Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, organized a Zoom call for white women to raise money for the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. This came after a Zoom call of 44,000 black women raised $1.5 million for the campaign in just 3 hours last week.
Almost 200,000 women joined the call to support Harris, including several celebrities like the singer P!nk; the actor Connie Britton; the writer and podcaster Glennon Doyle; athletes Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird, and Abby Wambach; and a long list of elected officials, including Congresswomen Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas.
.In fact, there were so many women on the call that Zoom crashed several times, forcing some women to watch the meeting on YouTube. Zoom engineers were called to get involved and help the platform to manage that many participants. They had never experienced a call that exceeded 100,000 participants before.
Shannon thought of the idea for the call after seeing the success of fundraising during the call with black women and realized it was time for women like her to step up and do something. The goal: Push white women to recognize their privilege and the way they have frequently failed to use it as political capital — and get them to avoid making the same mistake again. Especially after it was white women who voted for Trump instead of Hilary in 2016, and some women still felt guilty for having helped usher in the first Trump presidency. It was during his first term that he added 3 Conservative Justices to the Supreme Court who were responsible for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
From ABC News affiliate, Channel 6 News:
According to polling, the white women voter demographic supported Republican nominee Donald Trump in the past two elections. White women supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a margin of 47% to 45%, Pew Research shows. In the 2020 election, an even higher number of white women, 53%, supported Trump.
Democrats believe Republican backing of abortion bans since the 2020 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade will motivate young women to the polls, attract independent women, and potentially attract some Republican women to the Democrats.
Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts posted on Instagram:
The call took place Thursday night and by Friday the group on the call had raised $8.3 million for the Harris campaign. I would call that a successful fundraising call!
