Late last week an inconvenient truth for Kamala Harris’ campaign, and the left as a whole, emerged: They have a man problem.
Dudes just aren’t into her. And the current veep is losing ground with black male voters — as Trump is increasingly attracting demographics that traditionally leaned Democrat.
According to the New York Times Sienna polls, Trump has an 11-point lead over Harris among men.
And with three weeks to go before election day, the campaign and its surrogates have launched a Hail Mary or an “Our Father” to appeal to the not-so-fairer sex.
Incredibly, their strategy to sway men to a feckless presidential candidate is to belittle them, call them misogynists and reduce them to Carhartt caricatures.
It was like they saw the damage of JD Vance’s haunting “childless cat lady” comment from 2021 and said, hold my Bud Light.
On Thursday, Barack Obama scolded a group of black men in Pittsburgh over their lack of “energy” for Harris.
“I’ve got a problem with that because — because part of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly now, part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, it caused quite a bit of backlash. Though I can’t imagine “The View” host Sunny Hostin smoothed things over on Monday, saying, “We’ve got to reach those ridiculous, crazy black men that did vote for Trump.”
Nice.
Over the weekend Tim Walz went pheasant hunting which led to unfortunate comparisons of Elmer Fudd and accusations of LARPing.
And this push was not without amusement — not intentionally. On Friday morning, the hilarious “Man Enough” commercial dropped online. While not an official Harris/Walz ad it was created by a collective of creatives trying to elect them.
The ad features various male actors butched up in flannels, jeans and gym clothes with one even propped up in the back of a pickup truck looking more dainty and demure than blue collar gritty. The actors all took turns bragging about their stereotypical bro bona fides.
They were man enough to cook steak rare, drink double barrel bourbon and fix carburetors.
One actor declared that he was “man enough to deadlift 500[lbs] and braid the s–t out of my daughter’s hair.”
The point? They were also man enough to support a woman for president.
“I love women. And I’m man enough to help them win,” one proclaimed.
It was so cringe inducing, and pandering, that I was curious if the director, a man by the name of Jacob Reed, had actually ever met a dude in the wild, one who didn’t carry an NPR tote.
While it all seemed to crescendo last week, this dude disconnect didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.
For the better part of the last decade, the left and all of the cultural institutions it controls, has been sweeping men aside, pushing the idea that traditional masculinity is toxic with mottos like “men are trash and “the future is female” (All while also unable to define a woman).
Men have been falling behind in education and wages. The Harris campaign’s solution was to go all in on abortion and assume she could girl boss their way through the campaign.
To appeal to men, they chose Walz, who was touted as all guns, football and military service but without the baggage of a knuckle dragging Neanderthal. He was a feminist. He has also turned out to be a serial fabulist.
They gave us “wife guy” Doug Emhoff, who, as Jen Psaki said, “reshaped the perception of masculinity.” This despite knocking up his nanny and allegedly slapping a girlfriend, a claim his camp has denied.
These city slickers have also attempted to reclaim the camo hat to cosplay as a rural red blooded Americans.
They shored up their male support by creating segregated zoom calls like “White Dudes for Harris ” where celebs like Jeff Bridges and Mark Ruffalo came together to revel in how great it would be to elect a woman. On that call, singer Josh Groban talked about his white male privilege.
It was elites touting their glorious identity politics, offering nothing to men all over this country struggling to put food on their tables and support their families. (Though the Republicans, it must be noted, are struggling to form a cohesive message in a post Roe era).
The problem is that society stopped listening to men and their concerns. They were told to fit into a neat subservient box so that women can lead. Then they were called mansplainers.
The left acted like they needed to re-educated and rebranded, not engaged.
And it might just cost them the election.