The Bro Wave That Swamped the Democrats

Trump, it should be noted, has a long string of losses on his record—not just his 2020 reelection campaign but the 2018 midterms and this year’s down-ticket candidates. But his biggest successes came when his opponent was a woman: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Harris this year. With the added pressure from the Dobbs decision, women, many of us assumed, were eager to be finally listened to, especially at the ballot box.

Trump, who is not conventionally smart but clearly canny, made up for all those unhappy women by going full-throttle for the bros. There was nothing subtle about it. At a Sunday rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, after Trump repeated his claim that Harris had never worked at McDonalds as a youth, an attendee shouted out that she had worked “on the corner,” intimating that she was a prostitute—to which Trump guffawed, adding, “This place is amazing.” And on Tuesday, he called Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi an “evil, sick, crazy bi—” before theatrically shushing himself.

“Trump’s appeal to bro culture was huge. I mean, look at Elon Musk, bro extraordinaire, as Trump’s biggest cheerleader,” said P.J. Henry, a social psychologist and professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi. “And ethnic minority men are just as defensive of masculinity (and threatened by femininity) as anyone else, maybe even more so. So yeah, Trump just needed to lob diminishing insults at Harris and golf and eat steak, and he was fine with these groups.”