For Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who is the founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, the most frightful Halloween trick of all might be this: Women are outvoting men.
“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” he wrote yesterday on X, warning that, if men stay home, Vice President Kamala Harris will be elected.
“If you want a vision of the future if you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling, forever,” Kirk added. “Men need to GO VOTE NOW.”
It was a post that managed to both bemoan and explain a dynamic that has come to define the country’s first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. The gender gap between Harris and former President Donald Trump has grown large enough that just the fact of high turnout among women is enough to spook Republicans — and yet they keep talking about women in ways that may further intensify that gap.
So Kirk may well be right that they need to scare up more men.
And that’s exactly what he and Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, seemed to be trying to do this morning when they appeared together near High Point University in North Carolina. Trump has opened an enormous lead among young men, and I traveled to High Point to hear Vance and Kirk’s message in a space with lots of them.
“I think you guys have a lot to lose,” Vance said.
“Do you want a person like Kamala Harris negotiating in private rooms with people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?” Vance asked, not mentioning the fact that Trump has praised both dictators. “Or do you want a person like Donald Trump actually sticking up for the United States of America?”
A message tailored to young men
Sexist and misogynistic rhetoric is nothing new for the Trump campaign and its allies. The phrase “childless cat ladies” has become shorthand for Vance’s history of dismissive comments about certain women. Trump is set to appear tonight with Tucker Carlson, who last week compared a potential second Trump administration to a father spanking his daughter.
And last night, hours after Kirk’s post compared Harris’s laugh to a “cackle,” Trump took the stage near Green Bay, Wis., and complained that his advisers had suggested he maybe stop saying he will be a “protector” of women.
“I pay these guys a lot of money, can you believe it?” Trump said. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.’”
The remark, Harris said on a tarmac this morning, is “very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their rights and their ability to make decisions about their own lives including their own bodies.”
In High Point, where perhaps 100 male and female students from the Christian university nearby donned brand-new MAGA hats left on their chairs, the furor over Trump’s comments felt far away. Here, Kirk and Vance delivered a message seemingly tailored to the young men who, polling suggests, have been a source of considerable demographic strength. Democrats have worked hard to frame the election as a matter of life or death for women — but the pair suggested that’s the case for men, too.
Answering friendly questions from Kirk, Vance described Harris as an “empty vessel” without “strong or sincere views” about what she wants to do, one who he said would lead the country into danger. Harris’s allies say she has built valuable experience on the world stage as vice president, and that Trump and his allies are playing on sexist stereotypes.
“I think we are sleepwalking ourselves into World War III,” said Vance, warning that Harris could lead the nation into a global conflict that could require a draft — which currently involves only men.
“If there is a third world war, it is the people in this room that are going to be drafted and called upon to fight it,” Vance said.
A stark gender gap
The gender gap is especially pronounced among young voters. Among men between 18 and 29, Trump leads 58 percent to 37 percent, while Harris leads 67 percent to 28 percent among young women.
Vance’s depiction of Trump as a swaggering world leader seemed aimed directly at a voter like Reid Holloway, 20, a High Point student who was excited to cast a vote for Trump in his first presidential election — partly because he admires Trump’s “pure confidence” in what he does.
“A lot of young men sort of resonate with that,” he said. “A lot of young men, especially going into college and going out of it, are sort of trying to find — to develop themselves as, ‘All right, I want to live a strong, confident life.’”
Alex Muravski, a freshman, said he thinks the gender gap is explained not by Trump’s appeal to men, but by the fact that some women have a “grudge” against him, and are “way too focused on what gender is in office.”
“I don’t see, “Women’s rights matter.’ I see, ‘All rights matter, and that includes women,’” he said. “So I do think that it is kind of hurting the male society in our new generation.”
There were plenty of young women who supported Trump in the room, too, although Alexis Metro, 21, said his comments about protecting women were probably not helpful to his cause.
“People hold onto his past,” she said.
But on the campus of High Point, Ella Hurst, a freshman who has already cast her vote for Trump, told me she had no problem with that kind of talk.
“Men should protect,” she said. “Our job is to nurture.”
In Florida, weed might be more popular than abortion rights
Much of the political attention in Florida has gone to a ballot measure that would guarantee abortions “before viability,” or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. But public opinion polls suggest that another ballot measure might have a better chance of passage: one that would legalize marijuana. My colleague Patricia Mazzei, our indomitable Miami bureau chief, explains.
It’s not easy to pass a referendum in Florida, which requires a 60 percent threshold. But two recent polls, from Emerson College and the University of North Florida, suggest that Amendment 3, which would allow for the recreational use of marijuana among adults 21 and older, is more likely to clear the bar (a third poll shows both measures hovering right around the threshold).
The tight race has made for unusual political alliances. One ad features both a Republican state senator and a Democratic one playing up their support for the measure, which they said would raise money for the police and schools. On Monday, former Gov. Jeb Bush, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, appeared at an anti-Amendment 3 news conference with former Representative Donna Shalala of Miami, a Democrat, where they said that — while they had both tried marijuana in their college years — legalizing pot would hurt the state’s quality of life and put young people’s health at risk.
“I admit I smoked pot when I was like 21 years old, that was like 80 years ago,” Bush said. “It was not nearly as potent as it is now.”
But the biggest rift has been between Florida’s two most prominent Republicans: former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee and a Florida resident, has endorsed the marijuana measure and said that he would vote for it. He appears in a television ad and mailers for the Yes on 3 campaign.
Over the summer, Trump met with Kim Rivers, the chief executive of Trulieve, the cannabis company behind the measure, my colleagues reported. Trulieve has spent more than $100 million on the campaign. Florida has 25 licensed marijuana companies.
Meantime, DeSantis and his wife, Casey, have traversed the state to hold separate anti-Amendment 3 events at the state’s expense. (Casey DeSantis has also appeared in a campaign ad.)
“This amendment is written to benefit this one big weed company,” DeSantis said at an event in Cape Coral, Fla. “It’s not meant to benefit you.”
DeSantis has effectively made himself the face of opposition to both the marijuana and abortion-rights measures. So while he will not be on next week’s ballot, there is much riding on the two outcomes for his political future.
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