Getting out the "Eat, Pray, Love" Vote
Julia Roberts Tries to Mobilize White Women
Film star Julia Roberts is using her celebrity power to get out the vote for the Democrats in her home state of Georgia. One of her most iconic roles is as the lead in “Eat, Pray, Love,” the 2010 film based on the 2006 memoir by Elisabeth Gilbert, about a her globetrotting quest for meaning following a divorce. It’s a smart move for the Democrats trying to mobilize the key demographic of white women, but it remains to be seen if it will be effective.
The fact is, a majority of white women have voted for the Republican party going back decades.
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As Laura Bassett notes in a recent piece for Marie Claire magazine, white women are the largest voting bloc in the country and have favored Trump in the past two elections, over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (47 percent to 45 percent) and notably more strongly over Joe Biden (55 percent to 43 percent) in 2020. In this election cycle, in all polls, it’s Black women who lead in their support for Harris/Walz. When it comes to white women, the results go both ways. According to a 19th News poll, white women back Harris over Trump by six points. But in a different poll, this one conducted by PBS News/NPR/Marist, Trump holds a 13-point lead among non-college educated white women, with 55 percent of the vote to Vice President Kamala Harris' 42 percent.
What these polls (and lots of others) suggest is that there’s a college-education divide among white women, one that doesn’t exist among Black women. Perhaps there’s something about getting a college education that loosens one’s grip on their affective attachment to whiteness? Just spit ballin’ here. More seriously, I think the college-education divide is probably a proxy measure for is white Evangelicalism. The Democrats need this segment of voters because they refuse to move left, choosing instead ignore the concerns of Muslim, Arab and Palestinian-American voters at the same time they are trying to engineer enthusiasm for endorsements from Republicans and war criminals.
That’s why I say that the Democrats deploying Julia Roberts is smart because it’s about getting out the “Eat, Pray, Love” vote, that is, college-educated white women who are not evangelicals and who don’t care about the live-streamed genocide happening in Palestine. Mobilizing this demographic relies on the forgetting Palestine while focusing on inner healing, in much the same way that “Eat, Pray, Love,” focused on its protagonists inner healing while ignoring the geopolitics of both the empire she was traveling from and the places she visited.
This is very narrow demographic that the Harris/Walz campaign wants: white women who are concerned about their own loss of bodily autonomy but can’t manage to widen that ethic to include anyone outside the U.S. In other words, they are appealing to nice white ladies who are content to vote in favor of their own comfort while ignoring the suffering of others.