Last week, the influential International Association of Fire Fighters – another male-dominated union that backed Biden – joined the Teamsters in saying they wouldn’t endorse anyone this election cycle.
Which begs the question: What is now driving working-class men away from the Democrats?
For all his faults, ‘Amtrak Joe’ spent much of his long political career cultivating ties in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – election battlegrounds crucial to winning the White House.
The same cannot be said for Harris, who cut her teeth as a district attorney and attorney general in the liberal la-la land of California. Despite growing up in the leafy suburbs of Berkeley near San Francisco, she has tried to bolster her plebeian credentials by touting her experience – mysteriously unverifiable – of working in McDonald’s as a college student.
But America’s working-class men don’t seem impressed – and that should serve not so much an alarm bell for the Democrats as a klaxon. For if a significant number of union voters abandon Harris in November, she may lose.
In the 2020 election, Biden carried union households by 16 points in his victory over Trump, while Hillary Clinton bested Trump by only five points among union voters in 2016 – and, of course, she lost.
Now, a September Fox News poll has shown that Kamala is in Hillary-territory. In their survey, Harris narrowly won union voters by six points – 53 percent to 47 percent.
And it’s not only working-class men who appear to be turning their backs on the Democrats.
An October New York Times poll revealed that Harris is 11 points underwater with male voters overall. She is even performing relatively badly with black and Hispanic men, who might have been expected to support her overwhelmingly.
Beginning with a flashback to Michael Douglas in 1993’s Falling Down, in a G-File titled “Who’s the Bad Guy,” Jonah Goldberg charts the 30 year history of the left’s ongoing war on men, before writing:
A couple years after Falling Down came out, the Angry White Male discourse went into overdrive because of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Bill Clinton cynically but brilliantly blamed it on the white male rage fueled by right-wing talk radio. A few years later, Chris Rock and then Toni Morrison started calling Clinton “the first black president.” This became a big refrain in the Lewinsky scandal, but the intent was the same even before: to create a rationale to inoculate Clinton’s behavior as something different than what would be deemed toxic masculinity or white privilege in a Republican.
Now, I should say that I was hugely critical of this stuff back in the day—and remain so in many respects. But given the trajectory of Angry White Male-ism since then, I have to concede that there was more to it than I thought at the time.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I am willing to accept that the diagnosis had more merit than I appreciated at the time, but the remedy made everything worse. The decades of mocking, belittling, and minimizing of white men made many of the problems with white men worse, not better. I’m not for depriving men—or women—of agency in their own predicaments. The incels and white supremacist poltroons, the Andrew Tate fanboys, the “childless cat lady” choristers, and all of the right-wingers who now insist that the bullying and dishonest, thrice-married adulterer Donald Trump—who puts on makeup every morning—is the epitome of manly virtues and a “manly man” (in the words of one of his super-fawners Tom Klingenstein) shouldn’t be let off the hook for their own choices. But the backlash to this cultural tide is real all the same.
And whatever partisan advantage Democrats got out of this stuff, it’s now a partisan disadvantage as men—white, black, and Hispanic—move out of the FDR coalition into what is now essentially the Trump coalition.
Indeed, it’s a sign of how deep in a cultural bubble progressives are, that Democrats thought Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz could lure a sufficient number of these men back into the Democratic fold. In the same way that, say, Charlie Kirk is an old white right-winger’s idea of what a young person is—or should be—Walz is an MSNBC producer’s idea of what a “real” rural white man is.
It reminds me of the great fun we had with “Pajama Boy” during the Obamacare brouhaha. For those of you who don’t remember, in 2013 the Obama team released a web ad with a smugly smirking “man” in his 20s wearing flannel onesie pajamas drinking some hot cocoa. The tagline: “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
The ad was only possible in a world where this image is not only what you think young men look like, but what you think they should look like.
Fortunately, Nike, knowing both that, as Michael Jordan was famously quoted as saying, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” and that Kamala wants to temporarily dial back the leftist male bashing, has a new ad that calls for a truce in the gender wars.
Nahh, just kidding, of course. As with their previous racialist-themed ads featuring Colin Kaepernick, Nike is all too happy to dial the War of the Sexes up to 11: New Ultra-Woke Nike Ad Says WNBA Dynasty ‘Makes Men Look Like Amateurs.’
Instead of defending actual women from having to compete against biological males on their own sports teams, Nike is charging full steam ahead with the “woke” agenda in their latest ad, taking aim at the “patriarchy” and touting anti-whiteness, lesbianism, and basic human history.
The new ad, first aired in August as part of the Nike brand’s “Play New” campaign and currently making the rounds (and being widely mocked) on social media, features a black high school student who’s been tasked with writing a report on a historical dynasty. Instead, she chooses to focus on the “new” dynasty of women’s basketball, one the ad claims will “Make Alexander the Great look like Alexander the OK” and headlining “women of color, gay women, and women who fight for social justice.”
Oh – and it’s a dynasty that “makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.” Feel free to belly-laugh, it’s good for your health.
Check it out:
“A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.”
Nike embraces anti-white wokeness with its latest ad. You are witnessing corporate pandering to black resentment the likes of which you’ve never seen. pic.twitter.com/YcBSwGCx1p
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 11, 2024
Exit question:
As with Falling Down being Ground Zero in the left’s cinematic War on Men, Pinch Sulzberger was quoted in New York magazine in 1991, as saying that if his newspaper was “alienating older white male readers [that] means ‘we’re doing something right.'”
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