rests solely on state law grounds.” > But the five New Mexico justices—three of whom are women and all of whom are > Democrats—clearly didn’t want to play Mitchell’s game. In addressing the issues as narrowly as possible, the justices also declined to give reproductive rights advocates something else they wanted: a sweeping ruling that abortion is protected under New Mexico’s constitution. “We heed the canon of constitutional avoidance and refrain from deciding constitutional issues unnecessary to the disposition of this case,” Bacon wrote. The ruling is “really trying to shut down US Supreme Court review,” Rebouché says. “But it doesn’t mean that the Alliance Defending Freedom or Mitchell won’t petition the US Supreme Court to hear an appeal that there is a federal preemption issue that the [New Mexico] court did not address.” Such an appeal seems virtually guaranteed. “This is what we planned,” Seibel, an anti-abortion attorney based in Albuquerque, told the Christian news site The World. “We knew we were going to lose from the day we drafted the ordinance.” In a statement posted on X, Mitchell himself suggested that the New Mexico ruling had given anti-abortion groups all the grounds they needed for an appeal. “This is the first court to hold that an ordinance requiring compliance with the federal Comstock Act prohibits the shipment and receipt of abortion-related paraphernalia in states where abortion remains legal,” Mitchell said. “We look forward to litigating these issues in other states and bringing the meaning of the federal Comstock Act to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

When the longtime state representative serving her district in north-central New Mexico retired in early 2020, science educator Anita Gonzales wondered who would replace him. Then she asked herself, “Why not me?”  Although she’d occasionally visited the state Capitol in Santa Fe to lobby for issues that mattered to STEM students and teachers, Gonzales didn’t feel as though she had the background for politics, especially as the working mother of a then-8-year-old son. But the Democratic caucus in the legislature was changing—recruiting more women and people from the working class. “I could see a possibility of me serving,” Gonzales recalls, “because there were people who looked like me.”  That first race was a heartbreaker. Gonzales didn’t know the logistics of running a campaign—how to find a campaign manager or increase her name recognition—and lost her primary to a local rancher by a mere 62 votes. But she didn’t give up. This past November, in her third race to represent her hometown district of Las Vegas, New Mexico, she won a two-year House of Representatives term. “Seeing my name on a ballot with Kamala Harris—it was definitely a moment for me,” Gonzales says. “It was a very overwhelming feeling to be part of a movement historically.” In a mostly bleak election for American women and their rights, New Mexico was an unexpected bright spot. Even as Harris lost her historic bid for the White House, voters in the state elected 60 women to fill the legislature’s 112 seats, giving New Mexico the largest female legislative majority in US history. With the addition of 11 seats, women now make up nearly two-thirds of the state House of Representatives and just over a third of the Senate. Three out of four Democrats elected to the House on November 5 were women. The strong showing was more than just a balm for Democrats’ shattered spirits; it could have very real consequences for reproductive rights far beyond the state’s borders. In recent years, New Mexico has become a progressive stronghold, particularly for abortion and gender-affirming health care in the Southwest since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That role as a reproductive haven is likely to be even more important as Donald Trump assumes the presidency for a second time.  > The strong showing was more than just a balm for Democrats’ shattered spirits; > it could have very real consequences for reproductive rights far beyond the > state’s borders. Female legislators already have made enormous gains by putting progressive ideas into policy in the state. Since 2018, when New Mexico first elected a female majority to the House, legislators have implemented near-universal free child care, paid sick leave, free school meals, and medical aid in dying. They also codified the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions into state law so those protections will stand if the act is gutted at the federal level—as Trump allies have vowed to do—offered a child tax credit, raised teacher salaries 20 percent, and repealed the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban.  In the legislative session that begins Tuesday, lawmakers are expected to take up paid family medical leave, increased funding for early childhood education, and Medicaid reimbursements for birth centers and behavioral health care—as well as deflecting whatever attacks the new Trump administration throws at them. “There’s a chance for me to help protect my girls from legislators and from laws that want to control their bodies,” says Sarah Silva, a longtime community organizer and first-time candidate who was elected to represent the Las Cruces area in the House. “There’s an opportunity for me to protect immigrant families here on the border. There’s an opportunity for me to make sure that families have every opportunity to get their needs met.”  