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MAGA Is Exploiting the Lindsay Clancy Case to Try to End Voting for Women

As Trump subverts elections, his most ardent fans want to overturn the 19th Amendment.

Lindsay Clancy looks on as jurors enter the courtroom during Clancy’s murder trial at the Plymouth County Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on September 4, 2026.

Republican politicians might think they have enough problems on the cusp of the midterms, with their electoral prospects already threatened by the Iran War, rising inflation, a trade war with Canada, and a GOP president pigheadedly committed to every single one of these unpopular policies. But some of the most strident voices in MAGA have decided to give party leaders a new headache: trying to repeal the 19th Amendment and end the right of women to vote.

On Sunday, Fox News reported, “Calls to repeal women’s rights to vote are emerging from the online firestorm over the Lindsay Clancy trial, prompting Republican women to warn that the intraparty rhetoric could hurt the GOP.”

The fact that this article was published by Fox News was itself noteworthy. Press Baron Rupert Murdoch is one of the few remaining centers of power on the right who is strong enough to pick fights with Trump and his MAGA supporters. In recent years, Murdoch’s outlets have carved out a position for themselves as gatekeepers who work to protect the GOP brand from the most self-destructive impulses of MAGA. One recent example of this phenomenon is the decision to fire (or at least take off the air) the firebrand election denier Maria Bartiromo.

The Fox article was also significant for highlighting how the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy is being exploited by the hard right to justify misogyny. Clancy killed three of her children in 2023. Her legal defense was that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Eleven jurors voted to acquit Clancy based on this argument, but one juror resisted, leading to a mistrial.

Nine of the jurors who voted to acquit—presumably because they thought Clancy deserved pity rather than harsh punishment—were women; the lone holdout was a man. The hard right has seized on these facts to justify arguments that women are incapable of reason. The Fox article quoted a post on X that made a common argument: “The female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial are speaking out about their deliberations and disagreements with the sole male holdout. The more they speak the better they make the case for repealing the 19th Amendment.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal (another Murdoch property), Louise Perry notes that on the right, “both the crimes and the public response to the crimes are taken as evidence that feminism was a mistake. If the [O.J.] Simpson case was a trial of American race relations, the Clancy case is a trial of the American gender wars.”

As with Fox News, Perry is wary of the wild leap the hard right has made from criticizing the advocates of mercy for Clancy to calling for a repeal of the 19th Amendment. She treats it as rooted in........

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