While early voting trends have broken to favor Republicans slightly in some swing states, it’s still far too soon to say whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will lose a presidential race that remains a 50-50 deadlock in national polling. But there’s little question that the vice president will preside over one of the greatest losses of male support for a Democratic candidate across the age and racial spectrum.
The final round of national New York Times-Siena College polling for the 2024 cycle found that Trump isn’t just winning the majority of men overall — Harris is losing a slim majority of Latino men and 30% of black men, running behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance with the two demographics by 11 points and 14 points, respectively.
With one week to go before election night and more than a quarter of the 2020 electorate already done voting, how is the Harris campaign closing out its final messaging to half of the country? In the classic irony of third-wave feminism, Team Harris is insulting the entire male sex while begging men to save them.
Democrats deployed the single-most popular member of the party over the weekend with a baffling strategy. Former first lady Michelle Obama, who loathes campaigning, emerged as an extraordinary favor to Harris, only to spend an entire speech begging for men to save women.
“I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” the former first lady said in a direct appeal about abortion to men. “Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes. The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.”
“So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump,” Obama continued, “who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth. Let me tell you all, to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity. So, fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?”
So much for the idea that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. In Mrs. Obama’s own construction, even the most powerful women in the world are nothing more than modern Cinderellas, dependent on men to save us from the Bad Orange Man.
Such a desperate demand is made all the more delusional by the way the Harris camp continues to insult directly the men we apparently need to save us. In an advertisement starring top Harris surrogate Julia Roberts, the actress implies that Trump-supporting husbands are so abusive and controlling that wives who dare have their own opinions must keep them secret.
“In the one place in America where women still have the right to choose, you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know,” Roberts narrates as the wife of a Trump supporter clandestinely votes for Harris. “Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz.”
To be abundantly clear, if you’re scared of telling your Trump-supporting husband that you plan on voting differently than him, that’s not because you’re married to a Trump supporter. It is because you’re married to an abuser. The overwhelming majority of men are not, in fact, thin-skinned control freaks who emotionally, verbally, or financially abuse their wives for expressing a different opinion.
Team Harris’s outreach to men of color only escalates the insults. After sending out former President Barack Obama to berate a random group of black men for insufficient enthusiasm for Harris, the campaign authored its “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” which would legalize recreational marijuana and regulate crypto. Harris’s team then cut an ad depicting a bunch of women rejecting a black man during a dating game because he said he wasn’t planning on voting.
The only possible explanation Harris can come up with for why men of all races are running away from her campaign? You guessed it. Sexism.
Sure, it’s possible that the plus-10% of black and Latino men who voted for Clinton suddenly became sexist after 2016. Alternatively, Harris’s core assumptions themselves comprise the real sexism.
In response to the worst influx of illegal immigration in our nation’s history, Harris has waffled between offering lies and accidentally confirming she would simply legalize millions of migrants illegally here. She refuses not just to take responsibility for the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years but also to validate that a 20% increase in prices in four years has devastated households.
Instead of being honest with voters and admitting that the past four years have made men and women alike panic that they won’t be able to provide their children a more prosperous and promising life than their parents provided them, Harris belittles these real concerns, instead browbeating men for not saving women from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The only time Team Harris tries to appeal to men’s self-interest reveals even more misandry, such as an ad imploring men to vote to keep pornography legal — as a reminder, Trump, of all people, has no plans to ban it — as though the entire Democratic male base is made of incels who can’t catch a date in real life!
There’s also the matter that women’s equality and reproductive rights are on a different planet compared to when Roe v. Wade was decided. Women now outpace men in higher education and have complete legal equality everywhere, from the household to the workplace. And for more than 10 years now, Obamacare has forced virtually all insurers to pay for birth control, including nearly fail-proof IUDs and long-acting reversible contraception, now accessible to the overwhelming majority of women for zero out-of-pocket cost.
Abortion, beyond anyone’s moral attitudes to the practice, is simply no longer in demand the same way it was in a world of greater social stigma for out-of-wedlock births and oral contraception in its infancy. The notion that a modern woman, with all the access to education and professional promotions of today, is not capable of taking her birth control pill every day or scheduling an IUD insertion is insulting to the intelligence and agency of women. For all the left-wing hoopla over the need for abortion as a last resort, as we have demonstrated in the data in detail, fewer than 17% of abortion patients reported using hormonal birth control or IUDs. Rather, the overwhelming majority of women seeking abortions used condoms or no birth control at all. When women exercise choice before conception, it usually works.
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Ample evidence exists that Harris is simply reflecting the sexist overcorrection of her base. Ten percent of men supporting Trump said Harris’s gender played a role in their support, according to a recent CBS poll. So let’s say that 10% of Trump-supporting men are sexist, an unfortunate share, but at least a rather small one. But a full quarter of Harris-supporting women said her gender played a role in their support, meaning that Harris-supporting women are more than twice as sexist as Trump-supporting men! Ideally, both of these numbers would be a big, fat zero.
It’s possible that the Democratic gamble on the Karen constituency pays off. College-educated voters do tend to turn out in higher numbers, and Harris’s strength with college-educated white folks and women overall could paper over her losses with men. But if men decide not to save the Democratic Party, it’s not because of misogyny. If anything, it’s more likely because chivalry, the notion that it is laudable, let alone acceptable, for women to rely on men for anything, has long been dead on the Left, and Democratic activists killed it.