2024 Election
Julia Roberts Calls on Wives of Male Trump Supporters to Quietly Back Kamala Harris in Brilliant New Ad
Don't let him fill out your ballot for you, and don't let him watch you fill it out yourself.
The balance has been hard to keep for quite a few years now. I’m talking, of course, about having political opinions and allowing them to determine the outcome of your relationships.
For the longest time in America, there was a hard and fast — although mostly unspoken — rule about politics: Like religion, bodily functions, and how much is on your paycheck, you just don’t talk about it.
The fact is, however, that time is gone, for better or for worse. It’s good in a way, since we should be comparing paychecks to make sure there’s equity among workers. We should be comparing the merits of religious values and how they affect others. We really ought to get our colons checked out.
But the reason we talk about politics now isn’t because it’s suddenly become fashionable to discuss progressive taxation or import/export policies. It’s because we largely like to see whether someone holds similar views to us at all. The nuance of defense spending and foreign relations has been replaced almost entirely by whether or not we believe transgender people should be allowed to exist or whether America is still a “melting pot.”
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That’s where the balance comes in. A recent conversation I had included the fact that the left and right are somewhat justified in their anger when talking politics with each other. The right believes that the left has an agenda, and vice versa.
We could go into the weeds about how Democrats don’t actually want to send your sons to school and send them back as girls, or take away all of your guns, but Republicans do actually want to elect people of the same religion as them so they can create a theocracy that requires everyone to live by their beliefs.
I won’t, though. Suffice it to say, it’s hard to maintain relationships with people that you dearly love — old friends, siblings, parents, spouses — when you find out that they hold drastically different views than you, and there’s no such thing as “slightly” different views anymore.
They’re all drastic.
Enter the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good. They say that they’re trying to find an “exit ramp” for people who might otherwise vote Republican based on those older, more traditional hallmarks of conservatism — taxes, defense, etc. — but can’t bring themselves to vote for Donald Trump, who is both figuratively and literally a criminal.
One place it’s hard for people to vote their conscience is in a married relationship where one partner is an avowed Trumper. These people are far more likely to both care whether their spouse votes like them, and to ask and “make sure” they did after the fact.
So Hollywood super megastar Julia Roberts, who played different versions of “America’s Sweetheart” for more than a decade, made an ad for the group. And boy, is it powerful. There’s humor, sure, but it also carries a tone of knowing glances and hushed agreements for women to never talk about their real feelings when it comes to politics, so they don’t upend their relationships.
The ad shows two women going into voting booths, and one of them (we don’t know which) very obviously voting for Kamala Harris. As the commercial shows the women in the privacy of the booths, Roberts intones “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.”
As the two women exit, the (assumed) husband of one of the women, clad in an American flag and eagle hat, asks his wife, who is wearing a bedazzled stars and stripes hat, “Did you make the right choice?”
And while that may leave a bad taste in your mouth, the implication being that the husband thinks he knows what the “right choice” is for his wife, the look she shares with the other woman from the next booth over as she says “Sure did, honey!” tells you she made her own choice, and maybe made an ally in her fellow woman.
“Remember,” Roberts says, “what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”
I know it may not be that simple for some women. I know of even a same-sex marriage between two women that was marked by one partner constantly telling the other how to behave.
But if there’s an ad out there that might give a little hope — a picture of what it looks like to be free to make your own choice where it matters the most — it’s this one.
Watch the video here, and share this article with any woman you know in a similar situation.

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