What Does Repeal the 19th Mean? Advocates, Legal Stakes, Odds

“Repeal the 19th” is shorthand for revoking the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 1920 amendment that bars federal and state governments from denying the vote on account of sex. The phrase went viral as a hashtag during the 2016 presidential campaign after data showed a large gender split in vote preference, and it has resurfaced periodically since, most recently in 2025 when senior government officials drew attention to religious figures who openly advocate ending women’s suffrage. No serious legislative effort to repeal the amendment exists, and the constitutional math makes one implausible, but the slogan has become a live flashpoint in debates over gender, voting patterns, and the influence of Christian nationalism on American politics.

What the Amendment Says

Ratified on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Ratification did not produce universal enfranchisement. African American women and other minority women continued to face poll taxes, literacy tests, and other discriminatory barriers for decades afterward.¹

Where the Phrase Came From

The hashtag #RepealThe19th began trending on Twitter in October 2016 after FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver published hypothetical electoral maps split by gender. If only men voted, the data suggested Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton 350–188 in the Electoral College. If only women voted, Clinton would win 458–80. The tag drew a mix of genuine advocates, opponents amplifying it for outrage, and users flooding it with historical context and mockery. Some Trump supporters argued the tag was being pushed mainly by his opponents rather than his backers.²

The Gender Gap That Fuels the Argument

The political logic behind repeal rhetoric rests on a documented gender gap. Women have voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1984, and a majority of women have preferred the Democratic candidate in every presidential race since 1996.³ Since the early 1980s, women have leaned Democratic while men have leaned Republican, with the gap ranging from four to twelve percentage points depending on the cycle.⁴

The pattern is not uniform. A majority of white women have voted Republican in most elections since 2000, while Black women support Democratic candidates at even higher rates than Black men. In 2020, women made up nearly 55% of the electorate.⁵ Those numbers help explain why some ideologues view removing women from the electorate as a path to permanent conservative governance.

Who Is Actually Calling for Repeal

The current advocates are a small but increasingly visible network of Christian nationalist pastors, commentators, and political figures. Experts who study the movement consistently describe the anti-suffrage position as fringe: according to the Public Religion Research Institute, only about 1 in 10 Americans qualified as Christian nationalism adherents as of 2024.⁶

Doug Wilson

Wilson is the senior pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He has publicly called the Nineteenth Amendment “a bad idea” and advocates a patriarchal system in which only male heads of households would cast ballots.⁷ He argues that modern individualism has damaged families and that the household, not the individual, should be the basic unit of political representation.⁸

Dale Partridge

Partridge, pastor of King’s Way Bible Church in Prescott, Arizona, has argued that women “lack the emotional capacity to vote” and that “nearly every legalized moral atrocity in the last 100 years was made possible by the female vote.” In a February 2026 social media post, he wrote, “If we can repeal Roe v. Wade, then I think we can overturn the 19th Amendment,” predicting repeal “within 10 years.”⁸ A New York Times profile summarized his broader position as “one household, one vote — the husband’s.”⁹

Joel Webbon

Webbon, president of Right Response Ministry, co-authored “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” with contributors including Oklahoma state senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. The document calls for the United States to formally acknowledge “the Lordship of Christ” in law, abolish abortion, and outlaw marriage equality. Webbon has stated publicly that women should not be allowed to vote and has spoken of a “takeover” of the Republican Party by 2032.¹⁰

Public Officials and Nominees

Several people who have held or been nominated for government positions have past statements questioning women’s suffrage. John Gibbs, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration, founded a group as a Stanford student in the early 2000s whose website argued that “the United States has suffered as a result of women’s suffrage” and praised a group that petitioned to repeal the amendment. When the writings surfaced during his 2022 congressional campaign, Gibbs called them “satire” and “trolling.”¹¹

Paul Ingrassia, nominated by President Trump to lead the Office of Special Counsel, described the idea that women should not vote as “very based” on a 2023 podcast. Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, featured at the 2020 Republican National Convention, has advocated for household-based voting.¹²

The Hegseth Episode

The issue drew its sharpest recent attention in August 2025, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a CNN segment featuring Doug Wilson on X, captioning it “All of Christ for All of Life,” a motto of Wilson’s denomination.¹³ In the video, Wilson and fellow pastor Toby Sumpter argued that families should vote as a household, with the husband casting the ballot; a second unnamed pastor in the segment expressed explicit support for repealing the amendment. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters that “of course the Secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote,” while adding that Hegseth “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”¹⁴ Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed that Hegseth is a “proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches,” the network Wilson co-founded.¹⁵

Sociologist Andrew Whitehead said the significance of the episode lay in Hegseth’s “broad position of power,” which gave mainstream visibility to views previously confined to the margins.¹³ Historian Kristin Du Mez said figures like Wilson had “signaled and gave permission to others that they didn’t need to hide” their anti-suffrage views.⁶

