In every election, political consultants love to come up with a new demographic group with some cute identifier that they signal will be THE swing group whose votes will determine the outcome, and the media promptly latches on it it. Sometimes these groups consist of women. Remember the ‘soccer moms’ phase?
Well, we have a new entry for this election cycle: the ‘weighted vest moms’, which consists of (I kid you not) women wearing weighted vests as they walk around or jog or otherwise exercise. This is apparently the latest fitness fad promoted by TikTok influencers and others such as Gwyneth Paltrow. (That last piece of information alone should give you pause.)
Christine Matthews — the pollster for former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s reelection campaign, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ two campaigns and the president of Bellwether Research — first saw women wearing weighted vests all over her upscale neighborhood in Alexandria.
Matthews’ wanted answers to two simple questions: How many women were wearing weighted vests? And what were their politics? So she commissioned a poll of 1,000 women across the U.S., the results of which she shared exclusively with POLITICO.
Matthews found that about one in six women wear this year’s hottest wellness accessory. But more importantly, the weighted vest women broke for President Donald Trump by three points in 2024.
Going into 2026, though, this group backs Republicans and Democrats equally at 47 percent in a generic congressional ballot. Among all women surveyed, 48 percent would vote for Democrats compared to 35 percent for Republicans.
There seems to be no convincing evidence that wearing these vest produces any significant benefits but that has never stopped TikTok influencers from promoting fads. The main thing seems to be to be the first to promote something that requires people to buy stuff.
What I find astonishing is the claim that one in six women wear these vests. While I find it plausible that upscale suburban women, the chief targets of influencers such as Paltrow, might be persuaded to shell out money for such things in order to feel that they are not missing out and are part of a new trend, can it really be 16% of all women who have bought them?
It seems like the media is more likely to seize on groups of suburban, more upscale women than any other group to focus on. After all, it enables them to run photographs and videos of fit-looking women in skimpy outfits, a sure-fire audience getter. As a result, it is the concerns of this group, rather than the concerns of other groups, that get attention and to whom politicians then tailor their message, driving important but less eye-catching concerns about jobs and medical, food, and housing costs into the background.
Let’s see if this becomes a dominant feature of this election cycle. I hope not.
I’m questioning the poll. The poll asked only 1,000 women, across the US? That’s a teeny-tiny sample size. And from where across the US? For example, if you go to Utah and ask 1000 women how many are Mormon, then extrapolate that 90% of the people in the USA are Mormon, that’s a bad poll that gives useless information.
As for Alexandria: it’s a city, and part of densely-packed Northern Virginia where it can take you 40 minutes to drive a mile. It’s also ridiculously wealthy, so who were the women wearing the weighted vests? Trophy wives with nothing better to do with their day?
i read the original article. it has this line: “One of Republicans’ most respected pollsters,” so i bet the poll is suspect, being respected by republicans…
also, the “commissioned a poll of 1,000 women” is a hyperlink that my work IT doesn’t allow access to. So I copied the link. it takes you to http://www.beautiful.ai, which suggests the “respected” pollster used AI to create a poll.
I think you can pretty much discard the results of this poll.
dang, the URL got formatted into a hyper link. i didn’t intend that!
Christine Matthews…the president of Bellwether Research…
Not the best choice of company name. A bellwether is a castrated sheep who ends up “leading” other castrated sheep, merely because he’s wearing a bell that the other sheep are trained to follow. So, on second thought, it’s a perfectly appropriate name for a polling and “research” firm trying to stay relevant to whoever’s in charge.
I’m with Katydid, though my grumble is more specific. A poll of 1000 people out of the US’s female eligible population will have a sampling error of about 3% (assuming that the sampling is unbiased), about the same size as the “effect” they’ve claimed to measure
Biases in the sampling, will, of course, make that even worse..
@Raging Bee
That’s not the origin of the term. A bellwether is indeed a castrated sheep wearing a bell, but its purpose is that it follows the flock and indicates to the shepherd where the flock is from the sound of its bell. Which seems an appropriate sort of name for an election polling organisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether#Etymology
I’m remarkably lucky in that I have my own biological weighted vest I carry with me everywhere. Clearly a sign I am splendidly fit.
Hyper-specific, and extrapolated from 1,000 to a nation of 340,000,000? Pass, what an absurdity.
___
#4 RB
It also means an indicator of a trend e.g. in public opinion. Words can be separated from their etymological origins you know; see: sinister and dexterity.
This was reminding me of something and I just realized what it is. Trying to measure the whole country by these tiny, meaningless little groups is a lot like Trump deciding to stop counting votes when he’s ahead. It’s just arbitrarily assigning importance to a small part of the whole and pretending that it somehow matters more than any other part, even larger parts. It’s all nonsense.
@9: B-b-b-but these dumbasses need something new to write about! Won’t somebody think of the quacking class?
TIL a new definition for a word. I have never used ‘bellwether’ as a sheep reference, and I grew up in an area that was rural (and had -some- sheep, but mostly cattle).
My time is my own and I go walking through my neighborhood at random times. I very rarely see anyone wear weighted vests. Perhaps this is an east coast thing. I know that firefighters can wear them as training for carrying inert bodies out of a fire and there are two fire stations within three blocks of me?