As the polling continues to show a deep gender divide for Vice President Kamala Harris, former First Lady Michelle Obama made an impassioned plea to men to stand up for women through their choice at the ballot box at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Oct. 26.
According to The New York Times, this marked Mrs. Obama’s first appearance on the campaign trail and she indicated through her remarks to the crowd that she and many other women have a deeply personal investment in seeing Vice President Harris elected.
Obama pleaded to male voters and the “men who love us,” “I am asking y’all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously.”
“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Mrs. Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”
She continued, “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”
Obama did not stop there, she took the media to task for being complicit in holding the vice president to a much higher standard than it appears to hold former president and convicted felon Donald Trump.
Mrs. Obama lambasted the media and voters for “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence, while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”
She continued, “We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs. But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
Vice President Harris only had to underscore the points that Mrs. Obama eloquently and at times, forcefully made, telling the crowd during her time after Obama’s speech concluded, “We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Do you think Donald Trump is thinking about the consequences for the millions of women who will be living in medical deserts?”
The vice president continued, “I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this, because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth,” she said. “Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work.”
She also stressed that unwanted teen pregnancy not only affects young girls, but also the young fathers who will have the course of their lives drastically change.
The urgency from both Vice President Harris and the former First Lady has its roots in polling data.
As Vox reported, nearly every poll has indicated that men are lagging behind women in their support of Harris’s candidacy.
Although the recent polling from USA Today and Suffolk University does not fragment into gender and race, in a poll from ABC News and Ipsos of likely voters in the 2024 election, Black men currently lead the way, supporting Harris at an 85% clip while Latinx men are polling at 63% and white men lag far behind at 38 percent.
According to CBS News, the election may also shape up to be a referendum on personal views of progress.
Men who believe that the focus on diversity, equality, and inclusion has left them behind in favor of women tend to indicate support for Trump, while women who believe that Trump is incompetent and is unfit to serve as president tend to indicate support for Vice President Harris.
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