As Democrats pour $20 million into an effort to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in the spaces” male voters frequent, remember that 25 years ago, a Presidential candidate attempted to rebrand himself in a similar way to laughable results.
Way back in 1999, Presidential candidate and sitting Vice President Al Gore secured the services of Naomi Wolf as a campaign consultant for some $15,000 per month, a startling sum. At the time, Time Magazine launched the story, claiming, “Maybe every campaign needs a mystery consultant, a mad genius who can turn a candidate into something bigger than himself. Inside the Gore camp, that role seems to have fallen to Naomi Wolf, feminist, best-selling author and outspoken advocate of female sexual power, who has quietly emerged as one of the most curious forces inside the ever more curious Gore operation.” While the campaign wouldn’t say specifically what Ms. Wolf’s role was, advisers, who Time insisted were rendered “speechless” by her presence, described her as “helping out” on “outreach” and a “wardrobe consultant.” To be sure, Ms. Wolf was a curious choice for such a role in a lot of ways, not well known as a political consultant, described primarily as a “feminist” and an “outspoken advocate of female sexual power.” In her first book, The Beauty Myth, she assailed male dominated society as perpetuating the impossible standard of “virtuous beauty.” In her third, she recounted her “sexual coming of age and denounce[d] masculine attempts to muffle female sexuality by ostracizing the sexually adventurous girl,” in Time’s words, before urging schools to teach “sexual gradualism,” “If we teach kids about other kinds of sexual exploration that help them wait for intercourse until they are really ready, we let girls find out about their desire…and let kids have an option not to go immediately ‘from zero to 60.’ Teaching sexual gradualism is as sensible as teaching kids to drive.” In between, she angered Democrats with her second book, Fire with Fire, which argued “that women should turn away from women-vs.-men feminism, avoid fault lines like abortion and lesbian rights, and start looking for bipartisan women’s issues like violence, pay discrimination and harassment.” Regarding the Vice President himself, she was said to have described him as a “Beta male” who would not win the White House until he became an Alpha, and it was widely believed she was engaged to enact that transformation mid-campaign including resetting his wardrobe.
Sure enough, shortly after her arrival, Vice President Gore’s style changed to more a casual, polo-shirt sporting earth-tones affair with sharper, slimmer cuts, three button suits and cowboy boots. The mainstream media, though not quite the lying propagandists they would become over the next two decades, dutifully swooned. “This is the TV age, when a candidate’s appearance sends out important cues about him or her. Al Gore had made a determined effort to change his image, and it looks like his efforts may be working,” explained CNN political analyst Bill Schneider. Gore has his drawl back. He’s trying to get away from any implication he’s another insider politician,” Mr. Schneider continued. “It has certainly done him no harm.” ABC’s Ted Koppel, in perhaps a preview of thrills running up legs because of President Barack Obama, claimed Mr. Gore looked “buff in a particularly snug pair of jeans.” “Al Gore has this ‘alpha’ woman, who came up with ‘alpha’ male. Now you see Gore wearing alpha-pants and alpha-shirts,” Eugene McCarthy described the transformation. Of course, not everyone was equally enthused. “Generally speaking, it can be a real negative for a candidate to undergo a physical makeover in mid-campaign,” said Ron Faucheux of Campaigns & Elections magazine. “In some ways, Gore has been hurt by it, particularly with so much undue press coverage about changes in his clothes or hair in the past year.” Perhaps needless to say, Vice President Gore claimed there was no transformation at all. “I’ve worn boots off and on for my whole life,” Mr. Gore told reporters, who supposedly pestered him about it, presumably while fawning over him. “The boots I have on today were given to me by my brother-in-law 20 years ago. I just had them resoled.” Regardless of whether there was or wasn’t a transformation or fashion makeover, Mr. Facheux ultimately had it right, when he concluded “I don’t know that voters are all that interested in the clothes. In the end, I believe they will look at the issues and the facts, not the fashion.” As history proved, Vice President Gore went on to lose an incredibly close election, one disputed in the courts for more than two months, and one some Democrats continue to insist he won in truth.
