Men’s Groups Backing Harris Grow as She, Walz Seek White House: NPR

When Vice President Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to the nation this week, she covered his biography (father, soldier, high school football coach, teacher) but she focused on one story in particular from his time as a teacher and coach.

“Coach Walz was approached by a student in his social studies class,” Harris said. “The boy 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 for LGBTQ students was difficult to find. Tim knew what a signal it would send to have a football coach involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor.”

It was the story of Walz helping a young man, but it was also the story of 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 permit structures

Since Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, a notable trend has occurred: reaching out to male voters. like menThere’s also White Dudes for Harris, which recently held an organizing call, as well as other virtual meetings 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 a number of organizing calls from Harris aimed at different women’s groups.

But men as a group vote substantially more Republican than women, and men remain a significant part of Donald Trump’s base. Indeed, the GOP (and Trump’s GOP in particular) has transformed itself into the party of overt displays of masculinity.

So Democrats have been thinking for years about how to get men on their side. In putting together these calls to men, leaders of these groups say they want to create a structure of permission for men to support a Democratic woman at the top of the ticket.

“If you have men who are recognizably successful as men in traditional terms and say, ‘We’re supporting Kamala Harris,’ then it becomes easier for men who are more conscious of that identification,” explained Jackson Katz, a writer and cofounder of the Young Men Research Initiative, a super PAC that aims to energize young, progressive men.

Bakari Sellers agrees. He was one of the organizers of the Win With Black Men call.

“The power of being able to go back to your barber and say, ‘I was on the phone with 50,000 men for Harris,’ it starts a whole different conversation,” Sellers said.

Just as Walz believed his status as a football coach would show students (probably, especially boys) that it was okay to support a gay peer, organizers hope these groups will help show men that they won’t be alone in supporting a black Democratic woman.

In fact, Walz himself, just days before becoming the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, had highlighted Harris’ gender and race during the White Dudes for Harris appeal, taking aim at Trump.

“How many times in 100 days do you do something that will impact future generations? And how many times in the world do you wake up that bastard and know that a black woman taught him a lesson and sent him packing?” Walz asked.

The male gender becomes visible

According to Katz, none of this would have been possible with Biden at the top of the list.

“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’re going to see things like Men for Harris in a way that you wouldn’t have seen Men for Biden, because that would seem very strange and even redundant.”

But then, men are not a monolith. Different groups have different motivations.

For example, Sellers said that black men feel a special duty to support Harris.

“This is our moment to show that we can stand with her. Black women are always the backbone of the Democratic Party — we feel it, we feel it, we feel it,” Sellers said. “And we say, ‘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 how it was possible to address white men using historical terms.

“This is the moment when white men are going to step up and say, this is our time to turn the page and write a new chapter in America’s racial history,” Linton said.

In all of these groups, however, it is clear that participants also reflect seriously on their own identity.

“We’re here not just because we’re reinventing politics or reinventing the White House, but we’re reinventing what it means to be a dad,” Mohan Sivaloganathan said on a Dads for Kamala call. “And we’re breaking that old stereotype of the dad who screams about everything but doesn’t stand up for anything.”