More than that, the decadelong effort to transform New Mexico’s legislature—and the impact that transformation has had on the state’s political priorities— holds important lessons for national Democrats demoralized by the 2024 results. “What you pay attention to grows,” Silva says, “and the [New Mexico] Democratic Party paid attention to investing in and developing women, and women of color, to lead. And now, here are the fruits of that.”  The remaking of the New Mexico Legislature began with a sobering defeat. Almost exactly 10 years before voters rejected Harris—on November 4, 2014—the Democratic Party lost control of New Mexico’s House for the first time in 60 years. In an election that saw Republicans take control of a record two-thirds of state legislative bodies nationwide, New Mexico’s GOP picked up five seats to secure a 37–33 majority in the House. (The state Senate, where no members were up for reelection, remained under Democratic control). Republican Susana Martinez was also reelected as governor after one of the most negative ad campaigns of the election cycle. In the aftermath of that debacle, Democrats elected a new leader to represent the party in the House, Rep. Brian Egolf of Santa Fe, a father of two daughters who had successfully sponsored legislation to prohibit sex-based wage discrimination. In the days after the election, he started looking for a chief of staff. “I asked all of the people that I trusted most in politics,” he recalls, and one name kept coming up: Reena Szczepanski, the executive director of a training program for Democratic women interested in running for office, Emerge New Mexico. “She was my first hire,” he says. A former drug policy advocate with two small children of her own, Szczepanski—like her new boss—believed that the key to Democrats retaking the House was to recruit candidates who reflected the experiences of the people they represented—and understood their real-world struggles. “You didn’t see a lot of working parents” in the legislature, Szczepanski recalls. “You didn’t see a lot of folks that worked regular 9-to-5 jobs.” In the preceding years, the proportion of women serving in the House had hovered around a third; in the Senate, it was even lower. The best way to rebuild Democrats’ majority, she and Egolf figured, was to “do it with women and people of color at the forefront.” Not long after assuming his new role, Egolf invited leaders from New Mexico’s progressive nonprofits and labor unions, as well as campaign managers and consultants, to his office. “I asked them to, for the first time in the history of our state, cooperate on candidate recruitment,” he recalls. That meant unions supporting a nonprofit’s candidate in one district and nonprofits lending their support to the unions in another. > “You didn’t see a lot of working parents” in the legislature. “You didn’t see > a lot of folks that worked regular 9-to-5 jobs.” Then, he and Szczepanski embarked on “a really intentional effort to find candidates in all [the state’s] competitive districts,” Szczepanski says. “And one of the reasons that that was a successful effort was because of Emerge.” Emerge New Mexico is part of a national training program for Democratic female candidates that got its start in San Francisco in the early 2000s and Harris’ first run for office. Running for district attorney against a male incumbent backed by the city’s powerful Democratic machine, Harris relied on a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. After she won, those same supporters took the lessons of her campaign and designed an intensive program aimed at giving women—particularly women of color—the nitty-gritty political skills, resources, and networks to run successful campaigns. Emerge soon expanded into Arizona, then Nevada and New Mexico, and eventually into 27 states. Interest exploded in 2016 after Hillary Clinton’s run for president—and perhaps even more so after her defeat. “We had women who woke up the next day and said, Okay, if not Hillary, then who? It has to be me, I have to be the one stepping up,” says Emerge’s current president, A’shanti F. Gholar. “And we got inundated with women who were wanting to make change.”  Today, Emerge is credited with helping to create female legislative majorities in Arizona and Nevada as well as New Mexico and to narrow the gender gap in Maine, Oregon, and California. In November, the organization had a 68 percent nationwide win rate among its “New American Majority” candidates: women who are racially diverse, young, unmarried, and/or queer. “These are people who look like America,” Gholar says, “and keeping that in mind when they’re doing their work is why they’re so successful, because women’s issues are communities’ issues.”  