Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Our guests today are Danielle Kurtzleben—she’s a White House reporter at NPR—and Meredith Conroy is a political science professor at Cal State San Bernardino. And we’re going to talk today about gender and masculinity and how they’re playing a role in politics—or maybe they’ve always played a role in politics, is probably how I should say it. We’re going to talk about the role they’re playing now, in this Trump and Graham Platner era, and so on. Guys, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Bacon: So I’m going to start by going through a few terms that are out there in the political discourse that I think are gendered, but we don’t necessarily realize that as we’re—or it’s not really acknowledged that we’re talking about gender when we’re talking about these terms. So I’m going to start with Danielle, and I’ll start with authenticity, because you wrote about that last year.
And so everybody was talking about how, Wow, this guy is so authentic. He’s just being himself. And at the time, there were a few other specifically white male candidates on the Democratic side who were getting written about as authentic. And typically, these are guys with facial hair, either blue-collar jobs or the ability to convincingly look blue-collar.
Bacon: OK.
Meredith Conroy: I already had one.
Similarly, if I were to run for office—which I never will—what’s authentic for me? I was thinking last night, I love classical music. Could I run on that? No, because then you’re a snob. So authenticity has so much class and gender stuff to it. And I’ll stop there, because I could go on for hours.
Conroy: Yeah. So Danielle already alluded to this, but I’ll say a little bit more. Authenticity is a judgment. It’s a judgment that audiences make. It’s not actually a trait. Of course, we all prescribe all these traits as being authentic that Danielle hit on—especially the ones for men: working with your hands, being gruff, unpolished, and blunt, I think, is a more modern archetype of an authentic male candidate in the era of Trump.
So I would say that women don’t fail to be authentic. They’re just being measured against an authenticity that they—a template that wasn’t built with women as the reference case. So it becomes really difficult.
Bacon: Yeah. My sense is authenticity is used as a positive term way more for male politicians than female politicians. But talk about some female politicians that you all think are authentic, at least to you. Who should be called authentic even if the media is not calling them authentic?
Kurtzleben: I think about, for example—the easy answers are like AOC and Ilhan Omar.
Kurtzleben: Yeah, yes. I think about specifically—I believe it was AOC and Omar are the ones that come to mind, because I think it was during the pandemic, they did like live streams while they were playing video games—
Kurtzleben: —and—
Kurtzleben: Yeah. And it wasn’t a put-on. It didn’t appear to be something that was focus-grouped, or something that like, “Oh, the kids like this.” No, they seem, “This is a game I enjoy playing. Here, I’m going to play it and talk to you about XYZ.”
Like, a lady candidate pulling out a bottle of beer—it sounds so backwards to say that is groundbreaking, but it was new. You hadn’t seen Hillary Clinton or anyone else do that before.
Bacon: I do remember that, yes. I thought that was fun. Yeah, now that you mention it, I remember.
Bacon: OK.
But I do think younger women in politics, which we don’t have a ton of examples of, have maybe room to redefine what it means to be an authentic politician that women of a certain generation don’t. Setting aside your examples of Elizabeth Warren, which—now that you mention it, yeah, I can see some of that as her trying, being herself.
And I think often politicians, both male and female, are criticized that they’re perceived to be too flip-floppy, not sure where they stand. So is there any sort of center-left person, or either a Republican or a Democrat, who would still be an authentic woman?
Bacon: Like Gretchen Whitmer or somebody like that, whose politics are more—
Bacon: I’m just giving examples of ideologically what I’m getting at.
Kurtzleben: I think it’s funny—I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I think that there’s something maybe instructive there, because we’re talking about authenticity as being gendered and having a very particular identity attached to it. It’s not to say that wanting a candidate to be authentic is BS, or that the idea of authenticity is entirely made up.
And I think that the idea of, for example, a working-class person being authentic—it’s not that’s absolutely silly, even if it’s limiting. It’s that a working-class candidate is authentic compared to what? Compared to the patrician politicians of the past. Compared to Mitt Romney,.
Kurtzleben: Yeah. Plenty nice guys, who maybe—were being authentic but just were a little stiff. Al Gore, that sort of thing.
