When Kamala Harris set her mind on a running mate last summer, strategists and pundits alike agreed that she must choose a white man. Not just any white man, but a moderate-coded one, either politically or culturally, who could balance a progressive black woman from California and appeal to male voters who had swung so strongly toward Trump in 2016 and could do so again in 2024. Conventional wisdom offered up a swing-state governor who supported fracking and spoke like Barack Obama, a swing-state senator who was a former astronaut, and two successful Democratic governors of red states. 

As we all know, Harris chose none of these white men. Instead, she selected a little-known governor from a solid blue state with a very progressive track record. But Tim Walz supposedly brought something else to the table that would carry the ticket to victory in November: masculinity. Tim Walz, football coach. Tim Walz, hunter. Tim Walz, soldier. Tim Walz, working-class cred. A sympathetic media gleefully burnished Walz’s gender credentials. He had “big dad energy.” He expressed a “casual, rugged, white-guy vibe.” He was a “man’s man.”

“Men without a college degree supported Trump by 22 points.”

On Tuesday, American men showed that they weren’t buying what the Harris-Walz campaign was selling. Donald Trump, liberal America’s avatar of toxic masculinity, won male voters by a margin of 10 percentage points to 13 points, depending on the survey. Harris won women, but by a much smaller seven or eight points. Men without a college degree supported Trump by 22 points. White men supported him by 20 points to 23 points, again depending on the survey. And white men without a college degree, those the Harris campaign hoped would see themselves in “America’s coach,” favored Trump by an overwhelming 38 points to 40 points.

The most impressive gendered result of the election has to be the response of young men. According to The Wall Street Journal, men aged 18 to 29 supported Joe Biden in 2020 by 15 points. In 2024, they favored Donald Trump by 14 points, an astounding 29-point swing in a single election. CNN found a much smaller Trump lead among young men of two points, but even this is a significant transformation. Democrats long believed that young people were their electoral Superman, weakened only by the kryptonite of indifference. If they could get these young voters to the polls, victory would be assured. This election just cast those illusions onto the ash heap of history.

A red shift among young men wasn’t wholly unexpected. All evidence suggests Democrats were worried. The campaign in September sent Tim Walz to a college football game, where he was booed. It sent him pheasant hunting in mid-October, the main result being a viral video of Walz fumbling with his shotgun. It sent him to play Madden NFL 25 on Twitch with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in late October, and it was no more impressive a performance of masculinity than the others.

In the end, liberal women in the media had the better measure of Minnesota’s governor. Rebecca Traister lauded Walz as an example of the emergent “Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status.” Karrin Vasby Andersen praised Walz for “stepping back” and playing “contented second fiddle.” Alyce Collins acclaimed his “positive masculinity” for “showing more traditionally feminine traits” and “letting women take center stage.” Judy Berman echoed this in complimenting Walz’s “gentle form of masculinity.” Joy Reid dubbed it downright “21st century.” American women seemed to admire Walz’s masculinity far more so than did American men. Like those in 2016 who described Donald Trump as a poor man’s idea of a rich man, Walz proved to be a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man.

Already by mid-October, Team Harris was running low on joy. Democrats started playing hardball to close the gender gap with men. Barack Obama scolded black men in Pennsylvania for their lack of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign, explicitly accusing “the brothers” of misogyny. In Michigan, Michelle Obama tried to shame men with abortion rights, rebuking those considering a vote for Trump for treating women as “just baby-making vessels” and turning them into “collateral damage to your rage.” In the waning days of the campaign, the Democratic super PAC Progress Action Fund targeted young men with ad buys on social media warning them—in graphic terms—that their consumption of pornography and emergency contraception was at stake. Democrats were right to be worried. White men increased their vote for Trump at most by one percentage point. Black men added around 12 points, doubling their support from 2020. Hispanic men shifted to the right by anywhere from nine points to a shocking 17 points.

As the 2024 presidential election campaign ground on, the Republican ticket tried to shrink the gender divide in American politics, while the Democratic ticket sought to enlarge it. JD Vance immediately began to walk back his 2021 “childless cat ladies” quip after it became widely publicized this year, calling it “dumb comments” and wishing he “had said it differently.” In the vice-presidential debate, Vance recognized that many Americans, particularly young women, “frankly just don’t trust us” on abortion and that the Republican Party needed to “earn people’s trust back” through federal family policy and state jurisdiction over abortion. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats ran an ad in the last week of the race with a Julia Roberts voiceover encouraging married women to resist the untoward pressure of their condescending husbands and vote Harris in the merciful secrecy of the voting booth (The Wall Street Journal reports married women voted for Trump by a 10-point margin).

Americans might be consoled by the fact that, on the female side, the gender gap has actually shrunk over the Trump era. According to Pew Research analysis of validated voters, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a 15-point advantage among women in 2016, compared to 11 points for Biden in 2020. As noted earlier, current surveys for the 2024 race show Harris’s advantage among women down to seven or eight points. Men were also becoming less polarized over time. In 2016, Trump enjoyed an 11-point advantage among them, compared to two points in 2020. Some Democrats interpret the 2024 election’s return to 2016 levels among men as an undoubtable sign of misogyny. They would do better to instead see it as a reaction against those same Democrats’ attempts to scold, shame, denigrate, and manipulate men on the grounds of being men. Democrats don’t get to decide who is allowed to play gender politics; sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Turning the temperature down—way down—on gender politics will not only help Democrats in the future. It will help America as a whole.

Darel E. Paul is a Compact columnist and a professor of political science at Williams College.

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