What Women Voters Really Want

While the political world waits for a verdict in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, we wanted to take a moment to remember how we got here — especially the broader political context of the fall of 2016. Mr. Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels as part of a scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Back in 2016, Mr. Trump was down in the polls and worried about losing support from women voters, who would, the thinking went, punish him at the ballot box for the lewd “Access Hollywood” tape and anything Ms. Daniels might make public. That of course is not what happened. And in the years since, assumptions about how women vote have come to feel more complicated. To discuss this, we turn to two women who have spent many years thinking about what women want when it comes to politics and everything else. Kellyanne Conway was Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and senior counselor to him from 2017 to 2020. Celinda Lake was one of the lead pollsters for the Biden campaign in 2020. In 2005, they wrote a book together called “What Women Really Want,” which argued that politicians needed to take seriously the particular desires of women, who make up more than 50 percent of the electorate. So this week we ask: What’s changed since 2005? And do Ms. Conway and Ms. Lake still agree on what women really want?