Social Storytellers Collective | Culture in Motion Source: NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, hosted by Brittany Luse, featuring Errin Haines, editor-at-large of The 19th and NABJ president. Based on Sam Adler-Bell’s New York Magazine Intelligencer piece “The Young Women Leaving the New Right.”
Ashley St. Clair built her audience inside Turning Point USA. She was a brand ambassador, a public face, a woman who showed up for the movement and helped give it credibility with a demographic it needed. She had a child with Elon Musk. She is now fighting him for custody and advocating publicly for women facing online abuse. She did not leave the New Right because the politics changed. She left because she looked around when the misogyny got loud and realized nobody — not one man, not one leader, not one institution she had helped build — was going to stand up for her.
That is the story underneath the trend. Not a political realignment. A broken contract.
Sam Adler-Bell’s piece for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer — and NPR’s Brittany Luse and The 19th’s Errin Haines unpacking it on It’s Been a Minute — name the mechanism clearly. The women who entered MAGA and New Right spaces believed they were signing a reciprocal agreement: domestic labor, loyalty, and public support in exchange for protection, value, and a seat at the table. What the agreement actually said, in the fine print nobody read out loud until recently, was that their output was required and their standing was conditional. When Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes and the room filled with racism and antisemitism and the women in those spaces raised concerns about the sexism — nobody responded. “Sexism was a small price to pay for the price of entry,” Haines said. Until it wasn’t.
The mask-off moment is real. What’s also real is that this pattern is not new — and Black women have been watching it repeat for over a century. When white women finally got across the finish line on suffrage in 1920, Black women were left on the other side. Indigenous women weren’t recognized as citizens. Latina and Asian women faced barriers the amendment didn’t address. The 19th Amendment was named for the women it actually served. The lesson — that proximity to power gets shared selectively — has been delivered in every generation since. The women leaving the New Right in 2026 are, in Haines’ framing, the latest iteration of a pattern Black women have been naming out loud for a very long time. The difference is the platform. The structure is the same.
The departure is real. The destination is not. Leaving a movement is not the same as crossing an aisle. The women Adler-Bell spoke to are not packing their bags and registering Democratic. They are disillusioned, not converted. Some of them may vote the same way they always have, for candidates still fully embedded in the world they just said they were leaving. Haines is direct about this: “Maybe you don’t like this particular strain, but then you may still be voting for candidates that are still very much a part of that world.”
The political math for 2026 does not automatically improve because some women are publicly stepping back from the most extreme elements of the New Right. What would change the math is sustained, authentic engagement — not a last-minute outreach effort in October, not a mailer, not a moment. The women leaving are not looking for a policy platform. They are looking for a room where they are valued as part of the infrastructure. The Democratic Party has not historically been great at offering that either. The question the midterms will actually answer is not whether these women are leaving. It’s whether anyone is building something real enough to catch them.
The movement turned on them when they stopped being useful. That’s not a reason to trust the next room just because it has a different door.