Ahead of the US election, the Democrats are trying to pull off the trickiest of political manoeuvres for centre-left parties in the modern populist era: leaning into the surging support from women without triggering a backlash among men.
But the hardest part is doing it without centrist media outlets exacerbating the response by making it all a “thing”, as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2016 (and in Australia with the Gillard government a decade ago).
It’s simple electoral maths. Women now lean far more to the left than men and are significantly more likely to vote for center-left and left parties like the Democrats in the US or Labor and the Greens in Australia — by up to 10 percentage points. Men? In a modern retaliation against women’s gains, they’re twisting the other way, counteracting identities like generation, class and race that usually determine how people vote.
Signified and signifiers
It’s more than votes (or the fact that in both the US and Australia there are just more women voters than men). Women are also more likely to be doing the hard grind of activism on the ground, knocking on doors and getting the vote out.
Centre-left strategists look over their shoulders at examples like South Korea’s 2022 presidential election, where the populist right overtly mobilised incel-style misogyny to split the once reliably progressive youth vote along gender lines.
Think of the Democrat strategy as the balance between the signified and the signifiers: when Vice President Kamala Harris talks policy, she talks (like Labor in Australia) to women about the care economy, domestic violence and abortion (contextualised into women’s health); when she talks symbols, she nods to men by pulling out her Glock (metaphorically speaking, at least).
The difference showed up in her media blitz last week, when she talked to women on Call Her Daddy and The View, and when she reached out to men (and women) through free-to-air 60 Minutes or to radio host Howard Stern.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media is working hard at pumping the misogyny that’s driving the backlash. “Of course Kamala hates men,” says The American Spectator. “Too Stupid to be President”, reckons The Federalist.
It’s no surprise that the Murdoch family media is at the heart of it, with Fox News’ prime-time host Jesse Watters smirking Harris would be “paralysed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her”.
It’s not Rupert anymore. It’s Elon
The right’s media misogyny teaches us another lesson. Suddenly, it’s not Rupert — and much less Lachlan — who’s pulling the strings.
Those Fox bedtime stories might still work with the network’s carefully nurtured grumpy-old-man demographic. But now, it’s Elon Musk, using the X algorithm and his personal rocket-thrusting image to send the Donald Trump macho vibe resonating through the far more dangerous — and younger — manosphere with the perception of “a permissive environment” for the creation of new accounts that followed “known abusive and misogynistic channels”.
The platform formerly known as Twitter has become Musk’s loud hailer. “Musk has spent nearly two years installing his own account as X’s main character and shaping the platform’s architecture in his own image. The politics of X are inextricably linked to Musk’s own politics,” as Charlie Warzel wrote head-shakingly in The Atlantic last month.
Musk is also bringing his clout into Australian politics with high-profile attacks on Anthony Albanese.
But unlike Rupert, Musk is not content with pulling strings behind the scenes. The Republican Party has contracted out its get-out-the-vote strategy to Musk’s America Political Action Commission while Trump has foreshadowed appointing his fellow billionaire as a government efficiency czar.
The migrant obsession
It’s not just misogyny: central to the right-wing narrative in both Australia and the US (and across much of Europe) is the obsession with migration. The US campaign exposes the global right’s far more racist campaign against all migrants and migrant communities.
Trump has long centred attacks on migrants in his campaigns, but he’s hurried past the keep-’em-out “build the wall” mantra, this year embracing the ugliest aspects of kick-’em-out race-thinking, threatening mass deportations, including revocation of citizenship and residency.
Australia’s not there yet, but we’re not far off. From semiotics to slogans, the shocking weekend demonstration in Corowa came straight out of America. The Trumpist attacks on Haitian Americans in Ohio and Venezuelan Americans in Colorado rhymed with 2018’s “African gangs” in western Melbourne. Dutton’s call in August to ban all Palestinian migrants clapped back at Trump’s own Muslim ban.
The strategy works so well that some emerging left parties in Europe (such as Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) are embracing anti-migrant rhetoric as part of their populist agenda.
In more “macho posturing” (as Tanya Plibersek recently characterised the current dominant political style in Australia), the Murdoch tabloids and Liberal Party have embraced selective visa cancellation of people they don’t like as a test of strength. The Democrats, like centre-left parties everywhere, are trying to walk both sides, avoiding the subject when they can, leaning into a soft restrictionary rhetoric when they can’t.
Why is the right so obsessed with migration? Blame that, too, on the backlash.
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