Szczepanski went through the Emerge New Mexico program in 2008 and became its executive director a couple of years later. When she began searching for candidates in competitive districts, she drew in part from her list of Emerge alumnae: a retired teacher, a single mom and Air Force veteran, a physical therapist raising a child with autism, a community organizer and daughter of immigrants, young people, parents, and grandparents. Those recruiting efforts quickly paid off. In 2016, two years after losing control to the GOP, Democrats retook the New Mexico House by a 38–32 majority, with female candidates accounting for six new seats (including five who had been trained by Emerge). In 2018, a majority of Democrats elected to the state’s House were women; two years later, women won an outright majority in the chamber. Most of them went through the Emerge program; in this year’s legislative session, three-fourths of the Democratic women serving in New Mexico’s House—a quarter of all lawmakers—are Emerge graduates. These include newcomer Gonzales and Szczepanski herself, who won Egolf’s seat when he retired in 2022 and was recently chosen to serve as House majority leader. The state Senate, too, has seen more women elected each year—in 2024, twice as many as in 2014—though change in that chamber has been slower. Emerge has contributed to impressive gains for women in statewide and federal offices as well, including ex-US Rep. Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice C. Shannon Bacon. The number of women elected by New Mexico Republicans, however, has remained stagnant—though for the first time, a woman, Rep. Gail Armstrong, will serve as the party’s House leader. That disparity compared with Democratic women reflects national trends, says Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. She notes that while female candidates are approaching parity with men in the Democratic Party nationwide, they make up a far smaller proportion of GOP candidates—in part because of an aversion to targeted training programs like Emerge. “Republicans just don’t have the same infrastructure built to both recruit and then support women specifically,” Dittmar says. Anita Gonzales with her now-13-year-old sonDoug Cavanaugh In New Mexico, female lawmakers quickly proved that they were more than performative symbols of diversity. As their numbers grew, “you started to see the legislative process change dramatically,” Egolf says, as well as shifts in the broader legislative culture, with lawmakers cracking down on issues like sexual harassment. Democrats began chalking up victories on issues that had long defied progress—for example, moving the state from 49th in the nation in child poverty in 2018 to 17th by 2024. And when it became clear that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, lawmakers took decisive action, repealing the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban and then passing a shield law to protect physicians from investigations by other states. Another sweeping statute—co-sponsored by Szczepanski during her first term in the House—prevents New Mexico cities and counties from enacting abortion bans. Protecting reproductive and gender rights is an even more urgent priority as Republicans take over the White House and Congress. But the GOP’s inroads among Hispanics, especially men, in the November election has put Democrats on alert: They also need to prioritize broader issues affecting working-class voters. In the historically Hispanic land-grant communities of northern New Mexico, House Speaker Javier Martínez says, the margins of victory for Democrats were the narrowest he’s ever seen. “We have to keep our commitment and our focus on ensuring that we are delivering for people in ways that are meaningful,” Martínez says. > As the number of women grew, “you started to see the legislative process > change dramatically,” as well as shifts in the broader legislative culture, > with lawmakers cracking down on issues like sexual harassment. Democrats note one major barrier still discouraging women and other diverse candidates from serving in the statehouse: New Mexico remains the only unsalaried legislature in the nation. Lawmakers are reimbursed only for their mileage and expenses during the legislative session (though this year, for the first time, they will have paid district aides). When she decided to run for office, Anita Gonzales had to come to terms with the fact that she might not ever be paid for the work—a difficult reality to face as a working mother. “If I don’t get to possibly benefit from future changes [around salary], hopefully, someone else will,” she says. In the meantime, “I think it’s important to have a legislature that reflects our state, and that includes the working class.” Among the issues Gonzales is eager to tackle on behalf of women and working-class families more broadly: expanding the health care workforce in her rural corner of the state, improving public infrastructure, and increasing access to firefighters in a region that suffered the largest wildfire in state history. “I really thought this was the time we would have our first female president,” Gonzales says. But even with Harris’ loss, she adds, she feels inspired by the fights—and, she hopes, victories—ahead. “I’m excited at the opportunity to bring meaningful change.”

