American women were crucial to Biden’s victory
Marygrace Vadala’s 82-year-old mother had been a fan of President Donald Trump since his days hosting the reality TV show The Apprentice. She enthusiastically voted for him in 2016.
But in the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, as the two watched daily White House briefings, Vadala’s mom - Grace Webber - voiced her first doubts.
“Why isn’t he listening to the medical experts?” Vadala, a 48-year-old home care nurse, recalled Webber asking.
Weeks later, Webber landed in the hospital with a gastrointestinal bleed. She soon contracted the coronavirus, spending nearly a month on a ventilator. In May, Vadala, a devout Catholic, said goodbye to Webber over FaceTime, clutching her mother’s rosary beads.
Vadala, who lives in a suburb of Scranton, Pennsylvania, had been a Republican all her life. But she concluded Trump lacked the “integrity and trustworthiness and responsibility” she was raised to value, and she wanted him out. She became a prominent booster of Trump’s Democratic rival, even agreeing to appear in an online ad for former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign.
“I just couldn’t be silent on this one,” she said. “I let my mom’s voice be heard.”
Women appear to have been crucial in delivering the US presidency to Biden. They were at the forefront of the highest US 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. Media outlets called the race for Biden on Saturday after he pulled ahead decisively in Pennsylvania.
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 - like Vadala - 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.
Still, Trump held strong with one female demographic across both elections: white women without college degrees.