Kurtzleben: Absolutely. And so when we’re talking about gender and authenticity—the way I’ve put it is, there’s guys and there’s men, and the Mitt Romneys are the men. And Graham Platner pops into my head, but he’s recently distressed, even though he denies it. But like Bernie Sanders—those are guys. Guys who seem a little looser.
Bacon: You mentioned working class. Let’s zone in on working class. I’ll start with Meredith this time. So there’s a great push, particularly among Democrats—Democrats need to reach the working class. But I don’t think they mean Black women who work in whatever job. I don’t think they mean that. So what are we talking about?
Bacon: The candidates and the voters, is what you’re saying, right?
I also think we mean a certain attitude, too—an attitude that is opposed to the conflation of the Democratic Party with political correctness, and this idea that you can’t say what you want to say. The HR ladies is the counter. So I do think working class, it does require a foil to make sense, and that’s the one that tends to arise. So yeah—the HR lady.
Kurtzleben: No, I think that’s absolutely right. And we’ve covered quite a bit of this already. It does track neatly also onto, though, the bifurcation of the parties in terms of educational attainment, right? The fact that people with four-year college degrees are increasingly voting Democratic, people without those degrees are increasingly voting Republican.
And the thing is, on the Democratic side, those are the voters they have been losing. It’s understandable that they would want them back. What’s interesting to me is that we’ve been in this era—correct me if you think differently, but it seems to me we’ve been in this era where Republicans and Democrats are going after that group of people. Like, they really want those guys, those working-class guys. What about everyone else? Where is the push there?
Bacon: Interesting point. Because in theory, there’s a bunch of voters—in a pure marketing sense, if one market’s being cornered, you should try to seek the other market. But everybody’s seeking the same group. I hadn’t thought of it that way, that both parties seem fixated on white guys who work in certain jobs in Wisconsin—but Wisconsin is full of other kinds of people. I hadn’t really thought about it that way.
Kurtzleben: Yeah. I think that’s right. To some degree, it maps onto the popularism-versus-persuade-people constant argument that we see in Democratic politics, which I am not going to solve here today. But yeah, I do see it as that.
Bacon: Suburban white women, I think, that’s another group, right?
Bacon: We called them soccer moms when I started doing this. Now we call them suburban, I think, because I guess everyone plays soccer, but it’s the same idea, right?
Kurtzleben: Sorry, did I interrupt you, Meredith?
Kurtzleben: Now that we’re delving into this, I do think it’s worth separating the idea of working-class candidates—like the Graham Platners and any number of others of the world—and working-class men candidates and working-class men voters.
Conroy: Because he’s a Democrat.
I do think there’s something here about—I don’t know if the phrase cultural capital is right, but the fact that—it’s the idea that men determine what’s cool. Men are just more broadly accepted as cooler than women, I think. The middle-aged soccer mom is almost by definition uncool, right? Look, I’m becoming that person, I know. And I think I’m very cool. I think I’m great. But Graham Platner, he’s out there with a kettlebell. Boy, look at that guy. He’s intriguing.
Bacon: Yes, correct.
Bacon: In some ways, the parties treat working-class male votes as if they count more than the working-class female votes, is what we’re getting at, in some ways, right?
As far as I know, in their work, they haven’t really talked about candidates as operating as taste, but I think it fits perfectly, and I’m sure that they would agree. Like, who you nominate obviously represents who your party is. And right now, if that is the group that’s seen as having cultural capital, it’s meaningful to you as a party to have someone look like that represent your party. So yeah, I was going to bring up that topic.
So if this is something happening in the Democratic Party, that they’re more likely to nominate men of a certain kind, we’d obviously need to look at the types of men being nominated. But at a high level, it doesn’t look like the Democrats are necessarily changing their strategy because of this.
Bacon: Let’s talk about electability. Danielle, talk about the gender parts of electability as a term—because that term is all over the place, and 2020 was full of that term, and that was very obviously what the code was for. But talk about electability in gender terms.
Which makes some sense. It makes logical sense that you want your party to win. But also, what it often means—and 2020 was such a case study in this—is, what we saw in 2020 was it taking votes away, at least anecdotally, from... I remember Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in particular.
