Republican politicians might think they have enough problems on the cusp of the midterms, with their electoral prospects already threatened by the Iran War, rising inflation, a trade war with Canada, and a GOP president pigheadedly committed to every single one of these unpopular policies. But some of the most strident voices in MAGA have decided to give party leaders a new headache: trying to repeal the 19th Amendment and end the right of women to vote.

On Sunday, Fox News reported, “Calls to repeal women’s rights to vote are emerging from the online firestorm over the Lindsay Clancy trial, prompting Republican women to warn that the intraparty rhetoric could hurt the GOP.”

The fact that this article was published by Fox News was itself noteworthy. Press Baron Rupert Murdoch is one of the few remaining centers of power on the right who is strong enough to pick fights with Trump and his MAGA supporters. In recent years, Murdoch’s outlets have carved out a position for themselves as gatekeepers who work to protect the GOP brand from the most self-destructive impulses of MAGA. One recent example of this phenomenon is the decision to fire (or at least take off the air) the firebrand election denier Maria Bartiromo.

The Fox article was also significant for highlighting how the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy is being exploited by the hard right to justify misogyny. Clancy killed three of her children in 2023. Her legal defense was that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Eleven jurors voted to acquit Clancy based on this argument, but one juror resisted, leading to a mistrial.

Nine of the jurors who voted to acquit—presumably because they thought Clancy deserved pity rather than harsh punishment—were women; the lone holdout was a man. The hard right has seized on these facts to justify arguments that women are incapable of reason. The Fox article quoted a post on X that made a common argument: “The female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial are speaking out about their deliberations and disagreements with the sole male holdout. The more they speak the better they make the case for repealing the 19th Amendment.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal (another Murdoch property), Louise Perry notes that on the right, “both the crimes and the public response to the crimes are taken as evidence that feminism was a mistake. If the [O.J.] Simpson case was a trial of American race relations, the Clancy case is a trial of the American gender wars.”

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As with Fox News, Perry is wary of the wild leap the hard right has made from criticizing the advocates of mercy for Clancy to calling for a repeal of the 19th Amendment. She treats it as rooted in an understandable impulse but going too far:

It has become routine for men on the online right to endorse #Repealthe19th—that is, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote—and the Clancy case has led to a resurgence in this discourse. The argument goes that, if women are so emotionally unstable that they can’t be blamed for killing their own children, then why should they be entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as men? Furthermore, if women are so vulnerable to internet-induced mass psychosis that they can easily end up supporting baby killing, can women really be trusted on a personal level, let alone a political one? These questions go beyond a conservative call to revert to a former legal status quo—they express a palpable hostility toward women, as such.

Both the Fox News report and Perry’s opinion article are attempts to distance the Republican party from the politically toxic Repeal the 19th movement. One argument both pieces make is that the movement is coming from is the “online right” rather than mainstream right-wingers.

In truth, Repeal the 19th has a broader and older base than the online right. Writing in The Guardian in 2025, Moira Donegan observed, “More and more, influential voices in the Maga movement and the far-right Republican party are calling to strip women of the franchise. It’s not that this is strictly a new development.” The push against female suffrage is rooted in different sources. There is a long-standing evangelical Christian faction that is animated by patriarchy, but also more secular versions of sexism embraced by tech oligarchs such as Peter Thiel, who once lamented that the extension of democracy to women made his ideal of a libertarian state impossible. Thiel would later claim that he doesn’t want to disenfranchise anyone, but the antidemocratic thrust of his politics is undeniable.

Even more pertinently, the Repeal the 19th movement has friends in the highest levels of government. As Donegan notes, “In August [2025], defense secretary Pete Hegseth…reposted a video in which pastors explain their opposition to women’s right to vote, with the caption ‘All of Christ for All of Life’—a Christian nationalist slogan.”

Last month, Media Matters assembled a useful dossier of prominent right-wing media voices such as Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, and Greg Gutfield all expressing skepticism of female suffrage or calling for a repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Of course, a constitutional end to female suffrage is extremely unlikely, if for no other reason than the sheer legal difficulty of amending the Constitution. But the ugly calls to disenfranchise women have to be understood as part of a larger antidemocratic movement on the right.

Donald Trump is currently using his presidential powers to sow chaos in the midterms. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, “Election officials are contemplating ideas that once sounded outlandish, such as troops seizing voting machines, the president dictating last-minute election rules or rogue officials blocking the certification of results.”

These moves are justified on the grounds that American democracy has been compromised by a panoply of villains, from cheating Democrats to noncitizens committing mass voter fraud. (These claims are, of course, nonsense.) Casting doubt on the right of women to vote is just one more way of discrediting current elections. The underlying premise is that when Democrats do win elections, the results can still be rejected because the wrong sort of voters were allowed to cast ballots.

Although the Repeal the 19th movement expresses an extremism that even Trump would shy away from, it springs from the same authoritarian roots as Trump’s broader assault on democracy. The one saving grace is that the blatant misogyny of the movement is likely to mobilize women voters to come out in droves. There is little comfort to be gained as MAGA has mainstreamed extreme sexism. But for many women, voting might end up being the best revenge.