The Harris campaign fumbles the play in trying to connect with male voters.
The Harris campaign fumbles the play in trying to connect with male voters.
K amala Harris’s campaign has struggled to appeal to men in this election, and, for some reason, the team seems to want you to know it.
The Harris campaign engineered a bizarre contrivance over the weekend in which the candidate was supposedly “caught” on a live microphone describing the campaign’s troubles with male voters — all while she bellied up to a Kalamazoo bar to wash down a pint alongside Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “Oh, we have microphones in here listening to everything we say,” Harris said with a laugh, after she somehow managed to lose sight of the photographers and videographers with whom she was clearly surrounded. “We just told all the family secrets,” she chuckled. “Sh**.” You see, real men don’t just drink locally brewed beer. They also swear.
The Harris campaign’s conception of how to appeal to men seems to involve putting the candidate or her surrogates in stereotypically masculine situations without altering the rhetorical overtures it reserves for the broader electorate. The result is the political equivalent of Mad Libs. Open on young men inexplicably spot-welding sheet-metal gaskets while discussing the importance of reproductive rights and expanding Medicare to cover seniors’ home-care services. As men are wont to do.
Harris isn’t alone in making a mockery of herself. The campaign has also deployed Tim Walz to perform its more scenery-chewing supplications to male voters.
In one of this election cycle’s more surreal moments, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee was dispatched on Sunday to play video games and shoot the political breeze with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The pair spent an afternoon in which most football fans were watching the NFL playing the latest contribution to the Madden NFL series, and they streamed their experience for the benefit of the masochists in their audience.
Walz and AOC made sure to pepper their condemnations of Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” with vaguely football-related terminology like “playbook,” but the game itself seems to have been a secondary consideration. Walz’s Minnesota Vikings played a scoreless first half against AOC’s Buffalo Bills before the two called it quits. “Ocasio-Cortez said she spent part of her last two days learning how to play Madden through tutorials,” the Washington Post observed.
Before the event ended, Walz and Ocasio-Cortez dove into the 1999 Sega classic Crazy Taxi, an excellent arcade-style racing game with an even better soundtrack. It’s far from clear how many nostalgic Millennial men were in the viewing audience, much less enthralled by the romantic reflection on this artifact of their youths. But Walz sounded confident in his appeals to the gaming community. “I see gamers, many times, are on the front end of this,” he said. “It’s a collaborative community and they’re competitive.”
These cloying efforts are designed to appeal to a caricature of a young American man — a cussing, beer-swilling layabout. If that is the Democratic Party’s conceptualization of the average male under 30, it’s no surprise that Democratic registration among that demographic has declined by seven points since 2020.
Writing in the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang cites the research of Harvard Kennedy School polling director John Della Volpe, who argues that Donald Trump has captured the young male vote by backing cryptocurrencies and securing the endorsement of various “alpha-male archetype” figures in the culture. “To combat these trends, Volpe writes, the Harris campaign should promote something that I’ve advocated for in the past: a national military and service program that would give young men a sense of purpose,” Kang observes.
What do military-aged young men want? Conscription, of course.
A recent NBC News report exploring the fears shared by male voters veered similarly off track. While young men “actually experienced solid economic gains” under Biden, the report reads, it is one of this election cycle’s more economically apprehensive constituencies. They “express concerns about making ends meet, and say they consider current immigration policies to be an obstacle to their upward mobility,” the report noted. “As these voters see it, Democratic policymakers have been more focused on supporting immigrants than them, despite years of evidence to the contrary,” according to one data analyst with whom NBC’s reporters spoke.
It’s hard to avoid the impression conveyed in the article’s subtext that today’s young men, who “are more prone to be lonely, single, and less well educated,” are possessed of a false consciousness. They just don’t know or don’t care to acknowledge how good they actually have it. If that is the conclusion to which the Harris campaign is partial, we can see why its overtures to young men portray them as one-dimensional cartoon characters.
Democrats and their allies don’t seem to have the first notion about resolving this conundrum, partly because they seem to resent the voters who have turned on them and don’t care to understand their concerns. Former first lady Michelle Obama all but admitted as much over the weekened. “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage,” she said in a general admonishment of American men. “Your rage does not exist in a vacuum.”
The Harris campaign and the Democratic Party do not believe the pocketbook concerns that are animating young men in this cycle are legitimate. They are, as NBC’s expert claimed, a product of “disinformation and misinformation” of the sort promulgated on platforms like the one Walz and Ocasio-Cortez invaded over the weekend.
There is a comedic metaphor in the fact that their gaming session lasted all of 30 minutes before the pair scrambled out of those unfamiliar environs. Their hearts just weren’t in it. Young men can’t help but notice.