In a bathroom stall, a simple message: Vote Harris, no one will know

One woman stuck a note to the door of her hair salon in North Carolina.

Another pressed it onto the back of a tampon box in Arkansas.

A third hung one on a mirror of a women’s bathroom at an Ohio airport.

“Woman to woman,” the note read. “No one sees your vote at the polls.”

In swing states and Republican strongholds, on college campuses and in sports arenas, sticky notes have appeared reminding women that their votes are confidential – kept private even and especially from the men in their lives.

The origins of the trend are unclear, but the co-founder of Women for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group supporting the vice president’s campaign, says her members have been sticking notes in bathrooms and similar spaces for months, encouraging women to vote their own minds and reminding them that their ballot is secret.

Now, in the final days of the presidential race, what started as a whisper campaign by women and for women has become the subject of a controversial 30-second ad, been amplified by Democratic juggernauts such as Michelle Obama and drawn furious backlash from the right.

Although a loud brand of feminism defined Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid – “I’m With Her” was Clinton’s campaign slogan – Harris has only rarely spoken about her own pursuit of the same historic first, instead talking about gender through the language of abortion rights and values like “freedom.”

But polls have shown a rift between how men and women plan to vote, and in an election that will likely be decided on the margins, Harris needs women – even women who are dating or married to Trump supporters – to turn out in droves to vote for her. And in the closing weeks of the campaign, Democrats and their allies have made explicit appeals to women who are in relationships with Trump-supporting men.

“Your vote is a private matter, regardless of the political views of your partner,” former first lady Michelle Obama, a top Democratic surrogate, said late last month in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “You get to use your judgment and cast your vote.”

“You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who has endorsed Harris, said at an event just outside of Detroit on Oct. 21. “And there will be millions of Republicans who do that on Nov . 5.”

Daniel McCarthy, editor-at-large of The American Conservative, called Obama and Cheney’s comments “patronizing” in a column for the New York Post.

“In the eyes of Team Harris, any woman who isn’t openly supporting the Democrat must be a hostage to false consciousness – or to an ogre husband,” he wrote.

A 30-second digital ad on the subject from an outside pro-Harris nonprofit has drawn particular scorn on the right. Narrated by actress Julia Roberts, the ad shows a woman arriving at the ballot booths with a man who appears to be her husband. She walks into a booth alone, locks eyes with another woman and smiles. Then she fills in the circle for Harris.

“Did you make the right choice?” the man asks as she walks away.

“Sure did, honey,” replies the woman, dressed in a hat with a bedazzled American flag.

“Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth,” the ad concludes. “Vote Harris-Walz.”

Many prominent conservatives said they found the ad offensive. Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA, called it “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family.” Fox News host Jesse Waters told viewers that his wife secretly voting for Harris would be tantamount to her “having an affair.”

Some conservative women have said the ad felt like an assault on intimate relationships – and dismissive of their own autonomy and support for Trump.

“It is objectionable, it is divisive and it is insulting,” said Jayme Franklin, co-founder of The Conservateur, a media and lifestyle brand for conservative women, and former Trump White House director of communications for presidential personnel. “As a married woman, I understand how important unity and trust is within a marriage, and the Kamala campaign promoting lying to their husbands is so disappointing, to say the least.”

One in 8 women have voted differently from their partners without telling them – a number that was not statistically different from the percentage of men who have done the same, according to polling from YouGov released last week.

The ad was created by Vote Common Good, an organization that aims to target progressive, religious voters. Doug Pagitt, the group’s executive director, said his team began designing the ad in September, and crafted it to speak to voters ages 40 and older who “are not really running in the social warrior world on either side, but their faith really matters to them at a personal level, and they are resistant to organizations or individuals trying to lay claim to their faith.” Pagitt, an evangelical pastor, said he believes that demographic includes a significant share of the still-undecided electorate.

Pagitt’s group did not have enough funding to place the ad on cable TV. But the ad reached a broad audience anyway. It has been viewed more than 50 million times on social media platforms since Monday, according to Pagitt, and cited on popular TV shows including The Daily Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The real reason for the gender gap between the candidates, Franklin and her co-founder, Isabelle Redfield, argued, is pressure that media and celebrities put on women to vote for Democrats. They cited, as an example, comments made by Mark Cuban, who said that Trump did not surround himself with “strong, intelligent women.”

Despite conservatives’ protests, women who have to hide their votes from their husbands exist, said Jill Nash, who co-founded Women for Biden-Harris – now renamed Women for Harris-Walz – in 2020 to connect grassroots organizers for Democratic candidates.

Nash said she first realized that some women were scared to vote in 2020, when a woman wrote to her on social media seeking advice. The woman’s Trump-supporting husband had demanded that she hand over her ballot, Nash said.

Since then, Nash said, she has seen women scared to publicly volunteer in support of Democrats and has heard from women who fear answering their doors when canvassers knock. Multiple members of her group have told stories of women stepping outside of their houses and quietly closing the doors so their husbands could not hear their conversations, she said.

Six months ago, Nash and her organization – which she said consists of 1.3 million members across 47 state groups – started to brainstorm ways to reach women in safe spaces and reassure them that their vote is confidential. Soon after, they decided to start writing on sticky notes and putting them on the doors of bathroom stalls.

“Your vote is private,” one note said. “Vote for women’s rights.”

The idea that some women might have to defy their husbands’ wishes to secretly vote for their choice of candidate attracted more attention in early August, shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. Around that time, Olivia Dreizen Howell, chief executive and co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry, a platform to pool resources for women going through divorce or other major life changes, started receiving questions on her personal social media account from followers who wanted to know who could see how they voted.

She posted a thread on X explaining that Americans’ votes are secret – even from their spouses.

The top post in the thread has since received nearly 9 million views. Soon, Howell started receiving death threats, she said.

Most of the backlash, she said, appeared to be from right-leaning users who said she was encouraging women to lie to their husbands. Other attacks, she said, came from people who said that anyone who felt compelled to lie to their partner may be in danger and should leave the relationship, and argued that her post downplayed that risk.

As the sticky note trend has grown, some women have found a way to make a little bit of money off it. Lyndsey Mullen, 44, grew up in Clinton, Indiana, a Republican town in a rural, Republican county, and her family had always had political differences.

Mullen, who spends most of her time at home raising children with disabilities, has long championed the Democratic Party. But she kept her preferences relatively quiet until 2016. Then Trump took office, and she hated how he talked about women. In 2020, she co-founded the “Nasty Women of Vermillion County,” a group that organizes for Democratic candidates and causes.

“Here, you just kept quiet and assumed everyone didn’t believe what you believed,” she said. “Then after 2016, that ended because we really started seeing all the bad that was happening.”

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Mullen said, she felt her bodily autonomy shrink. Then, in 2023, Indiana passed a law that banned kids from receiving hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery. The new law affected Mullen directly, because one of her children, who was born with a rare condition that occurs when the pituitary gland does not produce hormones that control growth and sexual development, identifies as nonbinary and has been prescribed hormone treatments.

Mullen was furious, and cast about for some way to make more of a difference. This August, someone in her Nasty Women group saw on social media that women in a nearby county were leaving sticky notes in bathrooms, reminding each other that their votes are private.

Mullen, a domestic violence survivor, liked the idea. She knew only about one-third of the 191 members of her group were married to other Democrats, and that they were only a fraction of the women who lived and voted in her area.

She logged onto her Etsy account, where she runs a small crafts business with her mom. Then she got to designing.

“Remember, No one sees your vote,” read her sticky notes, which she now sells for $15. “Vote your conscience.”

She chose a red backdrop so the notes would catch a woman’s eye, wherever she might find them.