If the idea of a bunch of liberal white guys talking about a “positive, multiracial, feminist democracy narrative” strikes you as unbearably cringey, white guys like Chris Crass would encourage you to consider the alternative.
As a “progressive white guy,” Crass often feels “really sad about what white guy political expression looks like” in the age of Donald Trump and the hard-core masculine right. “When you think of, like, white men taking political action, generally the idea of what that looks like is terrible — Charlottesville, MAGA, a Klan rally,” said Crass, a longtime organizer from Louisville, Kentucky.
But in late July, with Vice President Kamala Harris suddenly the de facto presidential nominee, Crass saw an opportunity to mobilize “progressive white men for multiracial feminist democracy” — in other words, organizing white men behind Harris and against Trump. Crass, 50, co-founded the group White Men Against MAGA within 24 hours of Harris replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Crass is quick to note the idea for White Men Against MAGA came from Win With Black Women, which held a Zoom call with 90,000 Black women and their allies on July 21, the day Harris launched her campaign. Crass wanted his own efforts on behalf of white men and Harris to be just as “positive” and “joyful,” with a “sense of possibility and hope” for what white guys can accomplish this election “instead of all these years under Trump being like, white men suck.”
For the second time in a decade, Democrats have picked a female nominee for president ― after Hillary Clinton in 2016 — choosing Harris, a boundary-breaking woman of color competing in a coin-toss election that will be decided, in part, by white guys across a handful of swing states in the Upper Midwest.
And white men are, for better or worse, offering up their services: Included in the medley of identity classes popping up to back Harris are white guys, who occupy the key organizing space of white guys talking to other white guys about voting blue.
It remains to be seen whether the type of progressive dudes the right likes to deride as out-of-touch coastal elites can effectively lead a movement whose goal is reaching persuadable white men in the middle in the country. But their objective, if not solely to elect Harris, is to do what the Democratic Party hasn’t done in ages: create a man cave for all dudes in the Democratic tent.
“I think we’re all pretty tired of hearing we suck. Every time you go online it’s the same story — we’re the problem.”
- The narrator from an ad by White Dudes for Harris
Leading the charge on that front are the White Men Against MAGA, which held its own Zoom call with 1,300 men and is participating in battleground state canvassing and phone banking for Harris. There’s also Men4Choice, a white-guy founded multiracial coalition that saw a surge of interest in its fellowship program post-Roe v. Wade. The group, around for almost a decade, had previously partnered with Harris’ husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, to advocate for abortion rights, but over the summer it made Harris its first official presidential endorsement.
But the group that’s garnered the most attention by far is White Dudes for Harris, which drew a star-studded lineup of famous beige men, including early-aughts pop star Lance Bass and actor Mark Hamill, to a July fundraising call that brought in more than $4 million for the Harris campaign (the group, it should be noted, is not coordinating directly with the Harris campaign, which has left the explicitly male organizing space and most other affinity-based organizing to outside groups). Last week, the White Dudes announced a $10 million ad reservation targeting men in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, debuting the golf-and-beer-themed Father’s Day card of political ads.
“I think we’re all pretty tired of hearing we suck. Every time you go online it’s the same story — we’re the problem,” says the narrator, with a whiff of a New York accent and the delivery of a nagged-to-death husband, before launching into a pitch for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “Before you jump down my throat, they’re actually talking to guys like us. No lectures. No BS. Just real solutions that protect our freedoms and help us take care of the people who matter,” the narrator says, set against B-roll of a family cookout and a white guy holding a baby.
The ad found an audience eager to mock it online, mirroring the reception from some corners of the internet to the entire White Dudes effort. A GOP strategist from Kentucky called it “an SNL parody of what a liberal Dem consultant thinks ‘regular, every day’ white men would want to hear.” Another commenter on the X social media site said they’d rather “die of radiation poisoning than hear the guys voice in the white dudes for Harris ad.”
The White Dudes are well aware you might be eye-rolling at their exaggerated tough-guy narrator and self-deprecating attempts to own an increasingly undesirable identity on the left — like calling its political action committee Beige Rainbow PAC. But part of the White Dudes project, for an enlightened white dude, is taking the feedback and creating space for the discomfort.
