Matt Boyle, the national political editor at Breitbart News, explained how former President Donald Trump has an opportunity to disrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ strategy to win the election, which is to woo women voters while keeping men voters “sullen but not mutinous.”
Last month, during an interview with Mark Halperin, Democrat pollster Celinda Lake said Harris must “win women” by more than she loses men in the election, adding, “You’ve got to keep men sullen but not mutinous, and you’ve got to win women enthusiastically.”
Boyle explained that Trump has an opportunity to act on Harris’ plan against her by getting white working-class men “mutinous,” which the Harris campaign is reportedly trying to avoid.
“So the question is, will men be sullen but not mutinous, or are they going to get angry? And are they going to say, ‘You know what? We’re not going to take this anymore.’ That’s a big part of this, and should be the Trump strategy. There’s a lot of good signs out there that are good for Trump, but I think his numbers aren’t as strong as they need to be in those places and he’s got time to make it up and he’s got time to get people focused on this stuff,” Boyle explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Boyle used the Harris campaign’s reaction to pop star Taylor Swift endorsing the Democratic nominee as an example of the campaign’s efforts to keep men “sullen, but not mutinous,” explaining how Swift’s endorsement appeared to be “coordinated” by the Harris campaign to be “buried” by post-debate coverage.
“You want to know why they put out the Taylor Swift endorsement in the immediate aftermath of the debate? Let’s be honest here for a minute, an endorsement of that magnitude does not happen without coordination from the campaign. Kamala Harris’ campaign coordinated with Taylor Swift, they decided on the timing of the release of that endorsement, and they put it out on debate night. Why did they do that? They almost wanted to bury it in the post-debate spin coverage because they wanted to double down on their energy from young women…but it’s almost like they didn’t want that to backfire and kick off men on the back end. They wanted to bury it in the news cycle,” Boyle explained.
“The fact that they would bury that in the middle of the post-debate coverage is pretty incredible. I think that’s a tell of their strategy of energizing women but keeping men sullen, but not mutinous. That’s the strategy from the Kamala campaign. So the question is, can Donald Trump make men angry? I don’t know if he can do it, but I think he can,” Boyle added.
Moving forward, Boyle said Trump should be visiting and sharing his vision for working-class communities in the rust belt and Sunbelt states which similarly resemble the Middletown, Ohio community described in Hillbilly Elegy, the novel written by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, as an effort to appeal to working-class men.
“I think what Trump needs to do is he needs to double down, triple down, quadruple down and go hit the road in the rust belt states, in the Sunbelt states. Go do factory tours, almost like a Hillbilly Elegy tour,” Boyle explained.
“There’s a scene at the beginning of [Hillbilly Elegy] where they show the factory in town from back in the heyday in the mid 20th century when it’s the lifeblood of the community, and then they show the town now and it’s a rundown place and the factory is not doing that well. Those factories exist all throughout Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. Those communities are there. That’s what Trump needs to do. He needs to go speak to those people with an economic nationalist message of how he’s going to bring their jobs back and how he’s going to make their lives better,” Boyle added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
