Julia Roberts ad sparks debate about gender gap, voting in marriages

A pro-Harris campaign ad encouraging women to break with their Trump-supporting partners at the ballot box is striking a nerve amid signs of a growing national gender gap in the high-stakes presidential race.

Vote Common Good, which encourages evangelical and Catholic voters to break from the GOP, aired an ad voiced by actress Julia Roberts reminding women “you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know” — prompting pushback from several prominent conservatives who criticized it for calling on wives to lie to their husbands.

Polls show a significant gap, with Vice President Harris winning over a large majority of female voters and former President Trump building up a huge advantage with male voters.

This difference would get attention in any presidential cycle, but it feels all the more important in the first presidential contest to take place since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“It's definitely significant and has the potential of being historic,” explained Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of the nonpartisan, moderate women-focused group Galvanize Action.

“When I'm looking at the data, what I see is, if only men voted, Trump would win,” said Payne, adding that “women are making this a competitive election.”

In the 30-second ad featuring Roberts, a couple are at a polling place when a man prompts his female partner, presumably after voting, “your turn honey.”

The woman, wearing a hat with a bedazzled American flag on it, is seen walking to her voting booth where she weighs choosing between Harris and Trump.

She looks up at another woman voting in front of her and the two exchange a knowing glance, before marking her ballot for Harris.

In the background, Roberts invokes the issue of abortion rights in her voice-over. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote anyway you want, and no one will ever know.”

Toward the end of the ad, her husband asks if she “made the right choice,” to which she smiles and says “sure did, honey.”

Fox News host Jesse Watters mentioned his own spouse in discussing the ad, comparing a woman who doesn’t tell her husband who she is voting for to someone having an affair.

“If I found out Emma was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” Watters said on air Wednesday in response to the ad.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called it “gross” to suggest women would “undermine their husbands.”

The ad isn’t the only effort this cycle to remind voters that their ballots are private, or to suggest that women and men are casting different ballots this fall.

NBC News reported pro-Harris sticky notes have been found in women’s bathroom stalls and on the backs of tampon boxes. And women are taking to a TikTok trend in which Harris-Walz voters share that they’ll “cancel out” a pro-Trump husband or family member’s ballot.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who’s doing work for independent expenditure groups in the presidential election, suggested the Harris ad with Julia Roberts could be effective, even if it doesn’t completely capture the dynamic she’s found in some relationships when it comes to voting.

“When we're trying to interview them or if you’re canvassing these married women, they'll say, ‘Well, you should really be talking to my husband. He knows more about this, or he follows politics,’ or ‘I just get his opinion on politics,’” Lake explained.

“These women presume that he has greater expertise, and he presumes that he has greater expertise. And so the first part of moving these women is to say you have your own way of doing things. You have your own opinion,” she added.

Polling the extent to which couples may vote differently from each other is challenging to accurately measure given votes are privately cast and respondents may not always offer that information to pollsters.

Still, it raises questions over how men and women will cast their votes this cycle — and how big a split it could be.

The gender gap was at 11 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election, with 42 percent of women and 52 percent of men backing Trump, according to Edison Research compiled by the Center for American Woman and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

In 2020, the gap was 12 points, with 57 percent of women and 45 percent of men backing President Biden.

In 2024, there are signs of a growing divide.

An October USA Today/Suffolk University national poll found women decidedly behind Harris, 53 percent to 36 percent. Men were behind Trump 53 percent to 36 percent. If similar splits show up on Nov. 5, it could make for a historic gender gap.

Payne of Galvanize Action explained that moderate white women were driving the gender gap. At the same time, Zachary Donnini, a data scientist at Decision Desk HQ, noted gaps were emerging among Black and Latino voters, too.

Polls have also suggested a deepening split among young voters in particular. Motivated by threats to reproductive rights and turned off by GOP rhetoric, young women are tending more liberal, experts said — while young men are pulled in by Trump’s messaging around masculinity.

Women, who have long outpaced men in voter turnout, are also dominating early voting, according to the latest data compiled by the University of Florida Election Lab, making up 54 percent of the 66 million early votes so far.

Only Election Day will reveal how many female voters are actually part of the hesitant demographic depicted in the Vote Common Good ad, said Martha McKenna, a Democratic strategist and veteran of EMILY’s List, a group aimed at getting abortion-rights female candidates elected to office.

But McKenna argued many moderate Republican and independent women are “feeling squeezed” this cycle. Even the Republican “outrage” at the new ad, she said, could make the case for the ad’s message.

“Republicans fell straight into the trap that the ad laid out for them,” McKenna said, pointing to the responses from right-wing talkers.

“They have so far overreacted to this discussion in the final days of the campaign that they've really exposed themselves ... It is, like, embarrassing almost — how upset these guys were at the thought that the women in their lives would not vote the way that they wanted them to, for Trump.”

Still, there are nuances within measuring the gap between how women and men vote for the winning presidential candidate.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics, noted it’s possible there could be a record in the gender gap this presidential cycle while noting women have been more likely to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1980.

“Anybody is going to be able to argue that women are the key to this election. But I think the more interesting story and the trends to watch are going to be, which women, how do they trend,” she explained. “What is the diversity among women voters?”

Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Republican secretary of state in Washington, said the dynamics in the Vote Common Good ad aren’t limited to the gender divide.

“I really do believe that this election, based on what we saw in 2016 and what we saw in 2020, saying to people how you voted, and it doesn't matter which side you say you voted, can get a very emotional response from friends and family and people you've known your whole life,” Wyman said. “And I think that for many Americans, they just kind of want to avoid it.”