Democrats appear to be rolling out a head-scratching new strategy for winning over male voters: lecturing them about why they’re racist and sexist if they don’t vote for Kamala Harris.
Three developments over the past week have provided strong indications that the Harris campaign believes it has a real crisis brewing with male voters – and that Democrats are hopelessly incapable of dealing with it.
The first was former President Barack Obama’s comments before a Harris campaign rally in Pittsburgh last week, where the 44th president scolded black men about their lack of enthusiasm for Harris.
“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said, adding that this problem appears “to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses; I’ve got a problem with that,” he continued. “Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — 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.”
Obama’s surprisingly candid comments reflected real frustration and alarm at the lack of support for Harris among black men – and for good reason. After Biden won more than 90 percent of the black vote overall in 2020, just 78 percent of black voters say they plan to back Harris this year according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
Much of that decline is driven by black men, among whom just 70 percent say they plan to vote for Harris, while 20 percent say they plan on voting for Trump. Among black women, Harris has a more robust 83 percent support, while 12 percent back Trump (a figure that would still be about a 50 percent increase from the eight percent of black women who voted for Trump four years ago).
Given how important black voters are to the Democrat coalition and the fact that the election could come down to a few thousand votes across a half dozen swing states, even those relatively small shifts could be catastrophic for Harris and Democrats.
But if the Harris campaign wants to win over black men, trotting out Barack Obama to demand they vote for her doesn’t appear to be a winning strategy. “Why are Black men being lectured to?” former Democrat Ohio state senator Nina Turner asked on CNN. “Why are Black men being belittled in ways that no other voting group is?”
Obama’s argument was as vapid as it was insulting. Instead of offering any sort of explanation for how a Kamala Harris administration would improve the lives of black men, Obama chose to publicly shame them for not blindly supporting the Democrat nominee. In doing so, Obama revealed that he, like the rest of the Democrat Party, believes that Harris is entitled to every black vote purely by virtue of the fact that she is a black woman.
What doesn’t appear to have occurred to Obama, Harris, or any other Democrat is that black men and black women might have other concerns unrelated to the race and sex of the nominees – like the 20 percent cumulative inflation that has devastated black households, the flood of 10 million illegal aliens that are taking black jobs, and the violent crime that is ravaging black neighborhoods. Without any demonstrable policy wins for the black community, Democrats have only low-brow, divisive identity politics to fall back on.
With Obama’s strategy of being openly condescending toward black men having fallen flat on its face, the Harris campaign tried to patch things up on Monday with the release of an “opportunity agenda for black men.” The plan outlined five vaguely defined policies, including: “fully forgivable loans” (read: taxpayer-funded handouts) offered exclusively to black entrepreneurs; training programs that “help Black men get good-paying jobs”; establishing a new “regulatory framework” for black men who own “cryptocurrency and other digital assets”; creating a “National Health Equity Initiative focused on Black men”; and “legalizing recreational marijuana.”
But the Harris campaign’s effort is likely to only create a whole new slate of problems for the vice president.
For starters, the plan is openly discriminatory against non-black men, promising special government assistance – paid for by taxpayers of every race – doled out exclusively to black men on the basis of race. It also promises the creation of special government regulations that only apply to black Americans.
Overall, the plan raises the same question that Americans of every race find themselves asking anytime Harris proposes any policy: after four years in the White House, why hasn’t she done it already? In the end, it’s just as insulting as Obama’s pitch.
But it’s not just black men that Democrats succeeded in further alienating over the past week. Just hours after Obama’s remarks in Pittsburgh, a new pro-Harris ad targeted at men which has been slammed as the “cringiest political ad ever” began making the rounds on social media.
The 90-second video features supposedly “typical” blue-collar men (who are in reality professional actors) bragging that they are “man enough” to vote for Kamala Harris. “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast,” one man awkwardly says before another cuts in: “I’ll tell you another thing – I’m sure as s*** not afraid of women.”
Once again, the men Democrats were hoping to target likely felt more insulted than inspired to vote for Harris. Instead of offering any reasoning for why Harris was better than Trump on policy, the ad questions the manhood of any man who doesn’t back Harris.
All of these developments reflect a deep frustration among the Harris campaign that their nominee is bleeding support among men. But instead of any introspection about how Harris’s record and policies might be causing that phenomenon, Democrats have effectively said that the problem must be with male voters themselves.
In other words, the problem is not that Harris and the Democrat Party are telling men that their masculinity is “toxic,” asserting that men can become women, attacking the nuclear family, and making it more difficult to buy groceries and afford a home. No, the Harris campaign says, it must be that male voters are simply too sexist and bigoted to appreciate the greatness of Kamala Harris.
With just a few weeks to go until Election Day, this seemingly counter-productive approach isn’t likely to win over many men – or voters of any kind.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
