With 10 days to go, and 25 million votes already cast, the U.S. election is too close to call. Gender, with a near-25-point gap between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters, is the leading factor in this impasse. Trump’s large male base is as solid as ever. The Dems’ traditional male base, not so much. Harris still has educated LGBTQ men sewn up. But there has been a meaningful shift to Trump amongst young Black males.
Desperation to reclaim them is producing gaffes, not goals. In a scolding lecture, former president Barack Obama effectively accused Black men of misogyny, suggesting some “brothers” had warmed to Trump’s skill at “putting women down.” Harris proposed an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” which would offer Black small business owners forgivable business loans of $20K; it was criticized as likely unconstitutional and soon walked back. And a patronizing dating-game style ad managed to insult both Black men and stereotyped women: the frankly conveyed message was that a Black man’s sexual appeal is contingent on support for Harris.
Women lacking the financial or social support of male figures in their lives — disproportionately Black women — form a solid Democrat constituency, by 72-24 per cent. Political scientist David Samuels calls them “Brides of the State (BOTS).” By contrast, married American women support Republicans 50-45 per cent. Samuels writes, “Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.”
So Harris could do with some untraditional support from the straight, white, working-class male voters Trump appeals to. But familiarity with low-status men — Black or white — is not her strong suit. Her gender comfort zone is a milieu populated by highly educated progressive men, including her husband, Doug Emhoff, and running mate Tim Walz, who delight in showcasing exaggerated deference to Harris.
In a telling anecdote, Emhoff recounted Kamala’s displeasure following Biden’s abdication, when she couldn’t reach him (he was at a gym spin class, phone in the car). When apprised of her frustration, as he laughingly told a podcast host, “I just ran into the car, and there was my phone, literally, like — you could feel the steam …” “I call Kamala … and it was a one-minute or less conversation, which started with, ‘Where the f**k were you?’… And basically, ‘Get to work.’ And I did.”
Once posted on X, Emhoff’s revelation elicited a contemptuous response (that perfectly captured my own astonishment): “If I was a man you could not waterboard this story out of me.” A dissenter posted, “If she was a man, you’d love this story. Your misogyny is showing.” She is wrong. The same words uttered by a male presidential candidate to his wife, if made public, would have him pilloried as a toxic neanderthal. But then no canny political wife would dream of sharing them, especially not if the husband had a known history of workplace anger issues, an albatross Harris cannot shake, but is never challenged to defend.
An illustration of Harris’s abysmal ignorance about ordinary men emerged from a “real men” ad Harris approved that was meant to attract undecided male voters. It featured six actors, because no real man would ever verbalize its parodic nonsense, such as: “I’m a man. I’m a man. I’m a man, man …”; “I’m man enough to dead-lift 500 and braid the shit out of my daughter’s hair”; “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast”; and of course, “A woman wants to be president? Well, I hope she has the guts to look me right in the eye and accept my full-throated endorsement.”
This “cringiest ever” spectacularly unpersuasive ad rivals Bud Lite’s hilariously off-brand 2023 trans-centred ad for market betrayal. As Nellie Bowles of The Free Press noted of the former, “This isn’t an ad for someone who has ever met a straight man, let alone interacted with one.”
For those paying early attention to her as a future national leader, Harris’s disregard for ordinary men’s rights and concerns was on full display during the 2018 Judge Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. I recall one pivotal moment in particular of her interrogation. With women’s unfettered abortion rights in mind (when are they ever not?), and signalling pre-emptive triumph in what she presumed to be an unrebuttable question, Harris asked Kavanaugh, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Harris got lucky. Kavanaugh was flustered, and flubbed his answer. If he’d had his wits about him, Kavanaugh’s answer might have been, “Why yes, Senator Harris, I can. Every 18-year-old male U.S. citizen is required to register for the draft whether or not he has ever considered military service, and liable for call-up in an emergency. No American woman has that obligation. Indeed, compelled military service for men, with all its attendant risks to life and limb, has been the norm for all of human history.”
Sadly, the beleaguered judge missed his golden opportunity to backfoot Harris and reveal her as what I call a “casual misandrist.” Harris doesn’t hate low-status men. As her stupid ads and her question to Kavanaugh demonstrate, she simply doesn’t “see” them. And they know it.
National Post
X: @BarbaraRKay