You probably saw the cartoon that went viral before the election: A long line of women enter the voting booth wearing handmaiden-esque robes and bonnets, only to emerge in slinky black dresses and take-no-bullshit pantsuits. Or the ads in which white women accompany their obviously GOP husbands to vote, blinking each other a silent signal of solidarity behind the men’s backs: “Actually, I’m with her.” The disobedient-trad-wives trope reflected Democrats’ conviction that Donald Trump’s misogyny and temperament—not to mention his relentless assaults on reproductive freedom and the rule of law—must be deeply, albeit secretly, alienating to many Christian women. All they needed was a Liz Cheney–size nudge to cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris.  Not only did that notion turn out to be utterly deluded, it was “a profound misreading” of how Christian women view themselves and their role in American society, says sociologist Katie Gaddini—a mistake that helped cost Harris the presidency and could resonate throughout US politics and policy for years to come.  On election night, Gaddini, an associate professor at University College London who studies Christian women in US politics, was at San Francisco International Airport, boarding a red-eye to Virginia to do research for her next book, due out in 2026. “Trump had just won Georgia,” she recalls. “It was like a funeral in that airport. Faces were drawn. It was silent.” When Gaddini arrived the next morning at the far-right Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Trump had retaken the White House, and the mood was euphoric. Decked out in MAGA gear, women students were just as thrilled as the young men—maybe more so. “They felt like this was God’s will,” Gaddini says. “He has spared the nation by giving us Trump. Even after we’ve made so many mistakes, He’s giving us one last chance to get it right.” These young women aren’t just relying on Trump to transform the country into a Christian bastion—this is their fight, too. “A new generation of them are entering politics,” Gaddini says, “influencing and controlling this country.” Yet many on the left, she says, dismiss Christian women “as being kind of brainwashed, just servants to the patriarchy and not free-thinking,” thus minimizing both their agency and their effectiveness. Among progressives, “there’s an inability to see how intelligence and political acumen could lead you to a place of supporting Trump,” she adds. “And yet it has for millions of women, and they’re not going away.” Gaddini’s mission is to “disrupt” that longstanding (and, she points out, “sexist”) narrative about Christian women and “understand them a little bit more generously.” And not just in the United States; Gaddini helps run a network of scholars studying religion and politics across the Americas and in parts of Europe. I count myself among those who’ve never understood the appeal of Trump and the misogyny-fueled MAGA movement for women, especially young, religious ones, who I imagined would find the well-documented sexual misconduct offensive. In the wake of the November election, with its vast implications for reproductive and gender justice, I was more mystified than ever. But I was also deeply curious. So I reached out to Gaddini at her home office in Northern California, where she is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Katie GaddiniLily Bungay How did you become interested in Christian women in politics?  I have a personal connection. My father was a Baptist minister. I have two uncles, an aunt, and a cousin who are pastors as well. The Sacramento suburbs where I grew up are known as the Bible Belt of California. There is a huge conservative presence there—it’s very Republican and very evangelical.  There wasn’t any moment where I became conservative. It’s just what happened if you were a woman in this kind of environment. Then I left the faith, and my personal politics changed, but I’ve always had an interest in who I could have been if I had remained in that world—in the women who have stayed committed to conservative politics and have moved even further to the right.  What about the Trump effect?  When Trump won the presidency in 2016, I wanted to understand why so many women voted for him. I’m really interested in this idea of paradox, of things that don’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of progressives or feminists that women would vote for Trump, right? It doesn’t make sense that evangelicals would vote for him. And then you put the two together: Why would a female evangelical vote for Trump? I wanted to untangle that seeming paradox—to understand not only why do they like him, but why do they like him so overwhelmingly and so enduringly?   I’ve also been looking at Christian women more broadly—not just evangelicals, but also Catholics and mainline Protestants. Because what I’ve seen over the last few years is that those groups have come together to do politics in a new way. They’re putting aside some of their theological differences and focusing on the larger political project. Democrats find it almost impossible to see past Trump’s failings as a leader and a human being. The 2024 campaign hammered on those failings: “He sides with fascists and dictators. He’s corrupt. He’s trying to destroy democracy. He’s misogynistic, he’s racist. Oh, and he’s incoherent and falling apart.” What are the strengths that Christian women see in Trump that others are blind to? It’s this sense of having a protector and a defender in Trump. That operates on a symbolic level in terms of: “He’s going to protect us from this woke liberal elite that wants to take us down and destroy us.” This idea was captured by one of the Trump campaign’s most effective ads: “She’s for they/them. I’m for you.”  > “Trump said at a few campaign rallies, ‘I want to protect the women.’ One > Christian woman I interviewed said she wept when she heard that, because it > was so resonant with what she needed.” It also operates on the material level: “The left is concerned with wokeness and identity politics, while Trump is concerned that you can’t afford a tank of gas. He’s going to protect our country from China. He’s going to protect our economy. He’s going to protect our borders.” That protector identity operates on so many different planes, and it’s hugely effective with these women.  Trump said at a few campaign rallies, “I want to protect the women.” One Christian woman I interviewed said she wept when she heard that because it was so resonant with what she needed.  Meanwhile, the feminist mantra is very different: Do not rely on any man to take care of you. Why do women on the Christian right feel that they need to be protected?   Within their gendered system of how women and men are meant to operate, women are the soft, nurturing ones, the caretakers. Men are the strong ones, protectors, and defenders. This gendered system is built into conservative Christianity, it’s built into their whole worldview, so it makes sense that they would apply that to politics and want a candidate who fits that mold. They can behave like traditional women if they have a traditional man fulfilling that protector role.  Among these women, there’s also a deep feeling of being under attack. This isn’t new—the religious right has been saying it’s under siege from a secular left for decades. But this sense of being embattled has become more inflamed since 2016. Several of the [Liberty] students I’ve interviewed told me that when they were younger, they were bullied by liberals in their home state or high schools. I’ve had them sit across from me and read me the messages they got on social media from classmates calling them horrific things because they posted a picture with a Trump sign. These experiences pushed them even further to the right and reinforced the sense that they needed to be protected. And who’s better to do the job than someone who’s got blood streaked down his face and a fist in the air, saying, “Fight!” The assassination attempts were key in securing Trump’s support among Christian women. They solidified the belief that the left is out to get us, they will stop at nothing, and we have to make sure we win. How does the idea of protection resonate differently if you are, say, a 20-year-old college student versus a 35-year-old mom, versus a Baby Boomer retiree in the suburbs?  The younger women are getting a lot of their news from social media. They don’t check mainstream news at all. Some women tell me they get their news not just from a single conservative outlet, but from a single influencer. And what they’re hearing is that the liberal left hates them. I think the online sphere is where a lot of their sense of attack is coming from.  > “The assassination attempts were really key in securing Trump’s support among > Christian women. They solidified the belief that the left is out to get us, > they will stop at nothing, and we have to make sure we win.” For the moms’ cohort, their sense of needing protection is all around children. It’s a sense that critical race theory, trans rights—which they would call gender ideology—and, to a much lesser extent, gay rights have infiltrated their schools and are trying to indoctrinate their children. They need to protect their children as mothers, and they need a paternalistic figure as president to protect their children on a larger scale. This sentiment also plays out in some of the movements to ban books and put conservative activists on school boards. With older women, their primary concern tends to be immigration. A lot of their focus is on defending our borders, keeping our country safe, keeping our neighborhoods safe, keeping women and girls safe from perceived physical threats from immigrant men. Trump is going to protect us in that way. But what is the response to people who point out: “Donald Trump is a criminal, a corrupt bully, an abuser. Trump is a sinner, and he’s unrepentant. Why does he get a pass?” On a literal level, people on the right would say those accusations and criminal charges have been fabricated and are part of a larger attack program against Trump and his allies. On a symbolic level, I would point to an event I attended at Liberty two days after the election. The speaker, who was a professor, gave a talk about a somewhat obscure character from the Old Testament. After an hour, she finally came to the point: This imperfect king had made all these mistakes, yet God had used him to deliver His promises. Nobody at that event said Trump’s name. Nobody mentioned the election. But the message was clear: That is our situation now. I have a sister who is an ardent Trump supporter. In 2016, her reaction to the Access Hollywood leak and the multiple accusations of sexual assault was weirdly positive: “All men do that” and “It shows his power.” She loved Trump’s swagger—that he was the type of person who does what he wants and if you don’t like it, fuck you. > “In 2016, Trump projected a kind of devil-may-care masculinity that [many of > these women] found quite attractive. Whereas in 2024, he’s seen as more of a > protective, fatherly or grandfatherly figure.” I think “swagger” is a really good word for how a lot of people I interviewed saw Trump in 2016. To them, he projected a kind of devil-may-care masculinity they found quite attractive. Whereas in 2024, especially amongst these conservative religious women, he’s seen as more of a protective, fatherly, or grandfatherly figure. In terms of his appeal, the sexualization has dialed down, and there’s more of a sense of him being older, strong, and reliable. Looking back at the last three elections, what else shifted in terms of how very religious voters viewed Trump? How did their reasons for supporting him change?  