The Scene
The “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser couldn’t have gone much better. Springing out of nowhere in a matter of days, the livestream event attracted over 100,000 participants, celebrity cameos, and a host of potential vice presidential nominees in Pete Buttigieg, JB Pritzker, Tim Walz, and Gary Peters.
“I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris,” Jeff Bridges, one of the world’s most famous dudes, said during the program. “A woman president, man, how exciting,” he added.
Bradley Whitford, who played an icon of white liberal smarm in “Get Out,” joked about addressing a “rainbow of beige” on behalf of Kamala Harris.
Participants talked about the importance of defending the vice president from attacks that touched on race and gender — several mentioned the “DEI” label Republicans had applied to her — while making their own case against Donald Trump.
“Real men respect women, their careers, and it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t,” North Carolina governor Roy Cooper said. “From Trump’s sexual assaults to Vance’s misogynistic comments, it’s pretty clear that disrespect of women permeates Donald Trump land.”
In just over two hours, the event raised over $3.5 million. It followed on the heels of a separate “White Women” gathering put together by gun safety activist Shannon Watts that attracted over 164,000 participants to a Thursday Zoom call, including pop star Pink and soccer legend Megan Rapinoe, and quickly raised $8.5 million by the end of the next day.
As the “dudes” label suggests, the tone of these “white” groups has drifted somewhere between self-deprecating humor (actress Connie Britton joked on the women’s call about joining “Karens for Kamala”) and deadly seriousness. Organizers framed the women’s event as an effort to “answer the call” from prior mass Zoom fundraisers put together on behalf of Black women and Black men, with speakers discussing how to use their “white privilege” as allies.
But as Democrats celebrate their newfound grassroots energy, the conversation around the events has also been conflicted. Ross Morales Rocketto, the 39-year-old Democratic operative who organized “White Dudes For Harris,” opened Monday night’s event by acknowledging the “elephant in the room,” that “a lot of people feel and felt uncomfortable” about its approach.
Critics have debated whether explicitly organizing “white” supporters for Harris — or anything — was a good idea, or politically counterproductive, or even offensive. A WhatsApp group of participants ahead of the call included plenty of discussion about how to explain it to skeptics.
Anticipating these concerns, the first speaker on Monday was Black — Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell — and talked about the need for white Americans to not “remain silent” while Trump ran up the score with their cohort.
“It doesn’t usually sound like something I would join,” Pritzker, the Illinois governor, told the group. “But this is a terrific cause.”
The View From ‘White Dudes for Harris’
To Morales Rocketto, there was no need to overthink things.
“White men support the vice president,” he told Semafor ahead of the event. “And, you know, after talking to folks about whether there was anything happening or not happening, it just became clear there wasn’t anything happening. And so honestly, we just said YOLO and said we’re going to start trying to do it.”
But he also said he was sensitive to others who were uncomfortable with the premise. Campaign outreach groups organized by gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and profession are common in both parties, but explicitly “white” groups have been taboo in recent decades. House conservatives abandoned discussions about starting an “America First” caucus to promote “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” in 2021 after a backlash, even without a direct “white” label. Some liberal critics of the “White Dudes” effort say they’re worried about weakening that norm, which they argue helps isolate white nationalists who make explicitly racist arguments about the need to organize around “white interests” as a group.
Morales Rocketto told Semafor he’s aware that “much of the time when white men get together to gather and plan with each other, that doesn’t work out super well for marginalized communities.” But that’s also why he argues they’re needed. Rather than leave it to extremists and reactionaries on social media to define the conversation around white guys, they should acknowledge that conversation exists and provide alternatives.
“What these groups are doing is the opposite of making ‘white interests’ a priority,” Isaac Bailey, a professor at Davidson College who researches race and media and has defended the “White Dudes” campaign, told Semafor. “Why can’t this lead to more white people gathering together for something other than ‘white interests?’ Why must we assume the [slippery] slope can only fall one way?”
In terms of raw electoral calculus, Trump won 57% of white male voters in 2020 and political debates around masculinity have grown even more pronounced in recent years. A number of speakers on Mondays’ call spoke in personal terms about problems facing men, including substance abuse, loneliness, and economic challenges, and the need for Democrats to speak to those issues.
“Over time, hopefully, we can start to turn those numbers around,” Morales Rocketto said. “And it’s not on anybody else to organize us. It’s on us to organize us.”
Polls have shown younger men drifting to the right this election cycle, a trend the RNC looked to encourage with macho speakers like Hulk Hogan and Dana White. Donald Trump, Jr. reacted to the “White Dudes” group by labeling them “Cucks for Kamala.” Some of JD Vance’s most notable arguments on the stump and in his old ads have been appeals to voters who he says are unfairly called racist. There may not be a “white men for Trump” group, but supporters of “White Dudes for Harris” say it’s naive to pretend those kinds of pitches aren’t taking place in practice — and don’t require a response.
“The hope here is that we’re creating…a permission structure for white men to come out in their own communities and say, ‘Yes, we do support Vice President Harris,’” Morales Rocketto said.
The View From Its Critics
Perhaps the most common argument on the left and right alike against the “white” pro-Harris groups: They think they’re annoying.
Conservatives argued that they’ll remind people of the kind of race-conscious liberalism that they have criticized and mocked as a fad among elites since 2020. “Sharon from Human Resources trying to save America,” as one Black conservative writer, Adam Coleman, wrote. “Bizarre and cultish racial struggle sessions,” a National Review reporter, James Lynch said on X.
Janiyah Thomas, the Trump campaign’s Black Media Director, called the “White Dudes” event “desperate pandering” and said that Harris was “inauthentic and dangerously liberal.”
Matt Stoller, a progressive economics commentator, joined the “White Dudes” WhatsApp group and warned them they may regret associating themselves with an idea that could legitimize a future “White Men for Trump” or further racial “balkanization.”
“You should know that yes there are people who think this effort is weird and cringe and bad,” he wrote.
Other progressive commentators noted that Democrats have rallied around calling Republicans “weird” in recent days, making it perhaps poor timing to embark on a new experiment in identity-based political organizing that Harris herself might get asked about.
“Granting that these folks are well/meaning, the Harris campaign should kindly ask them not to do this under her name or banner,” Dan Riffle, a former Democratic House staffer, said on X. “Exude normalcy.”
Notable
- In The Cut, Angela Chapin talked to Shannon Watts, who clarified that the “White Women for Kamala” event she put together is not the start of a new group along these lines: “We have enough organizations. It would have been cringe to create a new one. This was just a call to honor and emulate what Black women and men had done.”
- The race to be Harris’ running mate is being discussed in pretty blunt racial and gender terms as well, as the biggest names mostly share a certain demographic feature. “This is the most exciting group of white men I have ever seen,” Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official, told Semafor.