DANIEL VAUGHAN: Kamala Harris Scrambles While Losing Men

By 
 October 16, 2024

Kamala Harris has a man problem. The gender divide is alive and well in American politics, and Harris is having struggles connecting with working-class men of all races. Trump has his issues with women and is working on rectifying that situation. But Harris is losing support from men in all polls, and it could cost her the election.

Harris is on pace to lose the male vote by the worst percentage for any Democrat in decades and grant Trump the best margins with Black males among Republicans since 1960. Harris is trying to drive up the suburban vote among women to offset these losses and, in the meantime, throw everything at the wall to appeal to male voters in any way.

So Harris has gone on Howard Stern's show, and she's got an interview lined up with Brett Baier on Fox News for her first "hard interview." Meanwhile, Tim Walz is hitting the trail for photo ops pretending to hunt, cheering at college football games, and walking around in flannel shirts and hats to convey something to male voters.

It's clear the Harris campaign strategy wasn't working, as polls stagnated and started sliding against her. She's recognizing that and trying to adjust, but whether those adjustments are happening too late remains to be seen. In the battleground state of Georgia, more than 300,000 voted on the first day of early voting.

In short, it's getting late in the day for last-second strategy shifts to have a large impact in this race. People are already voting in droves—it's not hyperbole to say millions of votes have already been cast in this election.

That cuts in both directions. So much of this race is already locked in, and we're waiting for votes to get counted.

The problem for Harris is the same one Biden had before the first debate: they are both running behind Clinton's 2016 and Biden's 2016 polling numbers. That goes beyond Harris's standing with men. It's across the board.

In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Harris holds a 1.5-point lead over Trump on a national level. This is below where Clinton and Biden led Trump at this point and below where the actual national vote percentages were at the end. Clinton led Trump by nearly 7 points in 2016 and Biden by almost 10 points.

In a traditional election where we'd be looking at Donald Trump and Joe Biden, two critical measures would be Joe Biden's approval rating and what voters thought about him on critical issues across the board. Biden's approval rating is deeply underwater, sitting at 41%. And voters disapprove of Biden on nearly every single issue.

Why is this important? Because in any other election, we'd be focused on how much voters dislike the sitting administration and want change. The press is far more focused on the "vibes" of the Harris campaign, and now she's scrambling to explain why those "vibes" are gone.

But if you're listening to voters, they hate the Biden administration, they hate its policies, and they blame Biden for the current state of the country. How many of those problems do voters transition to Harris? This should be the top question for every reporter, but because they're beholden to Democrats, it's barely covered.

If that topic was covered, Harris might have pivoted earlier on trying to win men back for the Democratic Party. Instead, she drank her own Kool-Aid and enjoyed her press clippings, all while refusing to do the bare minimum of campaigning, and now Democrats are panicking. 

Now, again, it is possible that Harris still pulls this out. According to polls, it's a toss-up election, and it's still too early to determine which way undecided voters are headed. Polls should show where undecided voters go in the next few weeks, as this is typically when final decisions are made.

But Harris likely will need a polling error in her favor to win. In RealClearPolitics, Trump leads in six of the seven battleground states. You'd expect These kinds of battleground state polls if Harris was sitting at such a low level for Democrats in the national polls. Harris needs those polls to be wrong.

Furthermore, she needs these polls about men to be wrong, too. She will either hope the polls are wrong or try to offset these losses with other voter demographics. Can she win more college-educated voters to offset the loss of minority working-class voters and men? 

These are all looming questions for Harris because we genuinely don't know what her coalition looks like - we know who is voting for Trump and what his coalitions look like. We don't know this about Harris. We do know she's losing men, however. That's not a great place to be, with less than three weeks to go. 

" A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature."
Thomas Jefferson