And so you had quite a few people—anecdotally, I remember talking to quite a few—saying like, “Yeah, I would like so-and-so, and I don’t think they’re going to win.” And so the electability conversation so often takes votes away, I think, from any candidate that is not the default, which is a straight white man.
Conroy: Yeah. Correct. That’s what’s difficult. Women win at a similar rate to men, although there’s lots of caveats about that. The data show that in congressional races, women win—but that’s also because the women don’t run until they’re more qualified. So there is some bias factoring into all of that. But by the time women decide to run, historically, they are seen as more qualified, and so they’re maybe even slightly more likely to win.
I mentioned this topic and this concept that you both know, which is strategic discrimination—that’s what you’re describing, right? You’re discriminating against your preferred choice of Elizabeth Warren, because you know that some other person, the worst person you could think of from the other party, would never vote for a woman. But the Democrats themselves did this to them.
So it was a real observable thing—and it’s been replicated—that Democrats, especially after 2020, strategically discriminated against female candidates in particular because of memories. They overcorrect. Democrats overcorrect. They’re the party of overcorrection.
Are they saying that... It became a thing where we just weren’t getting—I don’t think we have any idea how accurate of a picture we were getting of what Democratic voters wanted, what it even meant for them to want someone, what their positions were. It was all just an absolute mess if you were trying to take the temperature of the Democratic electorate. And I imagine we’ll get it again in 2028.
Now I want to talk about masculinity, which is slightly different than gender, so I’m going to flip this a little bit. I want to talk about Hasan Piker, Joe Rogan, Theo Von—this whole podcaster, YouTuber thing, particularly like candidates need to be able to go on these podcasts and seem casual, and Trump did that better than Kamala, and that’s why he—I don’t believe all this necessarily. But talk about the masculinity that’s playing out in this sort of podcast discourse.
Conroy: Yeah, I think it’s similar to the one that we already talked about, right? That you don’t think twice about what you’re going to say—you just say it. The people that you mentioned, I think, would all have lots of politically incorrect things that are said on their podcasts, and that’s why their podcasts are a draw, and why they in particular are seen as authentic.
And same with Theo Von—Theo Von has walked back a lot of the things that he has said. But I think that they’re given that grace or flexibility because they position themselves as, I’m just asking questions, which counters some of the masculine posturing. There is some humility to some of them, because they are talking about when they’re wrong, and I think a lot of young men identify with that because they don’t have necessarily coherent opinions.
Bacon: It’s escaping me.
That said, I do think Harris benefited from some of the shows that she went on, like Call Her Daddy. I do think there was a positive effect. So Call Her Daddy, hosted by Alex Cooper, a young woman—we have some limited data. Colleagues of mine looked at perceptions of Harris before and after that appearance, and we did see, for people who watched Alex Cooper’s show, a positive increase in perceptions of Harris and the potential to vote for her. Maybe people need to broaden their podcast strategy. They’re thinking too narrowly.
Yeah, so first of all, there’s just more popular men podcasters out there. In addition to all of that, what worked so well for Trump and Vance in 2024 is not only that those podcasters were friendly, right? Joe Rogan, Theo Von, et cetera.
And the most humanizing Donald Trump interview I think I’ve ever heard was Theo Von’s with him, because Theo Von talked—
Kurtzleben: Yeah. Theo Von talked to him about Trump’s brother’s addiction issues. And that stuff Trump just doesn’t talk about otherwise, because understandably, journalists are asking him about his policy positions and past things he’s done and all of that. But I think that certainly worked to his advantage.
Conroy: No.
Kamala Harris recorded one with him. She came in with a take. The take initially—this is all reportedly—initially was, people shouldn’t take off their shoes on airplanes. It’s impolite. Which, true.
Bacon: Which makes less sense. Yes.
Point is, you have to be willing to go out there and say that you shouldn’t take your shoes off on airplanes. And if you can’t do that, then going for three hours on Joe Rogan just isn’t going to work out for you. You can argue, though, that men have more room to do that. That may be true. And also that Kamala Harris probably wouldn’t have gelled with Joe Rogan as well as Donald Trump did. So when we get a woman, a very popular woman podcaster who can talk for three hours at a time and have bajillions of people listen to her—
Kurtzleben: OK, yeah, actually, good point.
