The party is in a full-blown panic over Harris’s polling with the demographic group.
During the Democratic National Convention in August, a couple dozen attendees shuffled into a conference room inside a Hyatt Regency for a seminar on “Unseen Black Men” and “How to Reach Them.”
Morale in the room was low. Even during Democrats’ post-Biden-dropout honeymoon, black Democratic activists and convention attendees were still worried about young black men staying home on Election Day rather than pulling the lever for Kamala Harris.
“You’re not going to get a secret sauce in this room from me today on black men,” said the seminar leader Mondale Robinson, the mayor of Enfield, N.C. For Robinson, the solution is simple. “Even if I told you the No. 1 issue or the No. 2 or 3 issue for black men who don’t vote regularly, it’s not going to be enough,” Robinson said. “If you don’t have a relationship with them, they’re not going to see you.” Finding trusted messengers, he said, is key to turning them out to the polls.
Two months later and the Democratic ticket appears to be in full-blown panic mode over Harris’s polling performance among black men — and men in general. The trend comes after President Joe Biden, whom South Carolina’s black voters helped vault to the nomination back in the 2020 Democratic primaries, was similarly bleeding support among black male voters earlier this year in surveys.
Harris’s overtures to black men in recent days include campaign pledges to provide 1 million forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for “black entrepreneurs and others”; legalize marijuana at the federal level; federally ban price-gouging of “food and groceries”; launch a “National Health Equity Initiative” focused on illnesses, such as diabetes and sickle-cell disease, that disproportionately affect black men; lower rent; and give $25,000 in tax credits to first-time black homeowners. She dubbed the effort her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.”
The GOP ticket views that agenda as evidence that the vice president is scrambling to win over what should be a historically Democratic voting bloc.
“Kamala is spending the last 20 days of her campaign pleading with the Democrat Party’s historic base for support,” one Trump campaign adviser said in a text message to NR. “Her campaign is coming apart at the seams.”
And it’s not just black men: There is a stark gender gap emerging in this race that cuts across racial, educational, and financial divides. Trump is up ten percentage points with men and Harris is up thirteen points with women, according to an August Wall Street Journal poll. The issue cuts both ways, of course, with Trump struggling to appeal to some women over abortion, among other issues.
Concerns about the Harris campaign’s outreach to black male voters in particular have become so heightened that former President Barack Obama charged the entire voting bloc with sexism.
“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kind of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama told a group of black men in Pittsburgh last Thursday, adding that this trend “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he added.
Chastising a voting bloc for not pulling the lever for a female candidate can carry risks, even when the messenger is someone as popular as Obama, says Joe Paul, the executive director of Black Men Vote. The biggest problem for Harris isn’t so much black men turning out to vote for Trump, he says, but rather not turning out at all.
“You need to give black men a reason why they should vote. It’s not enough to just say, ‘Vote, don’t vote. Why aren’t you voting?’” Paul said in an interview with NR. “You have to give black men and every voting bloc a reason to vote.”
When Harris appeared on the popular New York City morning radio show The Breakfast Club earlier this week, a caller confronted her with a similar sentiment, asking the nominee why Democrats were “waving their finger at black men.” Harris dodged the question but clearly took the caller’s point, saying that she and her surrogates are simply “reminding people what is at stake, and that is very important.”
The moderator of the Democratic convention’s “Unseen Black Men” voter panel had a different view. “There’s nothing Harris can do that’s going to turn out black voters. She can invest in trusted messengers to do that work,” Robinson said back in August. Her struggle turning out low-propensity black voters “is not a flaw of hers,” he said. “It is the system she finds herself operating in — the American political system that has failed black men for 154 years,” and “she cannot change that in an election cycle.”
So black male voter turnout, he said, won’t come down to her message or ad investments, he said. “What she can do is take some of that $500 million she’s raised and send it to trusted organizations to reach those people and turn them out.”
