Kamala Harris is pioneering a new divide-and-conquer strategy to win the White House: She's dividing families — encouraging wives to split from husbands at the ballot box.
Harris enjoys a commanding lead among women voters, yet most of her advantage comes from single women.
Married women actually preferred Donald Trump in 2020: He won them 52% to 47% over the Biden-Harris ticket.
But what if Democrats could neutralize the effects of marriage and make all women single on Election Day?
Harris polls worse ahead of Nov. 5 than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden did during their races against Trump, but if she can break the family ties that lead married women to vote Republican, she may yet win.
Politics is divisive enough outside of the home, yet the Harris campaign and its allies believe their success depends on stirring up a sense of rival interests within the family itself.
C.R. Wiley, a pastor and conservative author living in Washington state, reports he was recently visited by a Democratic canvasser who insisted on talking to Mrs. Wiley — evidently in the hopes that she, a registered Republican, would be receptive to the Harris pitch as long as her husband wasn't around.
The idea that Republican women would vote Harris if not for the influence of the men in their lives has become a major Democratic theme in the race's closing days.
The campaign doesn't want the candidate herself identified too closely with the dirty work of making that case, however.
Instead, Harris surrogates Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney have been the ones out there arguing that wives should think of their interests as being divorced from their husbands'.
"If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don't listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter," Obama told a rally in Michigan.
Cheney reinforced the message on "Face the Nation" Sunday: "We, you know, obviously, encourage that your vote is a secret vote."
Secrecy is no foundation for a healthy marriage.
Yet Team Harris is afraid of what happens when married couples openly discuss their voting intentions. They need all women to think like they're single.
The vice president's allies are going even farther down this road than her campaign dares to.
A hokey new ad from a pro-Harris group called Vote Common Good features a voiceover from the actress Julia Roberts that describes the voting booth as "the one place in America where women still have a right to choose."
Never mind the fact-free fearmongering of that claim — what's really remarkable is that Roberts ends her script with a line adapted from an old Las Vegas marketing campaign that slyly promoted infidelity: "Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth."
Should a married person view voting like a trip to Sin City?
Ms. magazine, meanwhile, highlights an underground tactic to push Harris' message into spaces where women expect to be left alone — placing Post-it notes with the "voting is a secret" theme in the stalls of women's bathrooms.
Privacy used to mean the home — or the bathroom stall — was a place campaigning couldn't reach.
Harris has changed that: She allows women no privacy from her politicking.
She may be a woman herself, but Harris wants to be Big Brother, with a message of paranoia and fear one can't escape anywhere.
The implication of her last-ditch stratagem is that even in marriage, men and women are lonely individuals who can't trust or depend on each other; they can only depend on the party and its omnipresent leader.
Yes, the voting booth is private — women don't need Kamala Harris to tell them that.
But women can use the privacy of the voting booth to tell Harris and her party, in the most public way possible, to stay the hell out of their marriages and home lives.
Daniel McCarthy, a recognized expert on conservative thought, is the editor-in-chief of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. He's also a regular contributor to The Spectator's World edition. He has a long association with The American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan. Mr. McCarthy's writings appeared in a variety of publications. He has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NPR, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CNN International and other radio and television outlets. Read more of Daniel McCarthy's reports — Here.