When Vice President Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to the nation this week, she ran through his biography – dad, military member, high school football coach, teacher – but lingered on one particular story about his time teaching and coaching.
“Coach Walz was approached by a student in his social studies class,” Harris said. “The young man was one of the first openly gay students at the school and was hoping to start a gay straight alliance at a time when acceptance was difficult to find for LGBTQ students. Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group's faculty advisor.”
It was a story about Walz helping a kid out, but it was also a story about how, decades ago, Walz understood something that Democratic men are understanding en masse right now: not only that they have a gender, but that they can use their gender to send a political signal.
Building permission structures
There has been a remarkable trend since Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket: reaching out to men voters as men. There's White Dudes for Harris, which held a recent organizing call, plus other virtual meetups from groups including Win With Black Men, Men for Harris and Dads for Kamala.
Often, gender-specific organizing is aimed at women – think Moms Demand Action, Moms for Liberty, or Women for Trump. And indeed, there have been an array of Harris organizing calls aimed at different groups of women.
But men as a group vote substantially more Republican than women, and men continue to be a big part of Donald Trump's base. Indeed, the GOP (and particularly Trump’s GOP) has made itself the party of overt displays of masculinity.
So Democrats have been considering for years how to pull men to their side. In putting together these calls aimed at men, leaders of these groups say they are creating a permission structure for men to support a Democratic woman at the top of the ticket.
“If you have men who are recognizably successful as men within the traditional terms say, ‘We're supporting Kamala Harris,’ then it makes it easier for men who are more self-conscious about that identification,” explained Jackson Katz, a writer and cofounder of the Young Men Research Initiative, a super PAC aimed at energizing young progressive men.
Bakari Sellers agrees. He was one organizer of the Win With Black Men call.
“The power of being able to go back to your barber shop and saying, ‘I was on a call with 50,000 men for Harris,’ that starts a totally different conversation,” Sellers said.
Just as Walz believed his status as a football coach would show students – likely, especially boys – that it was okay to support a gay peer, organizers hope that these groups help show men that they won’t be alone in supporting a Democratic woman of color.
Indeed, Walz himself – days before becoming the Democratic VP nominee – emphasized Harris’ gender and race on the White Dudes for Harris call while taking aim at Trump.
“How often in 100 days do you get to do something that's going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?” Walz asked.
Men’s gender becomes visible
None of this would have been possible with Biden at the top of the ticket, according to Katz.
“Because Harris is a woman, her presence in the race makes gender visible in a way that it wasn't with Biden,” Katz said. “You'll see things like Men for Harris in a way that you wouldn't have seen Men for Biden, because that would strike people as very odd and even redundant.”
But then, men are not a monolith. Different groups have different motivations.
For example, Sellers said that Black men feel a particular duty to show up for Harris.
“This is our time to show that we can stand up with her. Black women are always the backbone of the Democratic Party – we hear it, we hear it, and we hear it,” Sellers said. “And we're like, ‘No, they are, but we're here too.’ And we're going to do everything we can.”
Meanwhile, Mark Linton, co-founder of Men for Harris, talked about making the pitch to white men using historic terms.
“This is that moment where white men are going to actually step up and say, this is actually our moment to really begin to turn a page and write a new chapter in America's racial history,” Linton said.
Across all these groups, though, it's clear that participants are thinking hard about their own identities, too.
“We're here not only because we're reimagining politics or reimagining the White House, but we're reimagining what it means to be a dad,” said Mohan Sivaloganathan on a Dads for Kamala call. “And we're retiring that tired stereotype of the dad who yells for everything but stands up for nothing.”
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