In the first election, immigration was a top concern, specifically focused around Muslims and Muslim Americans. In 2020, top of mind for a lot of conservatives, men and women, was Black Lives Matter, critical race theory—“We need law and order to protect against these BLM protesters.” In 2024, it was immigration again, only this time focused on keeping Latin Americans out of the country. The three elections are an interesting barometer for the way that primarily white Christians have viewed a racial “other”—what group they want to protect the nation from. This year, the anti-Black policies they had been prioritizing fell by the wayside.  So Christian conservatives didn’t reject Harris because of her race or gender?   Oh, I don’t doubt sexism and racism played a role in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But my sense is, for a lot of religious conservatives, this election was more about love for Donald Trump than dislike for Kamala Harris. That’s different from 2016. Hillary Clinton very much defied the role of what a woman should be, she had a long history of that, and the religious right hated her. This time around, Christians weren’t holding their noses and voting for Trump. I think a lot of Christians genuinely like this man. For years, I’ve been hearing that fewer and fewer Americans view themselves as religious. And as the numbers dwindle, the think tanks say, the influence of Christian conservatives will fade. It’s true that the numbers of evangelicals and devout Christians have been declining in this country. But what has stayed steady, or even gone up, is their level of political engagement. If you report being a practicing Christian, you are more likely than the average American to vote and to be involved in politics.  Your next book is a history of Christian women in US politics over the past 50 years. And a lot of the women students you spoke with at Liberty University are envisioning careers in politics and law. Yet much of the work they take on will be aimed at eroding women’s rights. Some on the religious far right don’t even want women to vote.  This has been a contradiction that has entangled right-wing Christian women since the 1970s. On the one hand, they are fighting for traditional gendered roles; on the other hand, they themselves want to be in politics. They’re embracing elements of feminism such as equality in women’s work. But they would never call themselves feminists and in fact, their work is to oppose feminism. Phyllis Schlafly, who led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, then headed the ultra-conservative Eagle Forum for decades, is a great example of someone who really pushed for these traditional gendered roles and yet was out there in public, being active in politics, traveling and speaking.  In other words, not practicing what she was preaching. How does someone like Schlafly compare with this new generation of Christian women? I think what’s different now is that there’s not such an outward opposition to feminism. That’s not what’s fueling their politics. Feminism has infiltrated their conservative sphere and is propelling these women forward, without them maybe wanting to acknowledge that, and certainly without secular feminists wanting to acknowledge that. > “Feminism has infiltrated their conservative sphere and is propelling these > women forward, without them maybe wanting to acknowledge that, and certainly > without secular feminists wanting to acknowledge that.” The new role model, and not just for the younger ones, is Amy Coney Barrett. She’s married to a man, she has tons of kids, and yet she’s on the Supreme Court advocating conservative values. It’s a version of having it all. I’ve heard religious women say that line—“we can have it all”—without recognizing that it comes from secular liberal feminism. Similarly, they embrace the choice elements of feminism, for example: “I want to have the choice to work part-time, or to work full-time, or to stay home with my kids and homeschool—I want to have that option available to me.” And yet they very much espouse these ideas that women are the nurturers, women are the caregivers, women have a very different sensibility than men do. Men should be in charge of the finances.  Did the outcome of this election surprise you, as it did so many Democrats? Or did you think, Yeah, it all makes sense?  I’m not surprised that Christians would be so allied with Trump, or that Christian women would view him as a protector. What has surprised me is that Trump made gains with some of these other populations—Gen Z women, even Black women.   Does this suggest Americans are feeling really afraid? That they want a protector? Maybe. But certainly among the Christian right, I also think there’s a strong desire for outsiders and anti-establishment characters to take charge and disrupt the status quo. Like Elon Musk?  Yes, exactly. He’s a businessman like Trump who’s been wildly successful. And the people I interview want someone who’s wildly successful running the country, because, deep down in their bones, they believe in capitalism. Musk has that devil-may-care attitude that Trump shares—he is anti-establishment and does what he wants to do. People on the religious right like that. He’s not beholden to the political old guard. And they think he’s going to do what he says he’s going to do, and not just make false, empty promises. For progressives—and possibly even moderates—the idea that somebody who became a gazillionaire by doing whatever the heck he wanted, with no guardrails, would now take charge of our democracy and run it like he runs Twitter/X is, well, terrifying. Whereas to conservative Christians…? It’s exciting.

