ERIE, Pa. — Dr. Theresa Wheeling had always been a registered Republican. She voted third party in 2016 and then for Donald Trump in 2020, in large part because she felt it would be “hypocritical” to vote against her kids’ chosen jobs, which were related to various Trump administration policies and promises.
But one day after the Supreme Court upended federal abortion protections previously enshrined by Roe v. Wade, Wheeling changed her party affiliation. And this time around, she is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I felt embarrassed to call myself a Republican,” Wheeling told NBC News. “Four years ago, I might have said no [to Harris], but now I do think she is more moderate. And I absolutely cannot vote for Trump.”
Voters like Wheeling, in counties and states like this one — Erie, Pennsylvania, a bellwether in the biggest battleground state — could decide the election. White women are a huge voting bloc, and since 2000, the GOP presidential ticket has won a majority of them. In 2016, the group helped launch Trump into the presidency. In 2020, he improved his margins among them, even though he lost his race for re-election.
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But new polling from Galvanize Action — a nonpartisan group that’s been tracking the attitudes of more than 6,000 white women across 10 battleground states since June — shows this group may be up for grabs in 2024.
“We’re seeing such a huge divide [between men and women], that it really is becoming a women’s election,” says Jackie Payne, founder and executive director of Galvanize Action. “And so we see both Harris and Trump vying for moderate white women’s vote.”
The group’s September survey, shared first with NBC News and conducted 10 days after Trump and Harris’ only debate, shows Harris with a 2-point advantage over Trump among that group, 46%-44%, within the poll’s margin of error. In Galvanize Action’s June poll, when President Joe Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, he and Trump were in a dead heat among white women.
“Then we started to see, once Harris entered the race, they started to shift a little bit toward Harris,” Payne said, adding that the survey numbers — like most public polling, currently — is “still very much within the margin of error, still very close.”
This group of voters, Payne reminds, “is by no means monolithic. And it’s not a runaway race for anybody, right? I think that’s such an important thing to realize. It’s a game of inches.”
Among white female voters, the economy ranks as the top issue, followed by preserving democracy, immigration and abortion rights. It’s on the issue of the economy that Trump and Republicans might find the most upside, with 41% of white female voters blaming the Biden-Harris administration for inflation and one-third believing the GOP “is much better” on the issue.
