She is 39, a high school English teacher with a PhD and part of a voting demographic whose rebellion could upend the political map of the country: not just suburban women, not just white suburban women, but white suburban women in the South, whose loyalty Trump will need to remain in power.
It is the kind of loyalty that has always been expected of white Southern women, who have long played a role as allies of the status quo. This was true during the days of slavery, then the days of segregation, and held true when the women's rights movement arrived and white Southern women joined the conservative movement instead, rallying to the slogan, "Stop Taking Our Privileges." In all the decades that followed, it has been the votes of white Southern women that have defined and shored up the modern Republican Party.
Black women and Latino women consistently deliver huge margins to Democrats. And in the 2016 election, 52 percent of white women outside of the South voted for Hillary Clinton, according to a study by the University of Arkansas' Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society.
It is white women in the Deep South who have remained the loyalists, the research showed, giving Trump 64 percent of their vote in 2016, a figure that did not include Miranda Murphey, who had first started reevaluating her politics after the election of Barack Obama, even though she had voted Republican.
"It was all the comments I kept hearing, like, 'Change the channel, I don't want to see that black face,' " she said. "It was always that he was black, not that he was liberal, not that there was a problem with some policy. I always thought being a Republican meant supporting the military and lower taxes, not being racist and ignorant."
Then came Trump, who Miranda found so morally repugnant that for the first time in her voting life she wrote in the name of the Libertarian Party candidate and went to bed expecting that good and decent conservatives would do the same. She woke up realizing she was wrong. Church members had voted for Trump. Her parents had gone for Trump. Phillip: Trump.
And then came Liz, a new English teacher in her district who was outspoken and had a sticker on her cellphone with an image of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the word "Dissent." She was not like anyone Miranda had met before, a Republican who'd become a Democrat and who described her Trump-era self as a "full-on rage machine."
----------------------------------------
Miranda was not sure how to describe herself anymore, other than at odds with a world she thought she knew, in an America that felt more fragile than ever, and now, a mile into the woods with Liz, that is what she began talking about.
"You don't find too many marriages around here where the husband is one way politically and the wife is another," Miranda said.
"Living outside expectations is like running a marathon — it's like being exhausted all the time because you have to work so hard," Liz said.
They trudged through damp leaves, and Miranda brought up a recent dinner with a relative who'd said that Trump should just "drop a bomb on the entire Middle East" and how hard it was for her to remain polite.
"It's those kinds of conversations. I'm looking around thinking, 'Am I the only one who thinks this is not okay?' " Miranda said.
"You just want to scream!" Liz said. She brought up a confrontation she'd had at school, over a white speaker who she felt was unfairly criticizing black activists. "I was like, 'Oh hell no.' But it's painful not to fit in. There's one woman I know at school, it's clear she questions things, but she is still in captivity."
Miranda listened. She was by now used to how Liz talked. Women in bondage, the white male establishment. Liz, the daughter of a minister, now described the evangelical church as a "fear-based cult permanently intertwined with a patriarchal power system."
Miranda was surprised by how often she found herself seeing what Liz meant. She had come around to Liz's view that being pro-choice did not mean being pro-abortion, for instance. She had stopped attending church partly because her Sunday school had turned into one long baby shower and she did not have children, and partly because of the day a teacher had gone on a rant about the growing Muslim population.
"The message to me was, 'They're here to out-populate us,' " Miranda said now. "I took it as: 'Wow, I guess I'm not doing my job having white children to add to the fight.' "
"It's like this way of life is threatened," said Liz. "This white way of life."
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
She was grading papers; he was working outside, and it was the kind of quiet and predictable day that gave Phillip the feeling of contentment he prized.
"It's just — easy," was how he described his relationship with Miranda.
They'd been through so much together — her graduate school, his new business, the deaths of his parents, serious illnesses, a thousand good times — and of all the things he was sure of in his life, he was surest of Miranda.
"I know I didn't marry a traditional woman," he said. "She's not Southern Living. She's very career-oriented. She's not lazy. She's a worker. She's a go-getter. I tell her all the time, 'Miranda, you are determined.' "
He accepted her, and he knew she accepted him, as he had always been accepted as the favorite son of parents he admired and never wished to disappoint. He had been a Boy Scout. He had never had a curfew because he never got in trouble. He had never lived anywhere but Columbia County, Ga., except for college and a brief stint after, which left him so out of sorts that he moved back into his boyhood room and saved money until he and Miranda married. He had never touched alcohol because he didn't want to like it. He had become a man who said of Miranda, "She's the only girl I ever kissed."
"I didn't know I had any feelings until I met Miranda," Phillip said.
----------------------------------------
Things Miranda had never told Phillip:
That she thought Trump was racist, and when he questioned the legitimacy of the first black president, she thought about her black students and how wrong it was to rob them of pride.
That she thought Trump was cruel, and when he mocked a reporter with disabilities, she felt the same surge of blind rage she had once felt when a boy called her sister a "retard."
She thought Trump was immoral, and when she heard Christians defending him, she wanted to say, "How? How do we worship the same God? There are so many things that we as human beings should not condone, should not excuse."
She had told Phillip about being sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, but she had not told him that when she heard Trump boasting about how he could kiss women "without even asking" and "grab them by the p---y," he had reminded her of the man who had grabbed her when she was walking to school, and the feeling of hands forcing themselves on her, and the feeling of struggling to break free, and the feeling of running for her life, and of "exactly that fear, that helplessness," and that when Trump got elected, she felt none of that mattering.
She had not told Phillip that when she saw Trump smiling on a screen in her living room, she felt physically ill. That she found him "revolting" and "vulgar." That Trump was the opposite of everything she had always believed her husband to be: decent, honorable, Christian, the sort of man who would find Trump offensive.
She had not told Phillip what she wanted from him: "I want to hear him say, 'The way he talks about women is not okay. The way he talks, period, is not okay.' "
More in the link.
