This year could be a groundbreaking one in American politics: An exceptional woman is in the race for the White House, and if she wins, she will be America’s first female president.
So why does it feel like this election is all about men?
The woman atop the Democratic ticket, who has inspired an outpouring of enthusiasm not seen since the Obama era, is Black and Indian American. She is the first female vice president, the child of immigrants, a woman of immense professional success, and a stepmother who is part of a very modern family—barrier-breaker in ways large and small. And yet the focus of this election seems to be not just on men writ large, but on white men specifically.
ADVERTISEMENT
There was, of course, the rapid-fire veepstakes, in which seemingly all of the potential candidates Kamala Harris and her team considered were white guys; the one chosen, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, seems like he was grown in a lab (or by Aaron Sorkin) to be the perfect Midwestern politics dad, a progressive populist with folksy charm. Among the newly released Harris-Walz merch, the most viral piece is a camo hat that initially sold out 30 minutes after it went live online. (Sales have now reached nearly $2 million.) The campaign’s bio of Walz emphasizes his military service, his gun ownership, and his time as a football coach. Article after article hand-wrings about the growing gender gap among young voters and the challenges Democrats face in reaching the working-class men who were key to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020.
To be clear, the Harris-Walz embrace of a healthier kind of masculinity, and their refusal to cede the male vote to the group Walz himself accurately described as He-Man Woman-Hater Republicans, is an excellent political strategy, especially since they’re managing to go for the guys without neglecting or sidelining so-called “women’s issues.” Instead, they’re framing those issues as universally important: Walz’s bio, for example, also mentions that he and his wife conceived their daughter Hope through fertility treatments—Walz is a staunch supporter of reproductive medicine including IVF. His support for abortion rights merits multiple mentions; he has highlighted paid family and medical leave as the number-one issue he thinks would make the biggest difference in people’s lives. It’s the kind of common-sense strategy that is often sorely missing from campaigns.
But the truth is that Democrats do have a male voter problem, and men, being nearly half of American voters, do need to be heard—and courted. Donald Trump has been particularly effective at offering disaffected men a simple narrative to help them make sense of their lives and even find some sense of purpose: You used to be recognized—revered, even—as the truest and realest Americans until bad outsiders (immigrants, the Deep State, feminists) stole your birthright from you. Trump has come to save you, his mythology promises so that you might again ascend to your rightful place atop the American hierarchy. It’s a message premised on looking backward and feeding on anger, entitlement, and resentment.
It's also proven a distinctly difficult one for Democrats to challenge. But the Harris-Walz campaign has launched the party’s best effort yet, with forward-looking and optimistic messaging that is less “the future is female” and more “the future belongs to all of us.”
This is smart and necessary politics. But only because of where we are as a nation. The focus on men and the traditional symbols of working-class white masculinity, and the sense that we shouldn’t dwell too much on the female candidate, are reflective of a broader anti-feminist backlash and perhaps a fear of getting too attached (again) to the idea of a first female president.
Given this reality, one can’t really blame the Harris campaign for steering clear of the feminized (even if there’s an occasional mention of the “femininomenon”) and treading lightly on the explicitly feminist. Still, it’s a depressing aspect of an otherwise invigorating and unexpectedly joyful campaign.
But then, this is a depressing era for American feminism more generally. The right has embraced unfettered patriarchal dominance, with Trump’s GOP barely even pretending to care about securing women’s votes or improving women’s lives, JD Vance suggesting women are only valuable if they’re making babies, and the conservative cultural realm a sexist swamp of domestic abusers, aficionados of the misogynistic man-o-sphere and men who get off on “trad wife” social media fantasies.
Feminism isn’t exactly having a moment in more liberal circles, either. The Women’s March seemed like it would be a turning point in the Trump era, but instead, its energy fizzled out as its organizing apparatus descended into disorder. The Girlboss, that now-cringe symbol of female ambition, is dead, felled in large part by sexist hit pieces targeted at female founders. Female financial dependence on more powerful men has been rebranded as feminine leisure and emancipation from capitalist demands—it’s a brat summer, but it’s also the season of looking for a man in finance.
Abortion has, thankfully, been a top issue in this election, and both Harris and Walz are better messengers on the matter than Joe Biden was. But the rise of the potential first female president in the wake of unprecedented rollbacks of women’s rights seems to be under-emphasized in an effort to appeal to the boys. Again, that’s politically wise.
But it’s also a devastating indictment of just how retro our country’s gender politics remain.