The Older Idea Underneath the Slogan

The “head-of-household” voting concept is not new. It descends from Christian Reconstructionism, a theological movement founded by Rousas John Rushdoony in the early 1970s. His 800-page treatise, Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), laid out a vision of society governed by Old Testament legal codes and organized around the male-led family as the basic social unit.¹⁶

The framework dovetails with the historical anti-suffrage argument that “the household, not the individual, is the unit of the State.” That was the claim made by opponents of women’s suffrage in the early 20th century, who argued that male household heads already represented the political interests of their wives and children through a concept they called “virtual representation.” Anti-suffragists warned that independent votes for women would introduce “discord” into the family and destabilize the social order.¹⁷ Modern proponents recycle those arguments almost verbatim, updated with references to feminism, immigration, and cultural decline.

Could It Actually Happen

Repealing a constitutional amendment requires passing another amendment through Article V. That means approval by two-thirds of both the House and Senate (or a convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures), followed by ratification from three-fourths of the states, currently 38 of 50.¹⁸

It has only happened once. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, completing the process in under a year because public opinion had decisively turned after years of organized crime and enforcement failures.¹⁹ The Nineteenth Amendment is in a fundamentally different position. There is no broad public support for its repeal, and assembling the supermajorities required to strip half the population of voting rights is, as a practical matter, not a realistic prospect.

What Would Happen Legally If It Were Repealed

Even in the hypothetical scenario of repeal, women’s right to vote would not necessarily vanish. Multiple legal layers sit beneath the amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, ratified in 1868, prohibits states from denying any person “equal protection of the laws.” Since the early 1970s, the Supreme Court has applied heightened scrutiny to laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. In Reed v. Reed (1971) and Craig v. Boren (1976), the Court held that gender-based classifications must be “substantially related” to “an important governmental objective.”²⁰ The Court has also recognized the right to vote as a “fundamental right” warranting strict scrutiny.²¹ A law barring women from voting would face immediate challenge under both doctrines.

That protection was not always available. Before the Nineteenth Amendment existed, the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett (1873) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee women the right to vote, holding that citizenship alone did not confer political rights.²² Equal Protection doctrine has evolved substantially since then, but whether the Fourteenth Amendment alone would sustain women’s suffrage in the absence of the Nineteenth has never been directly tested.

At the state level, 49 of 50 state constitutions recognize the right to vote in affirmative terms, and many include anti-discrimination provisions covering sex.²³ States such as Wyoming and Utah enshrined women’s suffrage in their constitutions before the federal amendment existed.²⁴ The federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 primarily addresses race and language-minority discrimination, not sex, so it would not serve as a direct backstop.²⁵

How Significant Is the Movement

Political scientist Joseph Slaughter has emphasized that what makes recent developments notable is not the number of adherents but the amplification these views receive when high-ranking officials publicly endorse the teachers who hold them.⁶ Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good called the ideas in Wilson’s viral video “very disturbing” but said they represent views held by “small fringes of Christians.”¹⁵

Analysts note that Christian nationalist adherents have increasingly sorted into the Republican Party over the past two decades, which concentrates their influence within one party’s primary electorate even though they remain a small share of the overall population. Historian Kelly Marino has described the current rhetoric as part of a broader conservative backlash against recent shifts in gender norms and social policy, a pattern with precedent in the original anti-suffrage campaigns.¹²

1
National Archives. 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
2
BBC News. RepealThe19th: What Does the Hashtag Mean
3
Center for American Women and Politics. Gender Gaps in Vote Choice and Party Identification
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Pew Research Center. Men and Women in the U.S. Continue to Differ in Voter Turnout Rate, Party Identification
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Brookings Institution. How Gender Gaps Could Tip the Presidential Race
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The 19th. Pete Hegseth Doug Wilson Women Voting
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Ms. Magazine. Pete Hegseth, Women’s Right to Vote, Pastor, Suffrage, 19th Amendment
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Baptist News Global. Yes, There Is a Movement to Take Away Women’s Right to Vote
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The New York Times. Household Vote Women
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People For the American Way. Joel Webbon
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Minnesota Reformer. Who’s Questioning Women’s Right to Vote
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The Guardian. Pete Hegseth Video Pastors Women Voting
16
Political Research Associates. Dominionism Rising
17
National Park Service. Anti-Suffragism in the United States
18
National Archives. Constitutional Amendment Process
19
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Constitutional Amendments: Amendment 21
20
Supreme Court Historical Society. Decisions on Women’s Rights and the Equal Protection Clause
21
UMKC School of Law. The Right to Vote
22
American Bar Association. Suffrage Timeline
23
State Court Report. Voting Rights Under State Constitutions, Explained
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National Park Service. Women’s Suffrage Timeline
25
U.S. Department of Justice. Statutes Enforced by the Voting Section