In Dowd’s world, this election is a showdown between the genders: The battle of the ballots where brave women who know what’s best for the country must counteract the boorish, backward, and insecure males who might wish to pull the lever for former President Donald Trump.

But, while lamenting the reality that men don’t want to vote for Harris, Dowd ironically demonstrates just why this is the case.

First, the author references an assessment from Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, who described this election as a “jump ball” between men and women on a political basketball court. He suggests that about 60 percent of men are backing Trump while the same percentage of women are supporting Harris.

Dowd suggests that men are simply falling for Trump’s “swaggering, bullying, and insulting” brand of masculinity. It is as if she believes males, who are hung up on some Neanderthal idea of male dominance, are drawn to Trump’s manner and not actually thinking about the issues.

It never seems to occur to Dowd or her contemporaries that perhaps men believe Harris has not demonstrated that she is competent enough to handle the issues about which they are most concerned. Apparently, she doesn’t think men worry about the economy, jobs, crime, foreign policy, immigration, and all that other stuff that lofty, female intellectuals like herself understand.

The author then takes a second swing at men, painting their support for Trump as the “reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy”:

In Kamala Harris’s case, the backlash is evident even before the election. Surveys reflect the same doubts about a woman in the White House that I saw covering Ferraro in 1984. Many men — and many women — still wonder if women are too emotional to deal with world leaders and lead the military.

Other countries overcame this stereotypical thinking about women leaders, but there is still a thick strain of it in America.

Harris is running way behind where Joe Biden was in 2020 with both white and Black men. It would sting if Black men sunk the chance for the first Black woman to become president, just as enough white women spurned Hillary in 2016 to tip the balance.

It is sad that women had to be stripped of their basic right to control their bodies — and to be threatened with the loss of lifesaving medical care — for Kamala to even have a chance to get the votes of enough women to offset losing the votes of so many men.

As many of her colleagues have done, Dowd is preemptively blaming Black men for potentially costing Harris the White House, which is sure to inspire African Americans to enthusiastically support the vice president.

Dowd then suggests that Trump is exploiting young men’s “loneliness, Covid isolation, economic insecurity, and a lack of purpose,” which is compelling them to oppose Harris. That’s right, folks. Dowd thinks Democrats can convince men to change their minds on Harris by telling them they are only voting against her because they are sad and lonely, a human manifestation of a whiskey-soaked country ballad.

If Democrats like Dowd were actually serious about winning men over, they would have approached them far differently. Poking fun at masculinity, deriding them as insecure, and reducing their motivations to desperation and a nostalgic longing for the days of the manly man doesn’t sound too persuasive to me – and I’m a dude who identifies as a dude.

The reality is that men are concerned about kitchen table issues, not whether Kamala Harris is a woman or not. We need solutions for inflation, crime, education, immigration, and a whole host of other problems that Dowd seems eager to ignore because it isn’t insulting enough to men.

This is usually the part where I would discuss the type of messaging Democrats could be using to win over male voters. But there is no point, is there, dear reader?

We are less than two weeks away from the election and most voters are already set on who they plan to support. Moreover, addressing actual issues is not the Democrats’ forte at the moment. Instead, they would rather pretend everyone who doesn’t support Harris is racist and sexist. This is why Harris’ campaign has focused mostly on women. The reality is that Democrats are going to lose with men simply because they don’t want to attract male voters.

Let’s see how that works out for them in a few weeks.