Will Republican women secretly switch from Trump to Harris?

Actress Julia Roberts joins a colorful array of celebrities urging the electorate to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on November 5, with a special shout out to female voters.

In an advert sponsored by the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good, Roberts tells us the polling booth is “the one place in America where women still have the right to choose,” in a clear reference to the Republican stance on reproductive rights.

Photo: screenshot of Vote Common Good Ad

In a voice over, Roberts goes on to say, “You can vote anyway you want and no one will ever know,” as the woman in the ad catches the eye of another female voter and gives her a complicit smile.

The ad shows the female voter marking her ballot paper in the Kamala Harris box before her partner, clearly a Donald Trump supporter, asks her, “Did you make the right choice?” to which she replies, “Sure did honey.”

Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and the director of the Electoral Innovation Lab, notes the emergence of the largest voting gender gap on record, and believes reproductive rights are behind it.

According to a recent survey by USA Today and Suffolk University, former president Donald Trump leads among men by 16% while Harris is ahead among women by 17%.

“The obvious reason for that gap is reproductive rights, since most Republican legislators are open to a nationwide ban on abortion,” Wang told the Huffington Post.

One former Republican voter, Michelle Allen, told the BBC why she would be shifting to Harris: “The whole Republican stance is smaller government and don't let government make my personal decisions, so why are they trying to legislate what a woman can do with her body?”

Photo: screenshot from BBC website

Former Republican Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney and a champion of the Harris campaign, has predicted that millions of disillusioned Republicans will end up, like her, giving Harris their vote.

According to Vote Common Good, some Catholic and Evangelical voters may be turning away from the Republican party in pursuit of good.

"In recent years a significant percentage of these voters have watched the Republican party disregard a commitment to the common good as they support political and social movements rooted in white-nationalism, a misguided approach to ‘America First,’ and practices of division,” it states on its website.

Cheney claimed at a rally in Michigan that Trump’s instability is turning an increasing number of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans towards Harris.

She told the crowd that this particular election wasn’t about choosing between two political ideologies but between “right and wrong.”

Cheney even said that a number of Republicans had approached her to admit that they may switch to Harris on November 5, in a bid “to do the right thing.”

“I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” she added, according to Fox Illinois. “There will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5.”

Cheney reiterated her message in a Detroit suburb where she was promoting Harris to a crowd of Republican and Independent female voters.

Again, she told her audience that no one – not even partners or family members – will know who they vote for because there is no official way to search for how someone voted.

Of course, there may also be a significant number of ‘secret’ Trump voters, given the extremely fractious climate leading up to polling day.

In the 2016 election, secret Trump voters doubled the number of secret Hillary Clinton voters, resulting in Trump’s victory coming as a huge shock.

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