Bacon: Let me follow up, though. I assume Amy Poehler is liberal. If she voted for Trump, I would be astounded. So couldn’t she have Pete in 2027—couldn’t she have all the candidates on for the Democratic primary and say, I’m for nobody, I’m just bringing people on? Do you think she wouldn’t do it?
Conroy: That’s a great question. So far it’s people of entertainment. Most recent guest was Matt Damon. They’re usually promoting something, but she has become a necessary stop on the promotion circuit, given how popular her podcast is. I think it’s possible she could talk to Democratic politicians.
Bacon: I do think The View has become a required stop if you’re running for office, particularly if you’re a Democrat—but it’s not the same thing. Even Vance. It’s very short. The View is not going to have you up for two hours.
Bacon: Yeah.
Bacon: They’re more conversational. That’s interesting, yeah.
Bacon: But part of the point you made, Danielle, is there’s not a female political podcaster who has the audience Hasan Piker does. Is that partly the case?
Bacon: So let me switch it a little bit. That was the podcasters. I want to talk about gender in terms of the two parties. I’ll start with the Democratic Party—and masculinity in the party. So the Democratic Party generally, when we’re talking about masculinity, their concern is they don’t have enough. Is that the answer?
Even Stacey Abrams—when was the last time she even ran, and they’re still using her. And AOC. And they also use unflattering photos that make them look like angry women. So there’s a reason that’s the association.
Kurtzleben: Yeah. And to be clear, this is not new. This has been going on for quite a while. I think it was in the ‘90s, the linguist George Lakoff talked about them as the mommy party and the daddy party, or something like that. The nurturing mother and the stern father.
So if you’re using those stereotypes to think about the parties, and if men are always preferable—or at least are often enough preferable—then Democrats are at a disadvantage. And I think what’s happened in recent years is that, first of all, with women actually getting to the top of the presidential ticket, and also with Trump, the most blatant about masculinity person, having won the presidency twice now—it’s just so much clearer than it ever was before, and it’s impossible to ignore.
Bacon: I’m going to ask you about the Republicans and gender, because you wrote this piece, Meredith, called “Feminize Your Opponent,” which is about how Ken Paxton in Texas is trying to make James Talarico seem like less of a man. So talk about some of the Republican discourse about gender—to say Democrats are not masculine. And it veers into sexism, in my view. But talk about how Republicans are using gender and masculinity ideas.
So yeah, feminizing your opponent is essentially the attempt to un-man a man that you’re competing against. You can obviously do it to women too, but it makes more sense when you think about two male candidates running against each other, and when you’re both competing on the same masculinity playing field—how do you make yourself seem like the tougher man? You feminize your opponent. You talk about them in feminine ways.
But the reason that’s even more interesting is that language. If I talk to my dad—my dad’s a weightlifter, so maybe not my dad—but another just 70-year-old man about low T, they’re going to be like, What do you mean by low T? So it was also in the language of the manosphere, which made it a little bit new.
George W. Bush threw a baseball and a football. John Kerry went skiing and windsurfing. So those are more effeminate hobbies. But you center those in your campaign against the candidate to say, “This isn’t a real man.” It’s really effective, I think.
Bacon: George Bush dodged getting in the war, didn’t want to be in the war.
Bacon: So can you talk about what Republicans are doing, Danielle? What’s your sense of what Republicans are doing on masculinity?
Bacon: Talk about how Republicans are using masculinity, from your perspective.
Bacon: Let me ask a question. Is veganism inherently female? Or is eating meat inherently male? I’m asking.
Bacon: I remember that, yes.
And Trump, again, pioneered making this so blatant with low-energy Jeb, Lil Marco, insulting Ted Cruz’s wife’s looks. Just all sorts of ways of emasculating his opponents, and it’s just kind of, I think, trickled down throughout the party.
I think what’s remarkable to me about the Republican use of masculinity is not just how blatant it is, but how they just hammer it over and over and over.
