Politics
Inside the minds of older, left-wing women driving new voting bloc of ‘Resistance Grandmas’ opposing Trump
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FIRST ON FOX: A Trump-aligned political consulting firm set out to investigate the ideological swing of affluent, college-educated white women who were once considered moderate, but have since moved farther to the left, uncovering what researchers describe as a new voting bloc of left-wing women: “Resistance Grandmas.”
“We are so knowledgeable about everything,” one woman said in a Northern Virginia focus group video reviewed by Fox News Digital, referring to herself and the other women who joined the session while slamming President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” “When [Trump voters] start being personally impacted, that’s when I’m hopeful that a little bit of something is gonna change.”
“It’s gonna be a catastrophe,” another woman chimed in, as another middle-aged woman added, “However, they will find a way to blame Democrats.”
Fox News Digital exclusively obtained a report conducted by the National Public Affairs (NPA), the polling arm of Trump campaign-aligned American Made Media Company, in September, as well as the full two-hour focus group session in northern Virginia that showcased the beliefs of 10 white, liberal, middle-aged, college-educated, upper–middle-class suburban women.
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A 2024 billboard in Hastings, Minnesota, informing voters to “trust women and vote Democratic.” ((Photo by: Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images))
The women who participated in the focus group were not informed it was conducted by a Trump-aligned polling firm, only told that they were brought in to discuss political topics for a focus group commissioned by another research firm. The researcher leading the focus group told the women at the start of the meeting that she had “no stake” in their comments “one way or the other,” and that the women “could say whatever comes to mind.”
“Pretty much anything is fair game,” the focus group leader told the women.
Fox News Digital is not publishing footage of the video or names of the women, but reviewed extensive footage of the session for the purposes of this article.
Justifying ‘ugly’ racist Virginia sign, using N-word analogy
The focus group was conducted to study how affluent middle-aged and older white women have increasingly shifted to the political left in recent years, and was sparked by a racist sign displayed outside a Northern Virginia school board meeting in August targeting Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears.
“In the year since President Trump’s historic victory, commentators have obsessed over what they call the radicalization of young white men. But a quieter, just as revealing transformation has swept another group once known for moderation and civility: older, affluent white women. This change came into sharp focus last August in Arlington, Virginia,” NPA’s report outlines.
The Virginia gubernatorial cycle is at a fever pitch, with the election just over two weeks away pitting ex-CIA agent and former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger against Republican Earle-Sears. In August, a white woman was spotted holding a Jim Crow-era-reminiscent sign targeting Earle-Sears, who is Black, when the candidate attended a school board meeting.
“Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain,” the sign read, igniting outrage from conservatives and others who called it racist.
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Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears was the subject of a sign condemned by Virginia leaders as offensive and inappropriate. (Winsome Earle-Sears Campaign)
The women in the focus group overwhelmingly characterized the sign as written in poor taste, describing its words as “ugly,” but also justified it by arguing Republicans have “already taken it too far with their trans bans.” Another woman used the N-word while comparing the sign to those of the segregated Jim Crow era of the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries in the American South.
“What’s the best analogy for a trans person not being able to use a particular bathroom in our recent modern history?” one participant asked the group.
Another woman chimed in: “You used to have hotels that said ‘No n—-rs, no Jews, no dogs at these hotels. Is that… I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”
“Like, I don’t think I would feel uncomfortable, and I definitely wouldn’t hold up that sign,” the first woman said in response. “But this person, I think, was just trying to find an appropriate analogy.”
Recent voting history of white women
The NPA report explained that polling data since the 2012 election, which pitted former Democrat President Barack Obama against Republican Mitt Romney, showed “voting patterns among white voters and women haven’t moved much in a decade.”
The shift to the left, the report argued, is not due to gender or race, but rather income and education.
“In 2012, college graduates leaned Republican, 51-47, while postgraduates favored Democrats 55-42. By 2024, that pattern had flipped and widened: Harris won college grads 53-45 and postgrads 59-38. Non-college voters went the other way. High-school grads and those with some college, once evenly split, gave Trump a 56-43 lead,” the report found.
“Income followed suit. Voters earning under $50,000, once a 60-38 Obama bloc, shifted to a 50-48 Trump edge. Those earning over $100,000 flipped from a 54-44 Romney majority to a 51-47 Harris win,” it continued.
The report took issue with the media asking and diving into explanations on “what ‘broke’ young white men” to move farther to the right and help re-elect Trump in 2024, but argued the question should instead be: “What radicalized rich white women, and whether they even realize it.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris is seen as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on July 31, 2025. (Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images)
‘Luxury’ of studying the news
The women in the focus group overwhelmingly presented themselves as arbiters of knowledge, reporting that they have the “luxury” of reading news articles from different outlets, while other voters are more concerned about costs of living and putting food on the table.
