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The Atlantic: The Democratic Manly Man Is Back as Dems Embrace Masculinity

Brett T.
Brett T.  |  10:00 PM on July 14, 2026

Remember when the Kamala Harris campaign needed to pick a vice president who would win over white, middle-class men? They settled on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the guy who mandated tampon dispensers in boys' restrooms, and dressed him up like Elmer Fudd and sent him quail hunting. There were reports that, after that abject failure, the Democrats had budgeted $20 million to learn how to talk to men. Good luck, after decades of "toxic masculinity" and third-wave feminism.

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The Atlantic reports that the Democrats are adopting masculinity as a campaign strategy.

We'd thought the Democrats had already struck gold with hard-working oyster farmer Graham Platner. "He's my kind of man," declared Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Russell Berman reports:

Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland when he delivered a message that, coming from a Democratic House candidate in the year 2026, sounded almost provocative. “There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”

Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order. The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker. He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard. Now Poindexter is running for Congress, trying to flip a Republican-held seat in Ohio with a pitch aimed at a constituency that has abandoned the Democratic Party over the past two decades: men.

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Critiques such as Poindexter’s have gelled into a consensus over the past two years, repeated ad nauseam by starchy senators and governors with an eye toward running for president in 2028. Closing the gender gap now seems to be an official electoral strategy for Democrats. A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”

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And an ironworker probably wouldn't want to surrender his daughter's "female spaces" to men who think they're women, which seems to be the demographic the Democrats were aiming for in 2020 and 2024.

Rep. Jason Crow tells The Atlantic you can tell if a man has calluses on his hands. Let's not talk about what Platner was doing with his hands.

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Remember when Annie Leibovitz did that cover shoot of Beta O'Rourke leaning against a pickup truck?

"White Dudes for Kamala" … that was a winning campaign.

They'll try at this and fail because they have no idea what masculinity is … they've chased it out of their bubble. To them, a manly-man is a racist white guy wearing a MAGA hat and driving a pickup truck with an American flag sticker on it.

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