In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found criminally liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems. I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him. One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption. > There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find > prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. I was well aware that algorithmic offerings are not reality, particularly on TikTok, which serves you things akin to the things you’ve engaged with. But the videos seemed to be representative of a record gender divide, clocked by pollsters at about 30 points nationally at the time and even higher in key districts and among certain demographics. Would women, horrified by Trump’s and Vance’s statements and actions, furious that their reproductive rights were rolled back, foreclose another Trump term? Would enough white women finally cleave from white men, and vote for a woman who was also Black and Asian? We know the answer now, and while conclusive demographic data will take months to emerge, exit polls in 10 historic battleground states indicate that women there favored Harris by 8 points overall—less than the margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020—resulting in an 11 point gender gap. (The exit polls’ ongoing inclusion of Florida, Ohio, and Texas might being warping our conclusions, but we don’t yet know.) Black women, Democrats’ most loyal constituency, voted for her in those states at a rate of 91 percent. Latinas, 60 percent. Young women, 61 percent. Other age groups, 49–54 percent. Harris won 57 percent of women with college degrees and 66 percent of women with even more education. But she lost white women with little or no college education by a mile. Only 35 percent of them supported her, and since those women constitute about one-fifth of the total electorate, they drove down her margins with women overall. The questions that feel most burning right now—like what is up with those who voted against abortion bans but also for Trump, and which part of his gains can be attributed mostly to racism and/or sexism—are complex and will take more data and analysis to really understand. But it’s safe to say Trump’s margin of victory was powered by men, who, those same polls found, voted for him by 55 percent—a few points more than went for him in 2020. Trump looks to have made gains with almost every type of man, especially younger men and Latino men. (Despite a lot of pre-election angst, Black men overwhelmingly backed Harris, though Trump increased his margins there, too.) White men of all education levels went for Trump, but white men who didn’t go to college overwhelmingly so. The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk. Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk has been on a mission to turn it into an amplifier of toxicity. He allowed hate-mongers—including virulent misogynists such as Andrew Tate—back on the platform, now called X, and dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans, foremost himself. He personally promoted disinformation of all kinds—about voting, about transgender kids (despite, or because of, having one), about Harris (his PAC literally called her a “c-word”), about science—to his more than 204 million followers. Who can forget his promise to impregnate Taylor Swift after she announced her support for Harris? His misleading election posts, including ones falsely claiming Democrats were “importing” millions of migrants to vote for Harris, were viewed 2 billion times according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated his posts were worth $24 million to the Trump campaign. (Musk, who likes to claim he’s a defender of free speech, sued the center in 2023; a federal judge tossed the case, ruling it was an obvious attempt to both stifle criticism of X and bankrupt the organization.) Musk gave, directly and through super-PACs, about $200 million to help Trump’s campaign in the final months, and mounted a parallel ground game in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried. He stumped for Trump, made the “brocast” rounds for Trump, and urged other tech billionaires to support Trump. He gave millions—possibly tens of millions—to Building America’s Future, a group focused on dividing communities of color and wooing Black men to vote for Trump. > Musk dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure > everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans—foremost > himself. Musk’s efforts are both part of and indicative of the fact that more and more men are cocooned in a YouTube/podcast/Twitch information ecosystem that connects sports, gaming, and other male-dominated hobbies to politics. And in that space, algorithmic forces and concerted efforts by far-right influencers and adjacent grifters are normalizing disdain or hate for women, part of a conveyor belt of extremism. A good example of that came immediately after the election, when neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes (who famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) posted “Your body, my choice.” Soon that slogan was screamed at high school girls all over the country by their male classmates, many of whom had likely never heard of Fuentes himself. (Similarly, Black people, including kids at my son’s school, were subjected to a decentralized but nationwide campaign of racist texts.) There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men.  