Kamala Harris' men are stepping to the sidelines
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- In their speeches at the convention, both Emhoff and Walz leaned into their goofy dad personas.
- Experts told BI that their warm personas project onto Harris, who highlights her toughness.
- Emhoff and Walz are employing their potential unprecedented roles strategically.
One of the first things Doug Emhoff did while speaking at the Democratic National Convention was lean over the podium and point toward the audience, a grin plastered on his face.
"And a special shoutout to my motha!" he said, unashamed with his own silliness. "I see you. My mother is the only person in the whole world who thinks Kamala is the lucky one for marrying me."
When Gov. Tim Walz took the stage the next night, he talked extensively about his own family. At one point, his son stood up, crying, and yelled, "That's my dad!"
Both of these men — the most important in Kamala Harris' campaign — are leaning into their warmth and fatherhood, all while clearing a space for Harris to take center stage.
Between anecdotes about suburban New Jersey and rural Nebraska, they each emphasized Harris' compassion and toughness.
They are adopting what Tracy Sefle, a Democratic communications consultant who advised Hillary Clinton in 2016, calls "the Travis Kelce model." The football player, a star in his own right, steps aside as his girlfriend Taylor Swift stands in the spotlight. At the end of his speech, "Coach" Walz became Kelce-like — he cast himself as a supportive player and Harris as the MVP.
"Our job, for everyone watching, is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling," he said.
Beyond stepping aside, Emhoff and Walz each portrayed their quarterback Harris in similar terms — and, according to Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at LSU who researches gender, terms she can't as easily speak aloud herself.
"Kamala Harris is much more constrained in what she can do on a campaign trail," Bauer told Business Insider. "If she tries to show that she's caring and the goofy stepmom persona, she can face a backlash for not being competent."
Her two central men, however, have far more leniency in seeming both caring and powerful, she said.
At the DNC, the image of the caring man has been on full display. Emhoff recounted calling Harris at 8:30 am the morning after their first date, reenacting a rambling voicemail he left. Walz spent more time talking about his career as a coach and teacher than his nearly two decades as a politician. And while they highlighted Harris' same caring nature — both commented extensively on her joy — both men kept coming back to her strength.
"Kamala is as tough as it comes," Emhoff said. Walz listed her experiences as a prosecutor before concluding that "Kamala Harris is tough."
Yet Bauer said that Harris is also benefiting from the warmth and tenderness of their speeches, without having to claim it for herself. Doing so would risk seeming too stereotypically feminine in a presidential race where gender is inevitably on display. The Harris campaign declined to comment on the record for this story.
As Harris charts a new path for how to engage with the unavoidable tensions of being a female candidate, Emhoff and Walz are also figuring out ways to inhabit their unprecedented roles as potential first gentlemen and vice president to a female president, Sefl said. Both men, it seems, are using their position to help Harris balance seeming both likable and tough.
"What Walz and Emhoff can do, leaning into this caring man approach, is they can embody those characteristics and those can transfer to Kamala Harris without her having to directly embrace that strategy," she said.
Throughout her short campaign, Harris has avoided focusing on her gender, talking more about her middle class roots instead. The strategy is in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, when she leaned heavily on the historic nature of her candidacy as the first female nominee of a major party.
"Hillary took a sledgehammer to the glass ceiling. It was difficult, it was brutal, it was oftentimes painful," Sefl told Business Insider, emphasizing that a female nominee is no longer a new concept. "But because she did that, the world and the political landscape for Kamala has been altered. She's benefiting from the sort of beta testing of Hillary's historic campaign and nomination."
Sefl, who is in Chicago for the convention, said she's never seen Democrats so giddy.
"I think the appeal of two white, married, middle-aged, successful men enthusiastically supporting the nominee is attractive to so many Democrats. It's hard to imagine that somebody who would be turned off by them would have ever been a Democratic voter in the first place," she said.
Bauer agreed, saying that female candidates will often try and find creative ways to balance toughness with likability. She was careful to note, though, that just because Emhoff and Walz are earning enthusiastic praise now, the election remains unpredictable.
"It's common," she said of the messaging strategy, "but whether it's successful? I don't know."
Sefl noted, however, that the speeches may not be strictly strategic. In her view, they likely reflect how the men actually relate to Harris, politically and otherwise.
"When something is authentic, it doesn't necessarily have to be an explicit strategy," she said. "In other words, they're presenting who they are, and personalities come through, regardless of who edited a speech. What the first gentleman and Governor Walz are showing us is non-toxic masculinity."