For somewhat obvious reasons, I was reminded of this episode when Democrats announced a new initiative that appears to take the same approach on an even larger scale, “Speaking with American Men.” Based on the data from the last election, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz suffered tremendous losses among men, particularly young men including those from minority backgrounds. According to a study conducted by the Democrat analytics firm, Catalist, President Donald Trump won young voters outright by 9 points while non-white voters “got redder” including winning a majority of Latino men by 3 points and black men shifting to the Republican side by 10 points; overall there was a 16 point decline in Democrat support among males aged 18 to 29, what the left-leaning site Vox.com described as falling “off a cliff.” The result is “Speaking to Men,” a new $20 million initiative, which they describe as a “strategic plan” to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in the spaces” male voters frequent. “The Democratic Party’s tarnished image could not come at a more inopportune moment,” the New York Times reported on this development last week. “In this era of political polarization, the national party’s brand is more important and influential than ever, often driving the outcomes of even the most local of races,” they continued, reporting that leading Democrats are gathering at swank hotels to craft this plan. Of course, the cynic in me simply has to note that Governor Tim Walz was widely believed to have addressed this problem last year, when article after article positioned him as an embodiment of modern masculinity. For example, Susan Woodward, writing for USA Today, described how “Football coach and cheerleader” Governor Walz was “defining masculinity in 2024” as late as October 19, shortly before the election itself. As she put it, “Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has made Tim Walz’s stereotypically masculine traits − a sports-lover, military veteran, gun owner and father − central to his introduction to America’s voters. It’s been a steady theme for the Democrats over the last two months – visiting college and high school football games, hunting for pheasants, hawking camo hats – as a counterweight to Donald Trump and JD Vance, their Republican rivals who are making a play for the ‘bro vote’ and whose surrogates have tried to cast doubt on the 60-year-old Minnesota governor’s macho credentials.” According to former Republican National Committee chairman and current Trump-critic Michael Steele, “What Walz offers is probably the more traditionally and actually appropriate view of what a ‘real man’ is. He’s a father, he’s a coach, he’s at times a disciplinarian, he’s the guy who’s going to help you fix your car. I think he’s a phenomenal role model.” “He shows you can be masculine, but also not threatened by women as equals, or women who are in positions of power,” explained Amy Diehl, sexism researcher and author of Glass Walls. “In fact, you can be cheerleaders for them.” Nor was this the Democrats’ only effort. There was also the infamous ad targeting “real men,” featuring a motley collection of actors and activists including a gay porn star claiming to be real men, and the “White Dudes for Harris” effort.
Both failed, leading even some Democrat strategists to question the wisdom this time around. For example, Michael Ceraso told Fox News last week he found it “hilarious” that “people in suits are hanging out at luxury hotels asking how they can talk to day-to-day Americans.” “We’re having an issue with the messenger more than the message,” he explained, accurately in my opinion. “I just don’t understand how, after all these years and all these Democrats who’ve been in the game, how we continue to make those same choices. Like Rahm Emmanuel, or all these sort of big names, they’re just like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to figure out how to win in, you know, rural North Carolina by hanging out in a New York hotel.’ That makes no sense to me. And strategically, I don’t care how much money you spend on focus groups, if you’re doing that, you’re just negating any type of investment you’re putting into how to have a conversation with voters.” “Democratic donors treating men like an endangered species on a remote island they need to study probably won’t rebuild trust,” noted MSNBC contributor Rotimi Adeoy on X. “This kind of top-down, anthropological approach misses the point: people don’t want to be decoded, they want to be understood and met where they are.” “The idea that you can ‘fix’ the male voter problem that exists with Black, Latino, and white men by spending $20 million to study their syntax like they’re a foreign culture is exactly why there’s a disconnect,” she continued. “These voters aren’t a research subject. They’re citizens,” Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot, concurred, also posting X, “This really says it all. Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.” Others, however, are at least a little more bullish, if not more visionary in their ideas. Natalie Mehlman Petrzela, writing for MSNBC, argued that the plan could work. Building on an idea she covered with one of the leaders of the Speaking to American Men effort, Ilyse Hogue, she recommended that Democrats should start by courting voters at the gym. “A smart place to start would be the gym; the booming men’s fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, growth driven by men under 25, who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women. And as SAM co-director Ilyse Hogue and I wrote here last year, the right has done an excellent job parlaying young men’s healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics.” “Across the political spectrum,” she continued, “craving the surefire sense of accomplishment the gym provides is an age-old response to an unstable political and economic environment. And historically, championing physical fitness with appeals to American manliness has not been a partisan issue. If the SAM initiative is going to net the Democrats more than online snark, its leaders should appreciate that this history suggests the party’s path forward might just begin at the gym.”
Setting aside how doubtful it is that Americans are clamoring for yet another non-political space to be invaded by politics, it’s hard to believe this effort will be any more effective than Vice President Gore’s more targeted version 25 years earlier. As ever, voters crave authenticity above almost anything else, people who are who they are and who are comfortable in their own skin, and short of grooming a cast of Academy Award winning actors to run in the future, authenticity is near impossible to fake. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the most under-appreciated aspect of the Trump phenomena is that he is and always will be Donald Trump. Whether he’s giving an acceptance speech at a convention watched by tens of millions of people or getting inaugurated for the second time, he is the same person Americans see at rallies, debates, interviews, townhalls, etc. Some, like my lovely wife for example, might even argue that he’s too much himself at times and should dial it back, but of course, he cannot. He is who he is, and voters, or at least more of them than his competition, clearly respect that because they always know what they’re going to get, flaws, warts, and all. For better or worse, this sort of bond can’t simply be grown in a focus group or foisted upon a politician by a consultant. To my knowledge, it’s failed every time it’s tried and even beyond the obvious opportunity for satire this time around, it’s likely doomed again. At the same time, one simply has to wonder: Why play pretend rather than simply run a real man in the first place?
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