NPR reports:

When Vice President Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to the nation this week, she ran through his biography – dad, military member, high school football coach, teacher – but lingered on one particular story about his time teaching and coaching.

“Coach Walz was approached by a student in his social studies class,” Harris said. “The young man was one of the first openly gay students at the school and was hoping to start a gay straight alliance at a time when acceptance was difficult to find for LGBTQ students. Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor.”

It was a story about Walz helping a kid out, but it was also a story about how, decades ago, Walz understood something that Democratic men are understanding en masse right now: not only that they have a gender, but that they can use their gender to send a political signal.

There has been a remarkable trend since Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket: reaching out to men voters as men. There’s White Dudes for Harris, which held a recent organizing call, plus other virtual meetups from groups including Win With Black Men, Men for Harris and Dads for Kamala.

Often, gender-specific organizing is aimed at women – think Moms Demand Action, Moms for Liberty, or Women for Trump. And indeed, there have been an array of Harris organizing calls aimed at different groups of women.

But men as a group vote substantially more Republican than women, and men continue to be a big part of Donald Trump’s base. Indeed, the GOP (and particularly Trump’s GOP) has made itself the party of overt displays of masculinity.

So Democrats have been considering for years how to pull men to their side. In putting together these calls aimed at men, leaders of these groups say they are creating a permission structure for men to support a Democratic woman at the top of the ticket.

“If you have men who are recognizably successful as men within the traditional terms say, ‘We’re supporting Kamala Harris,’ then it makes it easier for men who are more self-conscious about that identification,” explained Jackson Katz, a writer and cofounder of the Young Men Research Initiative, a super PAC aimed at energizing young progressive men.

Bakari Sellers agrees. He was one organizer of the Win With Black Men call.

“The power of being able to go back to your barber shop and saying, ‘I was on a call with 50,000 men for Harris,’ that starts a totally different conversation,” Sellers said.

Just as Walz believed his status as a football coach would show students – likely, especially boys – that it was okay to support a gay peer, organizers hope that these groups help show men that they won’t be alone in supporting a Democratic woman of color. [Continue reading…]