John Jefferson
It’s kind of hard to ignore the fact that white guys who support Vice President Kamala Harris are having a moment.
During Harris’ rally in Atlanta, Parker Short, the president of the Georgia Young Democrats, went viral for dancing along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not like Us”. And the current VP is virtually guaranteed to pick a white male Democrat as her running mate, whether it be Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.
Then there was the surprisingly wholesome White Dudes for Harris Zoom call that raised $4 million thanks to cameos from Mark Ruffalo, Mark Hamill, Pete Buttigieg and “The Dude” himself, Jeff Bridges, — before Elon Musk’s X/Twitter briefly shut down the account for the call. And of course, Harris has benefited from the fact that the White Boy in Chief, Joe Biden, chose to not seek re-election and endorsed her.
But all the jokes about Harris’s White Boy Summer, as The Atlantic called it, underpin a more serious predicament: to win the White House, Harris will genuinely need to shore up a lot more support among white men.
When Harris’s presidential campaign lagged in 2019, she alluded to the “Obama coalition” in one of her final debate performances. The Obama coalition holds a special place in Democrats’ memories, given the broad, multiracial swath of voters who cast their vote for the first Black president.
But as friend of Inside Washington Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report noted last week, that coalition “included lots of white, working class voters.” That contributed to Obama not only winning Iowa and Ohio twice as well as flipping Indiana and North Carolina in 2008, but nearly winning places like Missouri and Montana in 2008.
Indeed, Obama ran up the margins in states like Wisconsin, with its large white working class counties, to the point that he won the state by almost 14 points in 2008 and more than six points in 2012 despite a bad economy.
Similarly, the brutal truth behind why Biden won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan when Hillary Clinton lost them is because he significantly built on Clinton’s margins with white men, improving it by eight points.
On top of all this, if Harris is to have any hope of governing, she will need two white male senators from states that voted overwhelmingly for Trump — Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana — to win re-election.
“I will be really honest with you, I’m focused on my election, she’s gonna have to focus on hers, and she’ll make that decision,” Tester told The Independent.
“She needs to, between the convention and the election, make… two or three visits to rural places, be it a county fair or a state fair or a ranch in Arizona or Nevada, or a dairy farm in Wisconsin,” Matt Barron, a consultant who has worked for rural Democrats, told The Independent.
He suggested that Harris embrace her populist side to win with this particular voter demographic.
“ I mean, listen, Biden has done more in antitrust and sort of pushing back against economic concentration with these appointments to the [Federal Trade Commission] and Justice Department,” he added. “I think Harris should embrace that, because that’s very popular.”
A Rural Americans for Harris Zoom call will take place next week and feature one of Baron’s former clients, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who as a congressman represented a rural district before he ran for higher office. Now Walz is considered another potential running mate for Harris.
“I know him well,” Barron said. “Someone like him or someone like Governor Beshear [as a veep pick] would be absolutely beneficial to competing for rural votes.”
It’s also not lost on Black supporters of Harris that they will need to do well in that space. A’shanti Gholar, the president of Emerge, said it was important for Harris to have white men publicly speaking to other white men about the positive aspects of casting a ballot for the presumptive presidential nominee.
“She has those validators that show that she can relate to white men,” Gholar told The Independent on Monday before the White Dudes for Harris Zoom call.
Of course, Harris will need more than garner white validators going into November. While Democrats have seen a momentum shift in the past week and a half, they will need to find a way to turn that white validation into votes.
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