Bacon: I guess I should ask—most of this has been almost suggesting Democrats are disadvantaged by this. Are there any advantages for Democrats of being the party of women, the feminine party? Or any problems for the Republicans being associated with masculinity? Is there a downside or a flip side to what we’re talking about here—which is, the Republicans are perceived as the manly party and can call Democrats girly. Is there any flip side to this?
But yeah, quantifying that is difficult. And as long as Trump’s in office, I think the advantage is going to be to the party that can win on this masculinity playing field. But if you can shift the playing field, then yeah, Democrats absolutely can have an advantage.
Kurtzleben: Yeah, you’re getting at kind of the ultimate—I mentioned earlier, the popularism versus persuasion thing. I’ve been talking so much about how I think the ultimate dilemma that Democrats face when it comes to identity, whether it’s gender or anything else, is: do you stick with what you think or know has been popular, or do you try to change opinions and change paradigms?
I think the one addendum to this is, as I was hearing Meredith talk there, I was thinking about how—even if Democrats are the party of nurturing and all of that—I think there’s room in that to be tough and the party of helping people. For a candidate to come forward and say with their whole chest, Yes, we want better healthcare. Fight me.
Conroy: I do think Talarico is trying to do that. He’s like, “You want to have a fight about manhood? Let’s have it. Weak men—”
Conroy: Yeah. We’ll see. And also, if that’s the test case, Texas is a really hard place to try it out. If he fails, does that mean the strategy fails? No. But I do think that’s where we’ll see it play out, off the top of my head.
Conroy: I read a piece—and I can’t remember who wrote it, it may have been Moira Donegan—about contrasting the masculinity of Graham Platner versus Mamdani, and the lessons that we’re taking from these two characters.
I think he’s a good model that I imagine there’s lots of Democratic consultants that are watching closely and thinking about how you can take what he’s doing in New York to Michigan, to another place. But yeah, I’m glad you brought him up. It would’ve been a shame to not mention him in this conversation.
But first of all, a thing we also haven’t really gotten at—we’ve mentioned Obama too, I’ve written about this before—men of color are more constrained in the types of masculinity they can show. I think that, for example, Mamdani showing anger would not be viewed as kindly as if he were a white man. Similarly, Barack Obama rarely got up and showed—
Bacon: The other things now, briefly, are that Obama played basketball when he was running and played golf a lot, plus he talked about sports a lot. And if you notice, Mamdani gave this very long—the Knicks won—
Bacon: —and his display was great. Oh, it was a great speech. Was that a display of masculinity, in a certain sense?
Kurtzleben: Absolutely. I watched it. I’m not a basketball person, and I was like, “This is inspiring. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It was because it was a great speech. Mamdani is able to be—in whatever constraints he faces, he still is able to come off as likable and fun. And I think it’s important that he comes off as a person who is really happy and excited about running the city well. That is the brand he has created for himself. And it seems authentic, and that’s all that matters.
Meredith Conroy: Gillibrand maybe tried, and it didn’t seem to work in 2020. But yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I was trying to think of an example of a woman running for office that did attempt to do that. I need to think more about it.
Conroy: Midas Touch.
Bacon: Midas Touch. And she appears—I don’t know if irreverent is the answer, but she’s trying to be relaxed and casual, I would say. And I wonder if that’s—in some of those videos, I guess the other day she was asked what book she’s reading, and she’s reading a book about Lincoln creating a political movement, which was, I thought, a little bit irreverent, a little bit playing on the idea that maybe I’m running and maybe I’m not. I think that she’s doing it, and maybe she’s too far along to redefine herself, but I think she’s trying to be—am I wrong to think she’s trying to be somewhat casual?
And I think that anyone on the Democratic side who can sound a bit less like a scripting-everything-in-full-paragraphs talker is probably going to be better for the party.
Bacon: Ta-da. And Meredith Conroy—you can find her Substack, it’s called Gender Gap. You’re also doing some articles. Who are you writing for now?
Bacon: And Danielle Kurtzleben, of course, is at NPR—people listen to you all over the country and the world. But talk about the Substack you’re doing, which is where I’ve seen some very interesting stuff you’re doing.
Bacon: Thank you all for joining me. Good to see you. Take care.
Kurtzleben: This was great.
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