Kamala Harris and the dudes

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Dave Bautista, whom you might know best from his wrestling career, or from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, or for simply being an enormously muscled man, recently appeared in a video with an important message for the young men of America. “Fellas, we gotta talk,” he tells them, sweatily emerging from a boxing ring. “A lot of men seem to think that Donald Trump is some kind of tough guy. He’s not.”

What follows is two minutes of Bautista explaining exactly how Trump is a weenie. “The guy is barely strong enough to hold an umbrella,” he sneers as unflattering footage plays of Trump struggling with rain gear. Cut to Bautista flipping a truck tire. “Look at [Trump’s] gut,” he says. “It’s like a garbage bag full of buttermilk.” And later: “He’s got jugs. Big ones.” Cut to side-by-side images of Trump and Dolly Parton.

The video, which aired last week on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” is somewhere between high-minded satire and knuckle-dragging insult comedy. Is it supposed to be funny because Bautista is operating in the same juvenile mode that the former president likes to use, thereby exposing how silly it is for anyone to care how much a presidential candidate can bench? Or is it supposed to be funny because, ha-ha, man boobs?

The fact that the point of this thing – This sketch? Parody ad? Suggestion? – is so hard to pin down speaks to a dilemma facing Kamala Harris and her allies here in the final act of the so-called Gender Election. How should she talk to the fellas?

After two months of campaigning hard for young women’s votes, drilling down on abortion and reproductive issues, Harris and her surrogates seem to have awakened to the possibility that winning this race might require appealing to a different coveted voter demographic: undecided young men. The kind of young men who might frequent IGN, the world’s largest gaming media outlet, where the Harris campaign recently purchased ads. The kind of young men who might tune in to a “World of Warcraft” live stream on Twitch, the gaming platform where the campaign recently created a channel and broadcast a Tim Walz rally live-narrated by a popular WoW player. The men who are among the some 14 million Spotify followers to Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Trump is set to appear Friday. (As of last week, the Harris campaign was reportedly in talks to go on the show, according to Reuters; it’s now unclear whether this will happen.)

Trump supporters have long presented their guy as the masculine option, even before he was running against a woman. See: Swole Trump, a meme that portrays the former president as the embodiment of physical strength and desirability. A recent iteration, which Trump himself promoted on social media, imagines him as a Pittsburgh Steeler. Americans say they want a strong president; Trump has always taken the desire to an absurdly literal place, as if the commander in chief might be regularly forced to meet America’s enemies in the Octagon.

In the early part of Harris’s candidacy, her campaign stayed out of this peacocking. It wasn’t their lane; those weren’t her voters. Then, when she named Walz as her vice-presidential pick, he was presented as not only a running mate but also a Man – a football-coaching, military-serving, red-blooded man. But his energy, healthily masculine as it may have been, was a completely different genre than whatever Trump’s team is going for when they invited Hulk Hogan to rip off his shirt at the Republican National Convention, or when Trump went on Logan Paul’s podcast and discussed how cool his own mug shot was.

You could ask a whole host of questions here, about how to define masculinity, and who gets to own it, and who gets to exploit it, and how we landed on these rules to begin with.

Or you could acknowledge a hard truth, which is, even after Walz went hunting, and even after Harris went on Howard Stern, and even after she drank a beer with Stephen Colbert, Harris is not doing well with young men. Those under 30 support Trump over Harris by 15 points, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll. (Women under 30 support Harris by 20 points.)

Enter Dave Bautista. Enter a fella primed to acknowledge that some young voters don’t want sweet dad jokes. They want fighting, insult comedy, a president who treats the campaign as ElectionMania 2024. So, if you can’t beat ’em, then bring in a former wrestler best known for his power bombs to announce that Trump is a “weak, tubby toddler.”

There’s something serious behind this cringe campaign for the young male vote. And that is the fact that the demographic is legitimately in need of support. They have higher risks of suicide, lower chances of going to college and finding employment, and an increased likelihood of feeling lonely. “The young man’s experience reflects a broader crisis of confidence and purpose,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, wrote in a recent essay. They are experiencing real, serious issues that society has still not figured out how to fully acknowledge, much less fix.

Trump has galloped into this void with the instincts of a pay-per-view hype man, doubling down on the kind of tacky clichés that can animate imaginations even if they don’t really solve anything. “Donald Trump has gained ground with Gen Z by systematically exploiting the fears and insecurities of young men,” Della Volpe writes, “making them feel that their masculinity and future are under siege.”

In this context, Bautista’s silly, entertaining video is a reverse exploitation – a reverse pile driver, if you will. Yes, it’s calling Trump out for his phony posturing. But it’s still based on the premise that fears and insecurity over masculinity are something to be preyed upon. It’s still based on the idea that physical prowess is a reasonable barometer for competence. It’s just arguing that voting for Trump will actually make you more of a sissy.

The real trick for Harris’s campaign, and for whoever takes the White House, is to figure out what comes after you get young men to the polls by telling them that Trump “is afraid of birds.” How do you address the depression, the suicidal ideation, the fact that many young men seem to not even be sure what it means to be a man these days?

Young men are struggling. Trump is offering a steroid. Bautista is pointing out that the steroid is actually a placebo. There’s still plenty of room for healthier exercises. The kind that will produce serious gainz.