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Taking advantage of the comments of former Trump chief of staff John Kelly and others, Kamala Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that yes, she thinks Trump is a fascist. This came after several days of campaigning with Liz Cheney in swing states, where the two focused on Trump as a dire threat to democracy.
These two strategies are linked. Is this smart politics?
Yes, to a point, but this should not be the Harris campaign’s only closing theme.
A key target here is the women’s vote, and not just Republican women. Though it hasn’t gotten a great deal of attention, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016 (against Hillary Clinton!), and Trump’s share actually increased to 55 percent in 2020 against Joe Biden.
Why this anomaly? Republican women tend to default to voting Republican, even when their party nominee is a brute. And with an immense white male gender gap in favor of Trump (over 30 points in 2016, narrowed to 17 points in 2020), many women, despite their own misgivings, often vote the preferences of their husbands or partners.
If Harris can change those dynamics, so that she wins 55 or 60 percent of white women, she wins the election. It isn’t so much the fascist label or the portrayal of Trump as a threat to democracy that can accomplish that—it’s the vivid personal reminder that Trump is an abusive brute.
Trump—coarse, loutish, rude, bullying—is everything that women abhor about crude men. As Freud pointed out (oversimplifying), a key role of women has been to civilize men. Is there a man more in need of civilizing than Donald Trump?
The joint appearances with Cheney, combined with the emphasis on Trump’s autocratic bullying, are a strategy to give women permission to vote for Harris in the privacy of the voting booth, no matter what their husbands think. (As a good feminist, I need to make two disclaimers. First, women obviously do a lot more in their own lives than civilize their men. But for better or worse, women do tend to be keepers of the values of civility, in a different voice, as it were. And second, women surely should not need “permission” to break with their male partners’ partisan preferences, but the evidence is that some women do.)
Feminists will recall the words from the most famous poem of the sainted Sylvia Plath, titled “Daddy”:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Most women do not “adore” fascists, but some women are intimidated by brutal men, including oppressive, controlling, and violent husbands. Some women do need some kind of permission to break with them, as Plath had to come to terms with a love/hate relationship with her father.
As for the fascist label, that’s less important to shifting women’s votes than the emphasis on Trump as a bully and a brute. Does anyone under 50 have much sense of what the term “fascist” even means?
There has also been a great deal of attention given to the fact that reproductive rights will be on the ballot in ten states. That should both increase progressive turnout generally and serve to move more women into the Harris column.
But the correlation is not perfect. More than half of white women voted for Ohio’s 2023 ballot measure to protect abortion rights—yet more than 60 percent of white women supported Mike DeWine, the Republican governor who signed a six-week abortion ban into law, in 2022, just months after Roe was overturned.
Reproductive rights are not just about abortion. They are about the right to give birth safely, without being branded a murderer if something goes amiss with a pregnancy; or even dying for lack of care, as some women have, because doctors are afraid of being prosecuted for murder.
Where the two themes come together to empower more women to vote for Harris is in the all-too-apt image of Republicans as control freaks—anti-abortion legislators wanting to control women’s bodies, and Trump as a bully wanting total control.
Even so, it would be a mistake for the Harris campaign in the closing days to put all of its eggs in that basket. As various Prospect writers keep pointing out, the theme that Harris should be hitting harder is greater economic opportunity and security for everyone but the very rich.
Democracy as an abstract value tends to rank near the bottom of issues that voters care about. The economy ranks at the top.
It’s not as if the campaign needs to choose. There is no contradiction between pointing out that Trump is a brute and pointing out that he favors his billionaire pals. Autocrats tend to do that. Harris scrambles that message when she campaigns with surrogates like billionaire Mark Cuban, who wants her to fire FTC Chair Lina Khan.
The theme that Harris has sometimes made central—freedom—ties it all together: freedom to control your own body, freedom from abusive men, freedom from oppressive corporate tricks and traps, freedom to form a union, freedom from excessive college debt. That grander story can overcome a petty Trump advantage on the price of eggs.
If Harris can connect these twin strategies more consistently, she will be the next president.