This cycle, the GOP ticket is making a concerted effort to turn out low-propensity voters to the polls. And Trump’s campaign outreach to young men in particular includes casual interviews with the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, Andrew Shulz’s Flagrant podcast, and comedian Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast. This comes after a GOP convention complete with a host of masculine entertainment types, including former wrestling celebrity Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.
A cohort of GOP super PACs and nonprofit advocacy groups are making similar efforts to juice turnout for Trump among male voters. The GOP nominee’s campaign has spent millions airing an ad during NFL and college football games that highlights Harris’s prior support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. After clipping some of Harris’s comments during a 2019 interview expressing support for the idea, the narrator says: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Two other GOP super PACs — Duty to America and Future Coalition PAC — are blanketing swing states with digital ads that tear down Harris’s image on the economy and other issues in an effort to swing men toward Trump. The nonprofit advocacy group Building America’s Future has poured millions into both PACs’ efforts, a source familiar with the matter confirms to NR.
Meanwhile, the unconventional Harris-Walz affinity group for white male supporters, “White Dudes for Harris,” spent $10 million last month on swing-state ads urging its target demographic to support the Democratic campaign because they’re “actually talking to guys like us.” Yet in appealing to some white male voters, the ad’s narrator likely alienated others by claiming that “some white dudes” are in fact the problem, pointing to “Trump and all his MAGA buddies.”
The macho bravado of the “White Dudes” ad was in contrast to the more gentle picture of masculinity that the campaign had previously associated itself with, having repeatedly promoted Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff as a man who exists outside the typical confines of toxic masculinity. MSNBC host and former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently credited him with reshaping “the perception of masculinity,” while Emhoff himself delivered a lecture against “masculine toxicity” just last year during an appearance on the same network. (In the final stretch of the campaign, he has recently been hit with allegations that he struck an ex-girlfriend more than a decade ago and that he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” in the workplace.)
Around NR
• Jim Geraghty has long predicted that North Carolina isn’t really a swing state, and that Donald Trump will win the state handily. Today, he writes about how Kamala Harris and “X factor of Hurricane Helene” have changed the electoral calculus there:
There’s no erasing the effects of the hurricane, and some people may be so consumed with the enormous and arduous tasks of rebuilding their homes and their lives, and mourning their dead, that voting seems like a low priority now. All the state can do is pull out all the stops to make it as easy and convenient as possible to cast a ballot.
• On a recent campaign trip to the Buckeye State, Audrey Fahlberg caught up with former presidential candidate and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy about his interest in running for governor of Ohio:
“Six months ago, I would’ve told you no chance,” Ramaswamy told National Review in a brief walk-and-talk interview on Thursday afternoon on his way out of a Miami University College Republicans event. Running to be chief executive of Ohio was not on his radar when he exited the GOP presidential primary back in January and immediately endorsed Donald Trump, he maintains. “But the more I’ve traveled the state,” he says, “we have leaders across the state, grassroots activists, that are compelling me and drafting me into this. And so, I have to give it serious consideration.”
• Ryan Mills introduces us to “some of the ‘manly’ stars of a viral pro-Kamala Harris political ad aimed at reshaping the national conversation around masculinity” and juicing male voter turnout for the Democratic ticket:
Wayland McQueen, an actor with Los Angeles’s Upright Citizens Brigade comedy group, plays the rancher with the pickup who cooks steak rare and “ain’t afraid of bears.” In addition to performing with the Upright Citizens Brigade, McQueen teaches improv, charging $75 for a two-hour lesson, according to an online listing.
While his X account is now private, McQueen appears to have made a post in June 2020, in which he provided “COUNTLESS examples in which you benefit from white privilege.”
In 2019, McQueen appeared on the Too Effing High podcast, where he announced he was a “pretty much daily user” of marijuana. During the episode — recorded soon after the release of the Game of Thrones finale — McQueen was asked to improvise a skit where he was a furniture salesman tasked with selling a chair made of swords.
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