“There was a lot of ‘I hate-watched this thing and it actually was great, but actually identity politics is terrible,’” said Ross Morales Rocketto, the man-bun-sporting co-founder of White Dudes and a Democratic strategist who co-founded Run for Something, describing the reception to the group’s 200,000-person virtual meeting July 29. “The overwhelming feedback from the people who actually do the work was almost exclusively positive about the fact that, like, this is something we need. This was a space that needed to get created.”
That white men would even need their own organizing space given, you know, most of human history, is what can make the concept of the White Dudes project seem tone-deaf or self-indulgent to people on the outside.
“Historically, white men have been assumed to be the neutral. In other words, it’s like, well, white and male are the standard categories, so that’s not identity politics. Those are just voters, and everybody else is part of these other categories,” explained Kelly Dittmar, a research professor at Rutgers University’s Center for Women in Politics, who was given the unenviable task of describing how white men may or may not constitute their own identity group. “When we accept the white male norm, it makes it seem like it would be odd in some way for them to create their own grouping,” she concluded.
But white men feeling left behind in the economy and sidelined by the left’s focus on historically marginalized groups is what fueled Trump’s rise and made the GOP a soft landing for male extremists and ragey displays of testosterone. That includes this summer’s Republican National Convention, which featured an ex-wrestler who tore his clothes off on stage, an angry white rapper who tore his clothes off on stage and a ringing endorsement of Trump from the CEO of an organization known for bloody fights between men.
“One of the things that we hear from young men, and particularly white men, is that they’re really struggling these days and struggling to feel like they’re getting ahead. They don’t think that they will be better off than previous generations,” said Roshni Nedungadi, the chief researcher with HIT Strategies, a political data analysis firm. “They’re saying everyone is focused on women, on people of color, on getting other groups ahead. But who cares about me?”
For Rocketto, a 15-year veteran of progressive organizing who’s become the 39-year-old bearded face of the White Dudes movement, it’s about the left ceding white men to the right — particularly blue-collar white men, lured to the GOP by Trump’s bluster about bringing back blue-collar jobs and making white men feel important again. “We target ads to those people, but often what we don’t do is create space for them,” Rocketto said, explaining this was the goal of the July fundraising call. “A lot of them don’t feel like they have a place in the party. And Donald Trump in the MAGA right makes space for white men.”
In 2016, Trump won 63% of the white male vote against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton but did slightly worse against Biden, a white guy of the Silent Generation who was able to bring some white folks back into the Democratic fold in 2020. There seems to be no data so far to suggest that Harris is doing any worse with white men than Biden did four years ago — nor is there data suggesting she’s doing well enough to combat the potentially devastating loss of young Black men and Latinos to Trump’s Republican Party.
The goal of White Dudes, Rocketto stressed, isn’t to change the minds of chest-thumping Trump supporters. Rocketto believes there’s enough of a middle ground of male voters who can be won over by Harris and Walz if the message is targeted the right way and with the right tone — funny, honest, not too preachy. “There will be a lane in the strategy that’s about reaching out to white men who are not part of the MAGA right but maybe are a little bit on the fence about her, and that’s hopefully where we’ll be able to engage,” said Rocketto, who, like Crass, cited Win With Black Women as the inspiration for White Dudes.
What Harris herself and the White Dudes haven’t done, however, is lean into the vice president’s gender the way Clinton did in her 2016 “I’m With Her” race. “People don’t necessarily need to be reminded of it. It’s not necessarily a message that persuades them,” Rocketto said.
But the idea of gender is impossible to ignore in an election featuring a historic female candidate and where both sides could not be further apart over what it means to look and sound like a man.
At Trump’s GOP convention, delegates repeated the chant “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and railed against “men in women’s sports.” Trump entered the arena to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” At the time, the newly anointed GOP nominee had just tapped JD Vance, the junior U.S. senator from Ohio, as his running mate. Vance has since become known for his hard-line views on family values and comments demonizing “childless cat ladies.” (The backlash wound up spurring another quirky Harris coalition: Cat Ladies for Kamala.