This has all happened before. Women in the 1940s were sent to the factories and then back to the kitchen. The feminist movement of the 1970s led to big gains—we finally got those credit cards, ladies!—and then to a backlash, as Susan Faludi famously chronicled. An “anti-PC” movement arose too. But eventually the pendulum swung back, and new waves of female empowerment began to swell. Hopefully this election will do the same, and figuring out how to reach young men before they calcify into hardened misogyny needs to be a big part of that. After the 2016 election, I wrote that Trump’s victory was a “brutal affront to women” and “all who value kindness and tolerance.” His administration plumbed new depths of chaos, corruption, and cruelty, and while some voters are too young to fully remember, his 2024 campaign made sure that no one could say they didn’t get what he stands for.  The women who voted for Harris know that—and they are not okay. About one-third of women now live in states with abortion bans, and anybody who believed that Trump won’t try for a national ban, or revive the Comstock Act to stop distribution of mifepristone or even contraception, is likely to be bitterly disappointed. Even if nationwide prohibitions don’t come to pass, women in red states, and their doctors, will be further surveilled to prevent abortions, and women trying to have children will continue to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid to provide lifesaving care. What else do the “pronatalist” policies that JD Vance and Elon Musk have been so eager to enact hold for women?  > Women are suspicious, guarded, and apoplectic, knowing that some in our > families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status. When I went back to TikTok after the election, I saw sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage. Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way. Black women are especially flattened and yet unsurprised that white women didn’t break for Harris. Some young women began shaving their heads and embracing the South Korean feminist 4B movement, in which women swear off dating, sex, and childrearing. (“The good news is that men hate us, so there’s no point in catering to them,” posted one.) Not many are likely to go that far, but it was clear even before the outcome that this election could have far-reaching impacts on dating and marriage and divorce. Certainly sex: If women can’t get abortions and are prevented from obtaining contraception, young men will awake to a very different world, soon enough. “If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,” posted one woman. (And guys? Project 2025 wants to come after porn, too.)  Will the backlash, once the election’s consequences become fully apparent, help power a reckoning with misogyny and racism once more? Perhaps. But right now, so many of us fear for ourselves, fear for our daughters, fear for women whom we’ve never met, and all others with a target on their backs, and we are walking around, suspicious and guarded and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status, and wondering what else they’re ready to go along with.

Things seem to be going great for Vice President Kamala Harris when it comes to two key data points any politician obsesses over: cash and favorability ratings. A new NBC News poll out today shows Harris with a 5-point lead over former President Donald Trump among registered voters nationally, who prefer her to him 49 to 44 percent. That’s a big jump from July, when NBC polling found Trump leading Biden 45 to 43 percent. Not only that, the new poll shows Harris’ favorability rating soared 16 points since July, with particular spikes coming from voters under 30 and Black and Hispanic voters. NBC notes that this marks the largest increase for any politician in the network’s polling since George W. Bush saw a post-9/11 surge. > NEW: Kamala Harris’ favorability has jumped 16 points since July, the largest > increase for any politician in NBC News polling since George W. Bush’s > standing surged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.@SteveKornacki breaks down > the numbers from latest @NBCNews poll. pic.twitter.com/Zc84Q4cXkM > > — Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 22, 2024 Harris also outraised Trump 4-to-1 in August, according to new filings from the Federal Election Commission released Friday, which show that her campaign took in $189 million, while his brought in $44 million. Harris has been a boon for Democratic fundraising since President Joe Biden dropped from the ticket in July: As my colleagues and I reported, she raised more than $80 million in her first 24 hours and $200 million in her first week campaigning; her campaign also raised $540 million during its first month and more than $80 million during the Democratic National Convention. The Harris campaign is not sitting on its cash, having spent nearly $174 million last month, while Trump spent about $61 million. As the New York Times reported Friday, some of the campaigns’ spending gap is reflected in the money they’re putting towards digital operations, with the Harris campaign splashing out on more than $12 million on Facebook and Instagram advertising during the week of the debate, while the Trump campaign spent well under $1 million. Trump’s spokespeople told the Times that the campaign is spending less because they can reach people for free at rallies—though that’s a risky bet, given that Trump can’t be counted on to stick to a script… or facts.