Older Women — Not Young Men — Might Save Democracy

If ever there were a moment to mobilize menopausal voters, it is now.

Since 2024, there has been all kinds of handwringing among politicos about the rightward shift of young male voters in the United States. According to a new report from the centrist think tank Third Way, many of the “swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men” who support Donald Trump are likely to sit out the midterms 2026.

At the same time, it’s crickets when it comes to understanding the political engagement of midlife and older women. Even as “organized gangs of wine moms” dominated headlines in recent weeks, I’ve found vanishingly little interest in analyzing how that demographic energy might translate to electoral clout.

Photo by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

Back in 2024, after then-Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance went viral for agreeing with a derogatory remark about the priorities of “postmenopausal females” (fellow Contrarian Joyce Vance and I wrote about it at the time here), AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond noted that nobody has really focused on the 63 million women voters over the age of 50. Fast forward to November 2025, this demographic was key to gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as mayoral and judicial races across the country.

Three recent articles I’ve read, each summarized below, help crystalize why I believe midlife and older women’s fury — and therefore our collective power — may have solidified even more in the early weeks of 2026.

The first, by Abortion, Every Day creator Jessica Valenti, “They’re Coming For Our Daughters,” unpacks the Heritage Foundation report Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The same cast of characters who gave us Project 2025, go full-blown patriarchy this time — rewriting the playbook for how the next generation of girls and young women will live in America. Topics include: encouraging fewer women to attend college and instead marrying young and having babies right away; more restrictions on access to contraception; banning of IVF; penalization of single motherhood; curtailed or no options for divorce; and elimination of the legal right to same-sex marriage.

Yes, it is wild and sickening to see all this in black and white, and to grasp that Heritage’s ascent to power is such that it no longer is compelled to hide or sugar coat this vision. But what makes Valenti’s article so visceral and so searing goes beyond the excellent reporting. That she writes directly to and of her teen daughter just did me in. The intergenerational outrage is real and all-consuming, whether it comes from a mom, grandmother, auntie, or elder. We know the future of freedom itself is at stake.

The second piece, “we are living through the patriarchy’s last tantrum” by feminist writer Liz Plank, underscores how a slice of that future has been with us all along. Her articulation of the revelations that have come from the accumulation of Epstein files is also a heavy gut punch: “I think what’s landing so hard is realizing we weren’t exaggerating patriarchy’s harm at all, in fact we were underestimating it…. There’s a particular whiplash in being vindicated and horrified at the same time. You knew the system was rotten, but you didn’t know how much rot it could contain without collapsing.”

The whiplash brings me to the third essay, “From Invisible to Influential: Why “Wine Moms” Are Right-Wing Media’s Newest Target.” Heidi Lascanec deftly connects the dots to midlife women — those of us in or entering the stage defined by “having fewer f’s to give”— and why together we may be best-suited to elevate our ire to action. It’s not a new theory: a 1992 New York Times article, “Mighty Menopause,” posited that the then-rise of Baby Boomer women in politics was a direct result of hormonal shifts and that the “biological changes wrought by menopause” ultimately bolster women’s “interest in power and increase their ability to use it.

But what is new is all that’s transpiring in this country right now. If ever there were a moment to reclaim the menopausal mantel, it is now — as rights are rolled back, as communities are terrorized, as the power elite’s willful alignment with the rot becomes clearer by the day.

To be clear, I am neither a political pollster nor party operative. I am just someone who knows a whole lot about women in midlife. The writing is on the wall: These are voters who should be better understood and motivated to mobilize in 2026. Not because we desire the attention. (Lord knows we are used to being invisible! We like it that way. Trust us, it is a gift.). But because we may well be the ones best suited — in sagacity, in tenacity, in temperament — to help save democracy.

Remember as well that the SAVE America Act, the Republican-sponsored voter suppression bill that recently passed the House (an earlier version passed the House last year, too), is among the affronts; here at The Contrarian, we’ve published a deep dive about how it would, by design mind you, uniquely impact millions of women’s ability to register and cast a ballot. Given its likely return to the Senate, keep making noise to ensure it tanks there again.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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