US election: Kamala Harris campaign at mercy of her ‘man problem’

The father of the US men’s rights movement, Warren Farrell, says Kamala Harris could lose the US election because of a failure by Democrats to properly respond to new challenges facing young men.

US men's rights movement founder Warren Farrell. Picture: Joe Kelly

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With polls showing Donald Trump at least an even chance to reclaim the White House, a leading American thinker says the Democrats have failed to grasp a key factor propelling his comeback – the problem of men abandoning the left.

Dr Warren Farrell, intellectual father of the men’s rights movement in America, told The Australian Trump had been successful in politically harnessing the frustration of many men across the country who felt their problems had been dismissed for too long.

The trend shows up in all the polls, with The Wall Street Journal finding the gender divide had broadened since 2020 and Trump’s five-point advantage among men in that election had widened to 10 points – cutting across racial, educational and economic groups. An NBC poll conducted in early October found Trump leading Harris among men by 56-40 per cent.

The New York Times has also sounded the alarm on a Democratic “collapse” among males, reporting on October 18 that Trump was leading Harris among young men by 58 per cent to 37 per cent across the last three NYT/Siena national polls.

“Trump is getting a huge amount of the male support. This is the biggest gender gap in history,” Farrell said. “Kamala Harris doesn’t have a clue as to why.

“Kamala’s problem with male voters is mirrored in Trump’s lack of support among female voters … energised by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.”

The same NYT poll showing young men favouring Trump also revealed Harris with an even larger lead among young women, 67-28 per cent.

However, with polling averages now showing a dead-even contest in the key rust-belt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the inability to win over male voters could be the decisive factor between defeat and victory for Harris.

This is the view of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. He said the share of young men identifying as registered Democrats has dropped by seven percentage points since 2020, while the share identifying as registered Republicans had increased by seven percentage points, a net shift of 14 per cent.

Writing this week in the NYT, Volpe said young women had only shifted two points away from the Republicans, and went on to flag a potential “turning point in American political alignment” due to Trump’s decision to make “young men a central focus of his campaign”.

Farrell warned that men and women are more split than ever, and men are experiencing a new sense of alienation and purposelessness. He told The Australian Trump was a “very good reflector of anger” and males were voting for him because there was a sense he was “giving the left the finger”. In other words, Trump represented a cultural movement to correct years of political overreach by the left.

It is an argument that goes some way to explaining why Trump has not faced an electoral penalty for remarks – ranging from the absurd to the extreme – that would never be tolerated from other politicians, and why Harris’s attacks on his closing message about turning the military on the “enemy within” may ultimately fail to gain traction.

The sense of Trumpian resistance to creeping political correctness was seen as a key factor behind the surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the lessons do not appear to have been learnt.

Eight years on, Farrell argues the prospect of history repeating itself has been fuelled by the Democrats’ failure to think deeply about their political message to millions of men concerned about their future role in society.

While Trump was doing a “good job” exploiting this failure, Farrell – author of The Boy Crisis and The Myth of Male Power – also lamented that the former president was presenting himself to the people as the “absolute worst of masculinity”, and labelled him “the ultimate narcissist”.

“I could advise the Kamala Harris campaign in 10 minutes as to how to make a huge amount of progress,” Farrell said. “Number one, acknowledge that you haven’t paid attention to men and apologise.

“Number two, say ‘do you want your child’s strongest role model, especially if your child is a male, to represent exactly the opposite of what you want your child to be?’.

“No matter who you are as a man … when you have children, you’re going to say to them, ‘don’t interrupt when you lose. Lose gracefully. Think about others as much as yourself. Show caring. Show humility. Show warmth. Acknowledge when you’re wrong’. And that would appeal to almost every parent, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal.”

The “man problem” hobbling the Democratic campaign was recently given fresh exposure by former president Barack Obama when he admonished black men for not sufficiently supporting Harris. Speaking at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh on October 10, Obama addressed a small group of supporters.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” he said. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? That’s not acceptable.”

Farrell warned that the Democrats were “really blind” to the cues they were giving male voters.

He said the political landscape had changed for men because of the rise of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) culture, feminist ideology in educational institutions, toxic masculinity and male privilege narratives, and the emergence of “dad deprivation” as a result of divorce – young boys growing up without fathers.

