‘Speaking as a man’: Gendered insults at Republican debate highlight a risky strategy
Three-inch heels. Shirtless video clips. A literal below-the-belt manhood debate.
Attacks among Republican presidential candidates have turned personal — including during Tuesday night’s primary debate in Miami, as candidates exchanged gendered insults onstage, drawing some concerns of sexism within the Republican Party amid its struggle to appeal to more female voters.
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, dismissed both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as a “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.”
Haley parried that in fact, she wears “five-inch heels,” taunted her male rivals not to wear them “unless you can run in them,” and noted that they’re not a “fashion statement — they’re for ammunition.”
And Ramaswamy began an answer on abortion by offering a male perspective, declaring he was “speaking as a man,” and adding that “sexual responsibility for men” and “genetic paternity tests” should also be included in the discourse around abortion.
As the field of Republican hopefuls vying to emerge as a more palatable alternative to former president Donald Trump winnows, the group also finds itself fighting a cruder, more gendered battle.
In recent months, the 2024 Republican slate has engaged in a round-robin of gendered insults and, at times, clumsy attempts at machismo. And while Haley and her male counterparts have both lobbed and dodged the jibes, the underlying conceit often seemed to be that femininity equals weakness.
Haley, Ramaswamy and Trump, for instance, have all mocked DeSantis for wearing lifts in his cowboy boots — a charge he denies. The DeSantis and Trump orbits have gone back and forth over who has “the balls” to show up for a debate. And Ramaswamy has twice tried to burnish his bro bona fides by posting videos of himself shirtless engaging in what he claims is debate prep — once on the tennis courts and more recently on a jet ski.
“I do think it is clear that sexism is alive and well in the Republican Party,” said Erica Scharrer, a communication professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who is an expert in gender and media. “Equating femininity with weakness is inherently sexist, and seems to be a kind of prolonged strategy that is playing out in the campaign so far.”
Or, as Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, posted on X during the Tuesday night heels exchange: “So if you didn’t catch it. Ramaswamy: Heels = feminine. Feminine = weak/unqualified. Haley: Heels = weapon. Weapon = masculine. Masculine = qualified/strong. #masculinitytrap.”
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“If you think of Vivek as a stand-in or understudy for Donald Trump, this makes perfect sense, because Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and made fun of Carly Fiorina’s face,” said Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, referring to when Trump mocked the appearance of Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and one of his 2016 rivals.
But the strategy is rife with risks, many Republican operatives say.
“These other candidates are trying to emulate Trump’s toughness,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “But whenever you try to emulate Trump, you’re creating problems for yourself.”
Conant served as the communications director for the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and he witnessed Rubio’s public humiliation when he tried to out-Trump Trump, unsuccessfully mocking him for his “small hands.”
“Voters want authenticity, and a lot of this comes off as phony,” Conant said. “Clearly the candidates are projecting on what they think voters want, instead of being authentic.”
Conant added that the language that may appeal to parts of the Republican base could backfire in a general election, where suburban women and independent swing voters will probably prove critical: “It’s also questionable how much Trump can pull it off,” he said. “Trump underperforms with women — always has — and I think part of the reason why is locker-room talk is not appealing to suburban moms.”
In fact, network exit polls show that Republicans have lost female voters in every presidential election since 1988, and in 2020, women supported President Biden over Trump, 57 percent to 43 percent. Men have always voted more Republican than women, but Republicans haven’t always won a majority, most recently splitting between the two parties in 2008.
By 40 percent to 18 percent, more Americans said the Democratic Party had a better plan for women’s rights than the Republican Party, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll from August.
Asked on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” last week if she thought DeSantis would be wearing higher heels than her at the debate, Haley demurred, but quipped: “I’ve always talked about my high heels. ... I’ve always said, ‘Don’t wear them if you can’t run in them.’ So we’ll see if he can run in them.”
Then, during the debate, Ramaswamy levied the “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” charge at both Haley and DeSantis.
“Heels have apparently become the name of the race for both Nikki, who has been putting it out there, and Ron, who was been on the defensive about it,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a senior adviser to the Ramaswamy campaign.
But, she added, “Vivek does not think in terms of identity” and is not viewing the race “in gendered terms.” His dig, McLaughlin added, “is playful but it’s also sharp, and it’s also calling it how Vivek sees it.”
Meanwhile, DeSantis and Trump have taken testosterone one-upmanship below the belt. In a dig at Trump’s refusal to attend his party’s primary debates, the DeSantis campaign recently began selling a pair of branded golf balls in a box that blares, “DeSantis has a pair. He shows up.”
A DeSantis spokesman said the back-and-forth was intended to convey a serious reality, that Republican voters would prefer to see Trump debate.
