The gender gap in American politics grows ever-more dramatic, with recent polls showing it running at 15-20 percent, with a advantage of 7-10 percent for Harris among women and about the same advantage among men for Trump. You might think this is a wash that can’t effect the results, since about half the population is male and half is female. So even if the gender gap reached 100 percent and all men voted for Trump and all women for Harris, overall polling wouldn't shift appreciably.
And if all women supported Harris and all men supported Trump, this would at least make it clear that no one’s really voting their convictions. Everyone's just voting their gonads. It’d be silly at that point to argue about the issues, which would be neither here nor there.
Meanwhile the race gap continues its amazing run, with about 80 percent of black voters likely to vote for Harris. So if everyone just "voted their race" as the pollsters and demographers understand that (still largely as a dichotomy between black, or rather, “people of color,” and white), the Republicans would win until we become majority-minority, after which the Dems would win in perpetuity. But again, all you'd really need to do as a candidate is stand there displaying your skin color, or submit your DNA. Policy is really neither here nor there.
However, this time around, race and gender and their intersection have suddenly come into focus as the campaign's real battleground, and the identities of the candidates—white guy vs. woman of color—are well-suited to get the political identities in focus. If you've been near social media, you've probably seen some discussion or at least ridicule of the Harris campaign's "man enough" ad, which gives new dimensions of meaning to the word "drag." Tim Walz has been assigned to dude patrol, talking about football and taking reporters on a pheasant hunt. Harris has done gender and race-oriented podcasts ("Call Her Daddy", e.g.) for the last couple of weeks.
And the Harris campaign has thrown Barack Obama at black men. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president," said Obama, "and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.” This tends to accuse "the brothers" of being motivated in their vote by sexism, even if they don't know that about themselves.
In itself, that wouldn't particularly distinguish black men from all sorts of other people in this election. But still, Nina Turner and others defended black men against the charge, pointing out that about 70 percent of black men are expected to vote for Harris. Yes indeed, but that's sagging bit by bit since 2016, and Dems once could count on over 90 percent of the black vote. Losing any significant slice of "the race" is potentially devastating. And in a familiar move, commentators are pre-berating white women for Trump's possible victory (they took the brunt of blame in 2016), and urging them to get behind the Democrats.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has made some halting moves to ameliorate the gender gap, trying to get past "childless cat ladies" and the end of Roe v Wade. Trump at this point opposes a national abortion ban and is promising to pay for fertility treatments. The campaigns are aware of the problem. But their approach to addressing it seems pathetic, amounting to sudden pandering (like that "real men" ad) after years of effective hostility.
Progressive people are consistently puzzled by the polling habits of black men and white women. They tend to think that Trump and his people are successfully manipulating them with misinformation or fiendishly clever advertising strategies. But the absurdity (as I've argued through the last couple of cycles) is an intrinsic feature of the sort of simplistic identity politics pursued by both the Democratic party and by Trump-style Republicans.
Both parties, at least until the recent rather pathetic attempts at amelioration, have implicitly or explicitly framed this up as non-whites and women against whites and men. What’s bizarre about this is that each person (most of us, anyway) has both a race and a gender. We have other identity-stuff too: a region, an income, an age, a religion, and so on. But the left's wokeism and the right's neo-fascism are equally unable to grasp this.
Some black people are men, and some women are white people. Now, what have your relentless attempts to divide the population by race and gender pairs, to pit honkies against POCs and men against women, done to people? Well, they've helped divide the whole country neatly in two; there seems no way for a majority coalition to emerge. It's an excruciating national torture. But they've also tried to divide black men and white women against themselves. Whichever way they go, they are traitors to their people. Amazingly, the identities of black men and white women are incomprehensible to the current left and to the current right of mainstream American politics.
We can predict an extremely close election. But we can also predict a completely incoherent discourse about it. Whomever wins, the other side will likely be blaming white women and men of color, who should’ve stayed with their people. The problem is that in the grotesquely simplistic identity politics of the contemporary left and right, white women and black men are people without a people, people without a coherent identity, people with no politics.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on Twitter: @CrispinSartwell