Opinion: Joe Biden Has a Big Problem: Men
Joe Biden has 99 problems this week—and men are a big one. Any Democrat who replaces him will almost surely face similar difficulties from a group of people who think of themselves as courageous tough guys, but are among the American electorate’s most fearful voters. If Democrats want to win in November, whether Biden is replaced or not, they need to figure out how to assuage men’s fears—without alienating the women who are key to delivering Democrats a victory.
According to recent polling, no demographic group has confidence that the president remains young enough to do the job, even among groups that largely still plan to support him. After his debate debacle, he hemorrhaged support, with a New York Times/Siena poll finding that Trump now leads Biden by 6 points, the widest margin those pollsters have seen since 2015.
Trump’s advantage among male voters, and especially among men without college degrees, is well-documented. But Biden overcame it in 2020, and this year, Democrats have a sharper edge with female voters, many of whom are incensed about Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade and opening the door for Republican-led state legislatures to criminalize abortion, and potentially come for contraception and fertility treatments next.
Biden Says Only ‘Lord Almighty’ Can Make Him Go as Dems Sharpen Axes
That Republicans in Congress have refused to protect contraception or IVF, and continue to oppose abortion even if they don’t really want to discuss it in an election year, does not help their cause. Even Trump, who brags about appointing judges who overturned Roe, sees this for the catastrophe it is, and is trying to convince voters that he won’t ban abortion nationwide.
One question, though, is whether Democratic advantages with women will outweigh Republican advantages with men, which under Trump have grown. Previously reliable Democratic voters, including Black, Hispanic, and young men, have shifted rightward. And Biden’s increasingly visible frailty doesn’t help the Democratic math.
While women actually moved slightly towards Biden after the debate, perhaps recalling the exuberant and unbridled misogyny of Trump and his presidency, men defected en masse: Trump’s already-commanding lead among men nearly doubled, from 12 points to 23. In late June, just before the debate, Biden was leading Trump among men under 30; afterwards, Trump has pulled ahead among this group by 9 points.
These statistics are dire, but they shouldn’t be interpreted as cause for Democrats to chase men at any cost. The Republican Party and its Supreme Leader have made unabashed efforts to appeal to male voters at the expense of female ones, embracing a kind of masculinity that hinges on demeaning and diminishing women.
It’s not just Trump choosing a UFC fight for his first public appearance after being convicted of 34 felonies, or even weeks later suggesting that the company start a “migrant league of fighters” so that people Trump considers sub-human might tear each other to shreds for his entertainment—the kind of bizarre machismo that has come to characterize this president’s views.
It’s his unrestrained admiration of dictators for their apparent masculinity, a view he expressed in a video obtained by The Daily Beast in which he praises Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling him “a fierce man, very tough guy,” and questions—while sitting limply in his golf cart—whether Biden will be able to deal with men like Xi and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
It’s his and his party’s efforts to curtail women’s basic rights to our own bodies. It’s the repeated Republican insistence that gender traditionalism, with men holding all the financial and political power and women dependent on them, is the ideal way to structure a society. It’s conservatives repeatedly insulting successful or ambitious women, sometimes with misogynist slurs. Some conservatives have even called to repeal the 19th Amendment and end women’s voting rights.
Shocking numbers of American women don’t seem troubled by any of this, perhaps because misogyny is so baked into their lives that this all reads as acceptable, or at least within the realm of normal. And even more shocking numbers of American men are not only untroubled, but entertained, enthused, and inspired.
These voters are largely unwinnable for Democrats, and the downsides of trying to cater to gleeful misogynists are simply too high, both electorally and morally. Getting pro-choice women out to the polls in November is more important than convincing he-man woman-hating Trump devotees that the Dems are for them.
But every election victory relies on both turnout and persuasion. Men make up nearly half of the U.S. population, not exactly a niche interest group. And the men who jumped from Biden to Trump may be persuaded to come back—if Democrats run the right ticket and send the right message.
One reason voters shift rightward is fear, an emotion that animates a whole lot of conservative behavior from opposition to immigration to gun ownership. Conservatives are more motivated by fear than liberals are, and fear tends to make people more conservative. This is, of course, why the right continually presses the BE AFRAID button: Be afraid of immigrants killing young women (even though native-born men are more likely to commit crimes than newcomers); be afraid of rising crime (even if the numbers are made up); be afraid of transgender athletes pushing your daughters off their sports teams; be afraid of liberals coming for your guns; be afraid of feminists undermining men’s birthrights to money and sex and family and power.
One appeal of Trump’s machismo is his willingness to be a ringleader for collective cruelty; another, though, is the implicit promise that Trump will be a kind of Big Daddy protector of the perennially terrified men to whom he appeals.
Some of these men—the ones who are more afraid than they are misogynist—are the voters Democrats can win.
What these voters seem to want is the sense that they are on a steady and well-fortified ship: That the president will protect them from threats both foreign and domestic; that the very real problems they see in front of them—too-expensive groceries, too-expensive housing, decaying infrastructure, a country that appears to be in decline—will be addressed by a leader who understands their needs and prioritizes them.
Joe Biden did all of this in 2020. But in 2024, his struggles suggest that he may not be fully in charge, or may not be up to the task for another four years. And frightened voters who crave a strong male lead may be particularly jumpy when confronted by a president whose current capabilities and very future are uncertain—and who reminds them of their own human frailty and inevitable mortality.
The next question, then, is who Democrats can run to calm these men down and pull them back in. Hostility to female leadership is well-documented, and the nation saw it play out in real time in 2016. Democrats looking to the obvious Biden replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, are now making a crucial calculus with little in the way of real data: Are Americans ready for a female president, and in particular a Black female president?
It has been eight years since Hillary Clinton lost, but she was a particularly well-known—and, in some quarters, deeply hated—quantity who, it’s worth remembering, did in fact win the popular vote. The same country that elected Donald Trump also elected Barack Obama. Much is possible; nothing is guaranteed; and perhaps it is both vastly unfair to both Harris and the American public to assume that voters are so blinded by racism and sexism that Democrats need to keep putting white guys up for the White House.
Harris is young, measured, experienced, intelligent, and reliable. Compared to an erratic and untrustworthy convicted criminal, that should be more than enough. And Democrats can always heed the advice of historian and author John Ganz, who suggested on Twitter that the party run “Kamala and a cracker.”
What is clear, at least, is that the Joe Biden who appealed to a critical number of men in 2020 is not having the same effect four years later and four years older. The core Democratic coalition is one of Black and other voters of color, as well as women (and particularly college-educated women and women of color), and betraying these constituencies by aping the GOP’s contemptuous misogyny, or even their smug indifference to female voters, is a losing proposition. But so is ignoring mass male defection—and the anxieties driving it.
Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.
Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.
