It was only a matter of time. After Black women, Black men, and white women each organized conference calls in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s Democratic presidential run, white men – an historically privileged demographic group that leans Republican overall – got in on the action.
The new initiative, White Dudes for Harris, kicked off in earnest on Monday night with a video livestream that raised more than $4 million for Harris and over 190,000 viewers over the course of more than three hours of speeches.
A star-studded speakers list alternated between prominent Democratic elected officials, activists, and union leaders, and a list of Hollywood performers that included Mark Ruffalo, Jeff Bridges (the literal “Dude”), Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sean Astin, Bradley Whitford, Lance Bass, Josh Groban, Josh Gad, Mark Hamill, and the popular podcaster and business expert Scott Galloway.
The event doubled as something of a vice presidential audition for several (white, male) Democrats under varying levels of consideration to serve as Harris’s running mate: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper delivered remarks on the livestream just moments before he announced he had removed himself from consideration.
Walz, a former public school teacher who has emerged as a prominent Harris campaign surrogate in recent days, summarized the mood of the evening with a call to court persuadable voters with patience and compassion – without compromising on core principles.
“We can get out there, reach out, make the case, and for one thing – don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” he said. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
As far as Democratic morale and campaign fundraising events go, the livestream was an obvious success (though its fundraising haul did not match up to the “White Women for Kamala” call’s $8.5 million total last week). At least some of that money will arrive thanks to the sale of thousands of “White Dudes for Harris” baseball caps and other merchandise.
But what exactly was the point of getting “white dudes” together under the banner of group identity? Given the historic association of white identity groups with white supremacy, one might regard the framing as puzzling – not least at a time when Democrats are trying to pin the Republican presidential ticket with the “weird” label.
“I’m not the political scientists or the pollsters, but I know enough to know – and I’ve seen enough polling results or outcomes in elections to know – that if white males would vote 1-2% more for Democrats than they usually do, then we win this race.”
– North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D)
Ross Morales Rocketto, a lead organizer of White Dudes for Harris, and veteran progressive consultant who co-founded the Democratic candidate recruitment group Run for Something, addressed what he called the “elephant in the room” – that is, the very existence of the livestream as such – in his introductory remarks.
Many working-class, poor, or otherwise struggling white men have found something appealing in former President Donald Trump’s demagoguery and focus on restoring masculinity, Rocketto argued.
“The left has been ceding white men to the MAGA right for way, way too long,” Rocketto declared. “That’s going to stop tonight, because we know that the silent majority of white men aren’t actually MAGA supporters.”
“They’re folks like you who just want a better life for their families. They want more economic security,” he added. “They want better health care. They want better schools. There’s a crisis of loneliness in this country, and many of us are the ones that feel the most lonely.”
Without citing specific statistics, Rocketto referenced men’s higher rates of “deaths of despair” – a term used to describe preventable deaths from drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, and chronic diseases associated with stress and other lifestyle problems. Rocketto had personal experience with the matter having lost a white male friend from his Texas childhood to suicide.
There is also, Rocketto and other speakers emphasized, an inescapable electoral imperative for Democrats in taking these white, male voters seriously.
Nationwide, President Joe Biden won 40% of white men in 2020 – an improvement on Hillary Clinton’s 32% share in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.
Few Democrats would argue Harris – or any other Democrat – can win a majority of white men. But if she holds down Trump’s margin in the demographic group, it would likely make a difference, especially in the Great Lakes states where white male swing voters play a particularly important role.
“I’m not the political scientists or the pollsters, but I know enough to know – and I’ve seen enough polling results or outcomes in elections to know – that if white males would vote 1-2% more for Democrats than they usually do, then we win this race,” Cooper said. “We win Kamala Harris’s race. We win Democratic races in North Carolina. So this is a call to action.”
Rocketto’s introductory remarks notwithstanding, however, if you came to the White Dudes for Harris livestream in hopes of a clear and consistent message about how to address Democrats’ challenges with white, male voters, you would have been disappointed. There was no unified appeal for either tactical or substantive changes in Democratic Party messaging to improve the party’s appeal with the white working-class voters flocking to the MAGA movement, let alone a nuanced, Brookings Institution-inspired discussion on the unique problems afflicting a select group of men and boys in today’s economy, and how that has fueled reactionary movements.
Instead, Democrats who tuned in – and indeed, these were mostly dyed-in-the-wool Democrats – were treated to classic Democratic policy encomiums, from the need to block tax cuts for the rich and protect abortion rights to Harris’s expansive campaign theme of “freedom.”
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
To the extent that speakers focused on male or white identity, it was usually to offer gentle admonitions that participants leverage their white, male privilege in the service of electing the country’s first female president, and building a more equitable country in the process.
Several speakers spoke out against the suggestion by a number of prominent Republicans that Harris is unqualified because of her gender as a woman, or her racial identity as a Black and Indian-American woman. Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, would be the country’s first female president, and first Asian American president.
“This idea somehow that when other people get we lose, that when other some people benefit, we just get left behind. That is absolutely not true,” said former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a co-chair of Harris’s presidential campaign. “If white guys would just show up, if we would stand up and be counted, if we would talk about what it really means to be a great partner and a man, which is to help and to lift up and to not push down, all of us are going to be better for it.”
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group, and the sole non-white person to speak on the livestream, put it more bluntly when he called upon white men to speak up against racism and sexism directed at Harris.
When Republicans disparage Harris’s intelligence or fitness for the job, he warned, “Your silence signals agreement.”
“Don’t allow this fringe cult to speak for you and poison the well,” Mitchell said. “This is your time to stand up for not just the VP, not just for Kamala Harris, but for democracy, for community and for family.”
At times during the livestream, speakers’ efforts to shoehorn universal themes into the “white men” framework of the call led to some awkward attempts at humor.
Whitford, a former star of the “West Wing” TV series, joked about the “variety of whiteness” on display among the livestream’s speakers. “It’s like a rainbow of beige,” he quipped.
Jimmy Williams Jr., the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which is known to be one of the more racially diverse and ideologically progressive building trades unions, opened his remarks with what seemed like a tongue-and-cheek observation about the historically white makeup of his wing of the labor movement.
“I started thinking, I’m like, ‘Hey, how does this white dude get to be on a call with the secretary of transportation, [and] with Jeff Bridges, the coolest dude in the world,’” Williams said. “And I went, you know what, nothing screams white dude more than a construction union, right? And nothing screams white, middle-class working America more than a construction union.”
Williams went on to cite all of the ways in which Biden and Harris have delivered for organized labor, including through the bailout of the Teamsters’ distressed pension funds, and the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure law that’s “creating hundreds of thousands of construction jobs for white dudes.”
But if Williams leaned into the appeal of those policies for white guys, he also made clear he says transcending racial divisions as a key component to electing Harris and propelling the labor movement forward.
“We cannot allow for division around race and misogyny and xenophobia to be the thing that sets us backwards,” he concluded.