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One woman in the group recounted that her cousin living in a Heartland state was a lifelong Democrat who announced ahead of the 2024 election that he was leaning towards voting for Trump, which the woman said made her nearly fall “off my chair.”
The cousin, a male farmer, reported to her that the Biden administration had not helped U.S. farmers.
“He doesn’t know. He’s not paying attention to China’s not buying wheat or soybeans,” the female voter said. “He’s just concerned about his daily life and making enough money to support his family. And so I don’t think they’re paying attention.”
“I think a lot of times people are just very focused on … how it impacts them on that day and not reading The Washington Post or The New York Times or other things that we all have access to and, you know, have the luxury of doing,” she added.
Scene from the Jan. 6 2021 Capitol riot. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
Turning in a friend who breached U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6
Another woman reported to the group that she turned in her longtime friend after she found out she breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI launched a tip line shortly after Jan. 6, 2021, where people could report those who were “instigating violence in Washington, D.C.”
“She said, ‘We were just walking around,’” the woman in the focus group recounted of the conversation with her friend about Jan. 6. “And I know she slipped. I know she didn’t mean to tell me she was in the Capitol.”
“And I said, ‘It wasn’t a f—ing open house. You weren’t, you weren’t buying the Capitol,’” she continued, as other women in the group remarked, “Wow” and “Good for you.”
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The woman said she has not spoken to her former friend since, and submitted a tip to authorities that she was in the Capitol the day of the protests.
“And then I had that whole inner turmoil of, ‘do I go on that website and say I think that she would’ …. I went back and forth on that for probably two weeks and asked some people. And finally, I just went on and said ‘she was there, and I don’t know what role she had, what it was,’” she said. “‘She was in that building by her own admission.’”
A new report published by a Trump-aligned pollster examined how educated, wealthy white women have move more to the left. (Getty Images)
A more cohesive future
“As the session ended, they voiced a small hope that the country might still find a way back to calm and common purpose. Whether that hope can survive a culture built on outrage is uncertain. But their conversation left one clear lesson. Beneath polls and party lines, the real contest for the nation’s future is over how Americans think, speak, and live with one another,” the report concluded.
The women in the group called on the Democrat Party to find cohesion and to disseminate their message to party leaders across the country in order to win upcoming elections.
“Democrats need to stop primarying for the lesser Republican. So what’s happening is … Democrats are voting between two Republican primary candidates, and they’re voting for the idiot, crazy, right-wing guy so that they don’t have to compete against this actual intelligent person. And that’s where we’re getting these nutcases,” one woman said.
Another woman said the DNC should combat everything Trump says, including when the president pinned blame on radical liberal violence for the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September.
“I think it comes from the DNC. I think they need to organize. I think they need a cohesive message. I think they need to be vocal every time Trump says something, even about Charlie Kirk. Yes. No one should be killed for what they believe in. A hundred percent. But they are turning him into a martyr,” one woman said.
Politics
Playing catchup to Republicans, Democrats launch ‘largest-ever’ partisan national voter registration campaign
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Acknowledging that “we’ve been getting our butts kicked for years now by the Republicans on voter registration,” Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin on Tuesday announced the DNC will spend millions of dollars to get “back in the game.”
Martin said that the newly created “When We Count” initiative, which he described as the party’s “largest ever voter registration effort … will train hundreds of fellows throughout the country to register tens of thousands of new voters in communities across the country.”
The announcement by the DNC, in what Martin called an “all hands on deck moment,” comes in the wake of massive voter registration gains by Republicans in recent years and ahead of November’s midterms, when Democrats aim to win back majorities in the House and Senate and a whopping 36 states hold elections for governor.
“For too long, Democrats have ceded ground to Republicans on registering voters,” Martin pointed out. “Between 2020 and ’24 alone, our party lost a combined 2.1 million registered voters. Meanwhile, Republicans gained 2.4 million voters.”
GOP OVERTAKES DEMOCRATS ON VOTER ROLLS IN KEY SWING STATE AFTER YEARS OF DEM DOMINANCE
Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin addresses party members at the DNC’s summer meeting, on Aug. 25, 2025, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
The latest example is North Carolina, where new State Board of Elections data indicated that Republicans officially surpassed Democrats in voter registration for the first time in the crucial southeastern battleground state’s history.
Martin said a key reason for the Democrats’ deficit is that “Republicans have invested heavily in targeted partisan registration” to mobilize and grow their base of voters.
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But he lamented that “on the left” voter registration for decades has largely been led by nonpartisan advocacy organizations and civic “which limits their ability to engage in partisan conversations about registering as a Democrat.”
Martin said the new effort “is going to require everyone,” including the national, state and local parties, as well as outside groups and political campaigns, “participating in this critical work.”