Democrats presented a 180-degree version of masculinity at their August convention, which featured Emhoff as the goofy Borat-quoting husband who stepped away from his law career to become the first ever second gentleman, and Walz as the gentle lug of an ex-high school football coach and gay-straight alliance leader whose teenage son cried at the sight of him taking the stage at the Democratic National Convention.
Walz was partially chosen to balance the ticket with Midwestern white-guy energy, and though Walz has not played a direct role in the White Men or White Dudes organizing efforts, he is nothing if not the movement’s unofficial standard-bearer of bear-hug manliness.
“I feel like I’m in the coaches’ locker room,” said former Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, an ex-college quarterback from just outside Youngstown, Ohio, an area of the country where white men lurched to the right under Trump. “The way he straight-talks, the way he delivers, the way he’s animated, passionate … it’s right out of central casting, you know?”
Men are generally “really pragmatic and skeptical,” Ryan said, when asked how he’d describe his gender’s approach to voting. He also confirmed men don’t like bullshit. “Trump filled the no-BS lane in 2016 and to some extent in 2020,” said Ryan, who thinks Walz can help the Democrats corner the no-BS, Midwestern white-guy vote in November by talking about jobs, the economy and kitchen-table issues.
Oren Jacobson, the Men4Choice founder, said Walz and Harris prove “there’s nothing wrong with being a man. There’s nothing wrong with masculinity. But there’s something wrong with trying to control other people, and what you see with Doug Emhoff and Gov. Walz are men who are comfortable and confident in themselves, and able to stand alongside and uplift and amplify women, too. That visual has been so powerful — and that they’ve done it with such joy.”
Jacobson, whose fellowship program teaches men how to talk about reproductive rights without “causing harm or embarrassing themselves,” praised White Dudes for creating a welcoming space for all the bros. “It creates an entry point that feels like my bros are going, right? And guys go where their guys go,” he said.
The White Dudes, White Men and adjacent groups are nothing if not mindful of the critiques of their movement: that resources on the left would be better spent turning out the women and younger voters who are more likely to power their victory. That even the most well-meaning white men risk centering themselves in work that shouldn’t be about them. That it’s … hard to hear white men talking earnestly and academically about other white men.
“The reality is we have a lot of positional power, so we need to lean into our vulnerabilities and find ways to show up in this intersectional work.”
- Jason Biehl, White Men Against MAGA organizer
But the white men for Harris and reproductive justice view themselves as a collective force for social good outside of themselves, and they’re informed and careful to conduct the work with the necessary permission structure of people of color.
“I think sometimes, because of the power dynamics, there’s this feeling that somehow this work is led by Black folks and folks of color, it’s led by women and more marginalized folks. The reality is we have a lot of positional power, so we need to lean into our vulnerabilities and find ways to show up in this intersectional work,” said Jason Biehl, a 48-year-old outreach captain with White Men Against MAGA and volunteer with Showing Up for Racial Justice, a group that formed amid the backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency.
Biehl, not unlike other people in this article, can casually drop references to feminist, multiracial democracy and the author and social critic bell hooks. Asked whether these are ever references he’ll make to, say, a male swing voter in Michigan who is on the fence about Harris, the answer is, of course, no. “I would just say that phone-banking is hard,” Biehl said.
Rocketto pushed back on the idea that Democrats should just focus on women and people of color, arguing that the resources exist now for the party to do it all, including attempting to make inroads with the notoriously Trump-supporting demographic of non-college-educated white men. He also thinks Harris may end up doing better than expected with white men generally in November.
“I think that it is possible that she will win a higher percentage of the white male vote than Joe Biden did,” Rocketto said. “I think that’s very possible. And to be honest, we couldn’t have gotten 200,000 people on a call for Joe Biden.”
Even if Harris falls short, the left must prioritize countering the “manosphere and all that stuff that floats out there on the right. If we don’t, we’re going to continue to see our problems get worse with white men,” Rocketto said, adding that he’s proud Democrats this cycle “have really leaned into putting out their own version of what masculinity can be. I think that’s actually really powerful.”
Crass, the White Men Against MAGA founder, hopes the white guy movement will redefine what it looks like to be a politically engaged white guy. “We’re trying to create something positive that can then serve as a North Star to bring white guys into a place of hopeful, positive vision for the country. But also for themselves — as white guys.”