“When it comes to why males are leaving the left … it’s exactly for that reason – ‘that we’ve been overlooked. And we’re angry’.”

Trump has already made the Democrats’ “man problem” a subject of public ridicule, with the former president putting the political needle into the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising initiative during the Al Smith Dinner in New York last week.

“There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris. Have you seen this? Anybody know it?” he asked. “Doesn’t sound like it. But I’m not worried about them at all because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me.”

Harris has been forced to downplay her problems with male voters, arguing that she intends to be “a president for all Americans” regardless of gender and geographic location.

She said it was not her experience that men were more favourable towards Trump. But there are growing calls for her to do more and go bigger to win back disgruntled young men.

Like Farrell, Volpe also said young men are lonelier than ever before. In his guest essay for the NYT, Volpe said men under 30 were nearly twice as likely to be single as women of the same age, less likely to enrol in college or the workforce, and less likely to receive treatment for mental health problems.

Volpe, who oversees the Harvard Youth Poll, said Trump had “tapped these anxieties by weaving a hyper-masculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions. And it’s working”.

The Republican nominee had given a masterclass in “bro-whispering” by championing cryptocurrency, securing the endorsement of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and giving UFC president Dana White a key slot at the Republican National Convention.

“To win more votes from young men, Ms Harris must address their fears head-on and present a bold vision that speaks to their desire for purpose and strength,” Volpe said. “Ms Harris needs to go big.”

Farrell has tried previously to push the Democrats into action, encouraging the Obama administration to establish a White House council for men and boys. He raised this after being asked to be a board adviser for the council established for women and girls in 2009.

But Farrell said he was told by Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, that “there’s no time and no place for that, because we, women and girls, have such a small amount of the resources and men have everything”.

“I realised that we were up against a very, very strong, what I would call zero-sum-game approach to men and women, which was the opposite of my approach to men and women, which is that we’re all in the same family boat. When only one sex wins, both sexes lose,” Farrell told The Australian.

In his 2018 book, The Boy Crisis, Farrell sketched out the extent of the problem facing young men in the US. The statistics tell the story: between the ages of 20 and 24, the rate of male suicide is between five and six times that of females; men die at a younger age from 14 out of 15 leading causes of death; 92 per cent of workplace deaths are male, and; men receive only 40 per cent of college degrees.

When Trump was president, Farrell says he was invited to “present the boy crisis issue to some of the top staffers at the White House” and it appeared Trump was thinking about doing something in response.

“They asked me to do a speech that President Trump would give to create a White House council on boys and men, and also to talk about and articulate boys’ issues. And so I did that,” Farrell said.

“But he (Trump) didn’t deliver it. And the reason that I was told was that people, that his top staff, felt that … he really was not the ideal family person. And so they started to talk about (Mike) Pence doing that. And then it got too close to the election.”

Farrell tried again with Jen Klein, who became director of the White House Gender Policy Council when Joe Biden was elected President. But Farrell said the policy council “excluded men’s and boy’s issues”.

“That White House Gender Policy Council, mind you, leaves out the single biggest endangered group in this country, which is black males, who are doing worse than any other single demographic,” he said. “It’s so obvious to me why males are going over to Trump.”

“The Democrats are really … they’re all feminist in their orientation. And the type of feminism that suggests that men have all the privilege and men have all the power. And men are part of the patriarchy that was designed to make rules to benefit men at the expense of women.”

Volpe said there could be long-term consequences for US politics as a result of the shift in attitudes of young men.

“Compared with when Mr Trump ran in 2020, young male voters are now less likely to support government-backed climate change solutions (down 15 points, according to our poll) and affirmative action for qualified candidates (down eight points),” he says.

“They are more likely to question immigration policy (up 12 points), free trade (up 10 points) and whether government stimulus leads to economic growth (up seven points).

“They are also more likely to believe that religious values should play a more important role in government (up six points).”

Whether the drift to the right among young men was a short-lived, “Trump-inspired episode” or a more permanent transition would depend on “Ms Harris’s ability to connect with and motivate young voters as the campaign nears its end”.