“Before you cast your vote in this election, think about how it’ll impact the people you care about the most,” George Clooney tells male voters in a recent Harris-Walz ad.
Among the most memorable ads of the political season are a pair of 30-second spots with explicitly gendered themes featuring voiceovers from two of America’s most beloved movie stars.
The first, narrated by Julia Roberts, instructs women that whichever way they vote is OK because what’s said in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.
The follow-up is voiced by George Clooney and focuses on men. The ad tells men that while they might face pressure from MAGA to support Donald Trump, in the privacy of the voting booth, they’re free to do what they know is in the best interest of the women and girls they love.
The ads each play on the idea of “permission structures,” the assumption that voters sometimes need to be given permission to vote for a candidate or party that is not popular with their social group. That is why Kamala Harris has campaigned with Liz Cheney: to send the message to suburban Republican women that it’s OK to break from their party and vote against Donald Trump, even if they remain committed to conservative principles.
The underlying rationale for the women’s ad is that many women, including white evangelical Christians, often feel pressure from their husbands or other members of their community to support Trump. In this era of backlash and erosion of women’s rights, “the voting booth is the one place left in America where women still have the right to choose,” said screenwriter Dode B. Levenson, the creator and co-producer of both ads. (Full disclosure: Levenson is my longtime friend.)
During this election season, the permission structure concept has been widely discussed as applied to the (white) women’s vote. The Roberts-narrated ad has tapped a major vein of cultural energy and controversy, with more than 52 million views so far, writeups in The New York Times and other newspapers and segments on everything from Fox News to Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show.
But the concept applies to the (white) men’s vote as well, although it hasn’t received anywhere near as much attention. Consider the following as background.
There are many plausible explanations for Donald Trump’s large lead over Kamala Harris among men in the polls, especially white men. Perhaps the most important is also the most obvious: From the moment Trump entered presidential politics in 2015, he has aggressively marketed MAGA as a men’s movement and himself as the men’s candidate.
The Trump-led Republican National Convention in July doubled down on this strategy by staging a cartoonishly hypermasculine spectacle. Speaker after speaker lauded Trump as a “man’s man.” Former professional wrestling icon Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off at the podium and announced his devotion to Trump. When Trump entered the arena, the speakers blared “It’s a Man’s World” by James Brown.
Because the convention took place just a few days after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pa., the pro-Trump rhetoric reflected a more exaggerated than usual tone of muscular messianism. In those heady days, Trump’s acolytes in media and politics gushed about him as a heroic man of destiny who was protected by God so he could complete his mission of saving America from the forces of soft, secular, liberal degeneracy.
Even before the events of July, in certain white male peer cultures, the pressure to support Donald Trump could be intense. For more than a generation, white men have faced pressure to vote for Republicans, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest. This has only increased over the past decade since the emergence of Trump and MAGA.
It’s even more intense in some rural areas with a preponderance of high-school-educated white voters, including those in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In many of those areas, the act of voting for a Democrat—let alone a Black and South Asian woman from San Francisco—is seen by some as an act of community betrayal, a kind of tribal disloyalty. That is one of the main reasons why so many white women, especially working-class white women, vote Republican.
For men, the pressure might even be more acute, because it’s not just their tribal loyalty that’s called into question. They’re not just derided for having the “wrong” politics or thinking incorrectly about specific matters of policy. If they vote for Democrats, their very identity as men is subject to ridicule and scorn.
You can see this dynamic at work if you simply watch Fox News for an evening or tune into conservative talk radio. Before long, you’re likely to hear men who vote Democratic or support Kamala Harris mocked as soft, feckless and feminine—the very last people you’d want in charge in a world of threats, both foreign and domestic. The misogyny of this framing simultaneously puts down individual men even as it demeans women in general as incapable of serious political leadership.
That’s also the work done by the moniker “Tampon Tim,” the right-wing nickname of choice for Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Countless polls show that men, including young men, often have liberal and progressive views on many issues but continue to vote Republican. This attests to the power of political appeals to men’s identity—especially white men’s.
Right-wing ridicule of Democratic men often gets very personal—and sexual.
After Trump’s remarkably self-aware cry of “fight, fight, fight” after having been shot, right-wing organizer and media personality Charlie Kirk said, “If you’re a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man.”
And look at the jokes Trump told at the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City on Oct. 17, several of which took direct aim at the masculinity of Democratic men.
“I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz,” Trump said.
He teased Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “[He’s] here looking very glum,” Trump said. “But look on the bright side, Chuck. Considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have the chance to become the first woman president.”
Speaking about a new men’s organization that was formed a few months ago, Trump joked: “There’s a group, White Dudes for Harris. But I’m not worried about it because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me.”
The supposed sexual inadequacy of Democratic men is a theme that is repeatedly expressed in right-wing social media, where Democratic candidates, politicians and voters are regularly derided as “cucks” and “eunuchs.”
For the Democrats, it doesn’t make any sense to ignore this ongoing campaign of gendered mockery. Countless polls show that men, including young men, often have liberal and progressive views on many issues but continue to vote Republican. This attests to the power of political appeals to men’s identity—especially white men’s.
Before you cast your vote in this election, think about how it’ll impact the people you care about the most.
George Clooney
During this election cycle, Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups seem finally to have figured out that they need to respond, in part by creating a special kind of permission structure for men to support them.
One way to do this is through surrogates and celebrity endorsements. Think of the hundreds of high-ranking military and national security officials, many of them Republicans, who have warned of the dangers of Trump’s reelection and said they were voting for Harris.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent endorsement of Harris is an exceptionally vivid illustration of this. For all his acknowledged flaws, who can plausibly claim that the man who embodied The Terminator is a soft, emasculated cuck?
Another way to accomplish the same goal is to remind men, like the George Clooney-narrated ad, that despite whatever pressure they might face from their peers, what they do in the voting booth is private. Permission for men to vote for their values and conscience just might make a difference in what promises to be a very close election.
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