But a DeSantis spokeswoman also posted the golf balls on X, addressing the “Team Trump ‘men’” and taunting, “If you ever decide to man up, you and your boss can buy a pair of balls here.” The attack prompted a Trump campaign spokesman to offer a similarly crude rejoinder on X: “Ron DeSantis is so broke he needs to sell his balls to strangers in order make rent and keep the lights on.”
On the more G-rated end of the spectrum, Ramaswamy seemed eager to display himself shirtless, in a flourish of machismo.
Before the first Republican primary debate in August, he posted on X a 21-second clip of himself playing tennis topless, blasting forehands from behind the baseline under the caption, “Three solid hours of debate prep this morning.” And before Tuesday’s debate, he and conservative media personality Benny Johnson put out another “debate prep” video featuring them both — again, shirtless — doing cannonballs and jet-skiing in Miami’s waters.
The G.O.P’s Culture War Shtick Is Wearing Thin With Voters
By JAMELLE BOUIE
If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.
To be fair to Republican strategists, there was a moment, in the fall of 2021, when it looked like the plan was working. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, ran on a campaign of “parents’ rights” against “critical race theory” and won a narrow victory against Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor, sweeping Republicans into power statewide for the first time since 2009. Youngkin shot to national prominence and Republicans made immediate plans to take the strategy to every competitive race in the country.
In 2022, with “parental rights” as their rallying cry, Republican lawmakers unleashed a barrage of legislation targeting transgender rights, and Republican candidates ran explicit campaigns against transgender and other gender nonconforming people. “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the drag queens,” said Kari Lake, an Arizona Republican, during her 2022 campaign for governor. “They took down our flag and replaced it with a rainbow.”
Republican candidates and political committees spent millions of dollars attacking gender-affirming care for minors and transgender participation in youth sports. Republican opponents of Michigan’s initiative to protect abortion access in the state warned voters that it would give transgender youth the right to obtain certain forms of care without parental consent. An ad aired in opposition to Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat running for re-election to the House that year, portrayed gender-affirming care as a way to “chemically castrate” children.
Lake lost her race. Michigan voters successfully amended their state Constitution to protect the right to an abortion. Spanberger won re-election, too. Overall, election night 2022 was a serious disappointment for the Republican Party, which failed to win a Senate majority and barely won control of the House of Representatives. The hoped-for red wave was little more than a puddle. The culture war strategy had fallen flat on its face.
Undaunted, Republicans stepped back up to the plate and took another swing at transgender rights. Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, the Republican nominee for governor of that state, and his allies spent millions on anti-transgender right ads in his race against the Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear. In one television ad, a narrator warns viewers of a “radical transgender agenda” that’s “bombarding our children everywhere we turn.” Beshear won re-election.
Youngkin was not on the ballot in Virginia, but he led the effort to win a Republican trifecta in the state, targeting Democrats once again on parents’ rights and endorsing candidates who ran hard against transgender inclusion in schools. “No more are we going to make parents stand outside of the room,” Youngkin said, to a crowd of Republicans on Monday at a rally in Leesburg. “We are going to put them at the head of the table in charge of our children’s lives.”
One candidate for State Senate Youngkin endorsed, Juan Pablo Segura, told Fox News that he wants to revisit a failed bill that would have required schools to notify parents if there was any hint a child was interested in transgender identity.
Segura lost his race and Youngkin and his fellow Republicans failed to either flip the State Senate or hold on to the House of Delegates. He’ll face a Democratic majority in both chambers of the General Assembly for the rest of his term in office.
Some Ohio Republicans also tried to turn their fight against a reproductive rights initiative into a battle over transgender rights, falsely stating that the wording of the amendment would allow minors to obtain gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent. On Tuesday, Ohio voters backed the initiative, 56 percent to 43 percent.
I can think of three reasons that voters — going back to the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race, fought over the state’s “bathroom bill” — have not responded to Republican efforts to make transgender rights a wedge issue.
There’s the fact that transgender people represent a tiny fraction of the population — they just aren’t all that relevant to the everyday lives of most Americans. There’s also the fact that for all the talk of “parents’ rights,” the harshest anti-trans laws trample on the rights of parents who want to support their transgender children.
Additionally — and ironically, given the Republican Party’s strategic decision to link the two — there’s the chance that when fused together with support for abortion bans, vocal opposition to the rights of transgender people becomes a clear signal for extremist views. The vibe is off, one might say, and voters have responded accordingly.
If the Republican Party were a normal political party that was still capable of strategic adjustment, I’d say to expect some rhetorical moderation ahead of the presidential election. But consider the most recent Republican presidential debate — held on Wednesday — in which candidates continued to emphasize their opposition to the inclusion of transgender people in mainstream American life. “If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” declared Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, at the conclusion of the debate.
So I suppose that when the next election comes around, we should just expect more of the same.
