I’ve spent a lifetime championing women’s rights. Harris should pick a male running mate.
Democrats have a well-documented male voter problem. They ignore that at their own peril.
THERE IS AN OLD POLITICAL ADAGE that no one pulls the lever for the second in line.
That’s out the window this election cycle. Kamala Harris’s choice of running mate will shape the race in the next four months. And it’s for precisely this reason that Democrats need to resist magical thinking about an all-female ticket going up against Donald Trump, a man with a history of misogyny who’s been found liable for sexual abuse.
Instead, Harris must choose a strong man to round out the ticket. And Democrats must nominate her and him in order to win in November.
I take no pleasure in saying this. I’ve spent years in the trenches trying to help elevate female leaders and championing women’s issues.
But my reluctant warning comes precisely from that hard-won experience as a long-time feminist, a strong supporter of Vice President Harris, and as someone who led one of the nation’s largest reproductive rights organizations—NARAL Pro-Choice America (now Reproductive Freedom for All)—through the Trump years.
I’ve spent years documenting and fighting the male backlash that propelled the former president to power. I’m here to testify that that same energy is currently undergirding his re-election campaign and has, in fact, gained strength. We ignore it at our own peril.
Let me be clear: I love Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the woman most often mentioned to join the ticket. She’s an amazing leader with a long political future ahead of her. I also strongly support the move to elevate Vice President Harris following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not seek a second term. She has more than earned the spot and the instant reinvigoration of the Democratic coalition demonstrated that she is more than capable of beating Trump.
Large and small donations to her campaign have smashed previous records. So many people tried to join a call for Black women to celebrate and strategize on behalf of the Harris campaign that it almost broke Zoom. Harris’s team showed tremendous agility in boxing out the potential competition and consolidated support in record time. Crucial endorsements keep rolling in. These early indicators of strength are significant and central to a winning strategy.
But they cannot cloud our view of what else is required. And as much as it might pain me to admit, there’s no path to 270 Electoral College votes solely on women’s euphoria.
The math just doesn’t add up. For starters, there is a solid segment of women—predominantly, but not exclusively, white women—who are and remain unmoved from their traditional electoral preferences by the presence of a woman on the ballot.
With those women not budging, Democrats need to get men on board with Harris. To do so, we need to get them on board with the idea that putting Democrats more broadly in charge isn’t against their self-interest.
Democrats have a well-documented male voter problem, with many believing that Democrats are hostile to “masculine values.” The problem has been compounded by the exodus of Latino and Black men from the Democratic coalition, creating a new generation of voters marked by a gender divergence so severe that Axios has called 2024 a “boy-girl election.”
The final straw was Biden’s disastrous debate performance, which cast Democrats as a party committed to protecting infirmity over shoring up our nation. The post-debate cratering of support among men who had been “ridin’ with Biden” since 2020 should be a clear wake up call.
Elections are often about vibes. Trump and the Republicans get that. And they’re committed to making this one a referendum on masculinity. That’s precisely why Trump announced his re-election campaign online with MMA fighter Logan Paul. It’s why the Republican National Convention was a grab bag of testosterone-infused diatribes, complete with Hulk Hogan calling Trump a “gladiator” and UFC CEO Dana White saying that of all the tough guys he’s met in the tough guy business, Trump is the toughest tough guy of all.
All of this took place against a backdrop of a foiled assassination attempt the prior week, where the bloodied candidate emerged undeterred with fist raised—the personification of the bulletproof superman.
Democrats cannot win without some men, and we cannot contrast Trump’s brand of toxic masculinity with a female-only ticket or feminism alone.
We need to project a different, more compelling kind of tough guy: one willing to partner with strong women instead of belittling them. There are many men like that, but among the plausible vice presidential candidates, Sen. Mark Kelly has a particularly strong resume for the moment.
Kelly is a combat veteran fighter pilot and astronaut. He’s also a husband menschy enough to step up when his wife—Rep. Gabby Giffords—was felled by political violence, the exact kind of political violence that Trump foments. His scientific and technical background speaks to Arizona’s and America’s prosperous digital future while his action-hero resume speaks to maintaining our inherent rugged nature. As the son of not one but two cops from New Jersey, he has blue-collar roots. His ability to point to a childhood growing up with a police officer mom is exactly the message we need to send: comfort with tough women who can operate in traditionally male realms.
Best of all, he’s proven that he can leverage one of the Democrats’ best assets—support for abortion rights—while dunking on men who would rob women of that right. He won the undying loyalty of reproductive rights leaders with his TKO of Blake Masters in the 2022 debate for the Arizona Senate seat when he turned to the crowd and said, “I think we all know guys like this, guys that think they know better than everyone about everything. You think you know better than women and doctors about abortion. . . . Folks, we all know guys like this, and we can’t be letting them make decisions about us.”
If Kelly isn’t the right guy, there are others. The Harris campaign appears to be sorting through the list.
What the Harris campaign needs to resist is the magical thinking that Democrats can avoid male volatility as a salient variable in this contest. Elections aren’t logical, they’re visceral. Trump and his cronies leverage a distinctly male fear of obsolescence in a changing world into a brutal game of grievance politics. Overcoming those base instincts will require a strong team, one that taps into the aspirations of both genders for genuine respect. An authentic partnership between a strong woman and a strong man would make a strong case for Democratic leadership. That’s how we win in November.
Ilyse Hogue is a senior fellow at New America, director of its Gender, Extremism, and Engagement project, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and author of The Lie that Binds, a history of the anti-abortion movement.
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