Pointing to the sweeping ballot box successes by President Donald Trump and the GOP in the 2024 elections, when Republicans won back the White House and Senate and held onto their House majority, Martin said “we can’t just assume that certain demographics, whether they be young voters, voters of color or otherwise, will automatically support the Democratic Party. We have to earn every registration so that we can earn every vote.”
The DNC’s seven-figure initiative, which Martin said would kick off in the western battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, “puts our national party and local parties back in the game. When we count, we’ll begin to chip away at the Republican advantage as we prepare to organize everywhere and win everywhere in 2026.”
The Democratic National Committee announced on Tuesday it will spend millions to shift its voter registration strategy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
The DNC, as it ramps up to this year’s midterm elections, also faces a formidable fundraising deficit compared to the rival Republican National Committee (RNC).
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RNC Communications Director Zach Parkinson, pointing to the DNC’s campaign cash problems, charged in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Ken Martin has driven the DNC into debt, overseen anemic fundraising.”
“We at the RNC think he’s the perfect person to oversee Democrats voter registration efforts,” Parkinson added, in a shot at the DNC chair.
Politics
House Democrats challenge new Homeland Security order limiting lawmaker visits to immigration facilities
WASHINGTON — Twelve House Democrats who last year sued the Trump administration over a policy limiting congressional oversight of immigrant detention facilities returned to federal court Monday to challenge a second, new policy imposing further limits on such unannounced visits.
In December, those members of Congress won their lawsuit challenging a Department of Homeland Security policy from June that required a week’s notice from lawmakers before an oversight visit. Now they’re accusing Homeland Security of having “secretly reimposed” the requirement last week.
In a Jan. 8 memorandum, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote that “Facility visit requests must be made a minimum of seven (7) calendar days in advance. Any requests to shorten that time must be approved by me.”
The lawmakers who challenged the policies are led by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) and include five members from California: Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana), Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles), Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) and Norma Torres (D-Pomona).
Last summer, as immigration raids spread through Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California, many Democrats including those named in the lawsuit were denied entry to local detention facilities. Before then, unannounced inspections had been a common, long-standing practice under congressional oversight powers.
“The duplicate notice policy is a transparent attempt by DHS to again subvert Congress’s will…and this Court’s stay of DHS’s oversight visit policy,” the plaintiffs wrote in a federal court motion Monday requesting an emergency hearing.
On Saturday, three days after Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, three members of Congress from Minnesota attempted to conduct an oversight visit of an ICE facility near Minneapolis. They were denied access.
Afterward, lawyers for Homeland Security notified the lawmakers and the court of the new policy, according to the court filing.
In a joint statement, the plaintiffs wrote that “rather than complying with the law, the Department of Homeland Security is attempting to get around this order by re-imposing the same unlawful policy.”
“This is unacceptable,” they said. “Oversight is a core responsibility of Members of Congress, and a constitutional duty we do not take lightly. It is not something the executive branch can turn on or off at will.”
Congress has stipulated in yearly appropriations packages since 2020 that funds may not be used to prevent a member of Congress “from entering, for the purpose of conducting oversight, any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.”
That language formed the basis of the decision last month by U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, who found that lawmakers cannot be denied entry for visits “unless and until” the government could show that no appropriations money was being used to operate detention facilities.
In her policy memorandum, Noem wrote that funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which supplied roughly $170 billion toward immigration and border enforcement, are not subject to the limitations of the yearly appropriations law.
“ICE must ensure that this policy is implemented and enforced exclusively with money appropriated by OBBBA,” Noem said.
Noem said the new policy is justified because unannounced visits pull ICE officers away from their normal duties. “Moreover, there is an increasing trend of replacing legitimate oversight activities with circus-like publicity stunts, all of which creates a chaotic environment with heightened emotions,” she wrote.
The lawmakers, in the court filing, argued it’s clear that the new policy violates the law.
“It is practically impossible that the development, promulgation, communication, and implementation of this policy has been, and will be, accomplished — as required — without using a single dollar of annually appropriated funds,” they wrote.
Politics
Video: Minnesota and Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Deployments
new video loaded: Minnesota and Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Deployments
transcript
transcript
Minnesota and Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Deployments
Minnesota and Illinois filed federal lawsuits against the Trump administration, claiming that the deployment of immigration agents to the Minneapolis and Chicago areas violated states’ rights.
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This is, in essence, a federal invasion of the Twin Cities and Minnesota, and it must stop. We ask the courts to end the D.H.S. unlawful behavior in our state. The intimidation, the threats, the violence. We ask the courts to end the tactics on our places of worship, our schools, our courts, our marketplaces, our hospitals and even funeral homes.
By Jackeline Luna
January 12, 2026
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