Will Trump’s Playbook Of Appealing To Men Work In Ohio’s Senate Race?
The Republican primary for Ohio’s Senate seat is an early test of whether other GOP politicians can successfully embrace the hyper-masculine bravado that worked so well politically for Trump. Gender has been on the ballot in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for months now, with candidates vying to out-tough-guy one another.
Vance, for instance, tweeted in November that the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who at age 17 fatally shot two men and injured another amid protests against police misconduct in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 and was ultimately acquitted on all five charges, filled him with “indescribable rage.”
Rittenhouse was the victim, Vance continued, leaning into a theme that other Republicans have also recently promoted — the idea that boys and men are being attacked by the Democratic left for just acting like men. “We leave our boys without fathers. We let the wolves set fire to their communities. And when human nature tells them to go and defend what no one else is defending, we bring the full weight of the state and the global monopolists against them,” he tweeted.
It’s not just Vance either. In a debate in March, Gibbons stood by an interview where he’d said that Timken, the one woman running for the seat, had never worked, adding that women were “probably” oppressed when they didn’t have the right to vote, but making the argument now is “like judging George Washington according to today’s standards.” Timken, for her part, criticized Gibbons’s comments as “misogynistic,” but in many ways, she’s tapping into the same playbook: In a campaign ad, she attacked her opponents for “overcompensat[ing] for their inadequacies,” an obvious dig at their masculinity.
This emphasis on support for traditional masculinity makes a lot of sense, given that Trump’s machismo likely helped him win among men in 2020. It’s particularly apt for a GOP primary, too, since according to a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, Republican men are especially likely to identify as masculine, and to say it’s important that others view them as masculine. It’s one reason why messages like Vance’s could resonate and help him win tonight — the AEI report found that three-quarters of Republican men say that white men are too often blamed for America’s problems.