Despite the possibility of a female President, masculinity has swaggered to the center of the 2024 election—a development both parties seem to have embraced. The Trump campaign has reveled in “camp masculinity” (as Ezra Klein called the Republican National Convention’s lineup of high-testosterone speakers, from Hulk Hogan to U.F.C.’s Dana White); the Harris campaign, meanwhile, has showcased “the nice men of the left” (as Rebecca Traister characterized a contingent of surrogates led by Doug Emhoff). This stylistic contrast promises to be especially sharp on Tuesday night, when J. D. Vance and Tim Walz meet in New York for the Vice-Presidential debate. And, even more than competing visions of manhood, on view will be two very different ideas of what it means to be a father: a battle of the dads, if you will.
In a country given to worshipful talk of Founding Fathers, this is not a new subject on the political stage. Still, it has tended to be more conceptual than personal. In 1991, the political commentator Chris Matthews, in a column for The New Republic, proposed a dichotomy that has since become a cliché: the Democrats were the “Mommy” party, responsible for the nurturing work of health care, education, and Social Security, and Republicans—the “Daddy” party—protected the country from criminals and foreign adversaries and kept a stern eye on the finances. “The paradigm for this snug arrangement is familiar,” he wrote. “It’s the traditional American family. ‘Daddy’ locks the doors at night and brings home the bacon.”
By the time Matthews was writing, it was an arrangement already in decline. From 1972 to 1992, the share of marriages in which a man was the sole provider had fallen from forty-nine to twenty-three per cent, a shift that left open the question of how fatherhood might evolve and be redefined. Richard Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that he thought in recent decades the general understanding of a mother’s role has grown more capacious, whereas the view of the father’s role seems to have diminished. “You’re not the breadwinner, you’re not the provider, you’re probably not the protector in any kind of traditional sense,” Reeves explained. “So what are you? In some ways, I think the conversation about fatherhood has become a bit more cramped and narrow and uncertain.”
That may be true in a sociological context, but in the realm of pop culture and style, the increasing ambiguity of “dad” has made it a handy floating signifier. Dad jokes, dad hats, dad shoes, dad bods, dad thrillers, dad rock, sad dads: to the extent that “dad” is a brand, dad is never bad. He’s a little goofy, while maintaining his authority. He’s not cool, but you wouldn’t want him to be. “Dad,” in such contexts, implies reliability with no pretense of novelty or vanity beyond a dash of self-awareness—“Dad” brings a sense of humor to the fundamentally conservative appeal of familiarity.
Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has. From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket. His affect, along with his record as Minnesota governor, made progressive policies look like a matter of folksy common sense. One photo that circulated during his rise to national attention was taken after he’d signed a bill to provide free school breakfasts and lunches; around the governor’s shoulders, smiling children were piled like puppies. Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity the Harris campaign has hoped to represent with such outreach as the “White Dudes for Harris” fund-raising Zoom. “Weird”—Walz’s inspired epithet for MAGA leadership—was delivered in a tone of goshdarnit perplexity, and with it, he laid claim to the role of norm-setting paterfamilias. The other guys were the basement-dwelling nephews and conspiracy-theorizing uncles.
As the ticket’s resident Dad (to Harris’s Momala), Walz has also become a spokesperson on family issues. The fall of Roe v. Wade made abortion an urgent concern for voters, and Harris, unlike Joe Biden, has taken up the subject with emphatic clarity. (A wide gender gap has opened in the race, reflecting at least in part the number of pro-choice female voters energized post-Dobbs: one recent NBC News poll found Harris leading by twenty-one points among women, where Trump led by twelve among men.) Walz discusses reproductive rights with similar forthrightness, conveying a sense of connection to the topic rarely seen in a male candidate. At the Democratic National Convention, he spoke about protecting freedom and keeping the government out of the doctor’s office, but also about “the hell that is infertility” and the challenges he and his wife, Gwen, faced in having children. (They now have two, Hope and Gus.) “This is personal,” he said. “Hope, Gus, and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you.” In the crowd, his teen-age son, Gus, applauded and cried. “That’s my dad,” he said, pointing to the stage.
When Usha Vance introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention, she described him as “the most determined person I knew, with one overriding ambition: to become a husband and a father, and build the kind of tight-knit family that he had longed for as a child.” Determination and ambition might seem like an incongruous way to talk about having children, but the language suits the hard-edged attitude Vance brings to the project. He and Usha have three small children, and parenthood has defined him on the political stage as much as it has Walz. In the weeks after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, a cascade of interview clips resurfaced in which Vance disparaged nonparents as “sociopathic,” “deranged,” and “less mentally stable” than their child-rearing peers; his scorn for “childless cat ladies,” in particular, became a meme. “Sociopathic” is also the word he used for advocates of abortion rights, after his home state of Ohio passed a constitutional amendment protecting “reproductive decisions” last year. Vance has described himself as “100% Pro-Life” and has opposed exceptions for rape and incest; he wrote the introduction to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report critical of I.V.F., and, although a spokesperson later said that he supports the procedure, he recently skipped a Senate vote to protect it. When he spoke at the convention, he avoided mention of these issues, and instead played up his status as a family man. “Kids, if you’re watching, Daddy loves you very much, but get your butts in bed—it’s ten o’clock,” he said at one point. (“Daddy loves you very much” is also what he said on the Senate floor this past February, when he missed his middle son’s fourth birthday to stall a foreign-aid package by reading “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”)
Vance’s public performance of parenthood might have a certain cloying stiffness—“Daddy”?—but the ardor he brings to the concept of fatherhood is palpable. “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 memoir of Rust Belt life with his Appalachian family, was hailed for its insight into the emotional lives of Trump-country voters, but what it provides more persuasively, of course, is insight into the emotional life of its author. Vance grew up poor, bouncing between homes and caregivers, his childhood buffeted by adult conflict and addiction, and the book’s psychic core is his pain at the absence of a father in his life. “Of all the things I hated about my childhood,” he writes, “nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.” After his parents divorced, his biological father disappeared for much of his childhood; the stepfather who adopted him was gone a few years after that. What follows is a series of parental stand-ins Vance strives to please and to emulate—first, his mother’s husbands and boyfriends, and later, as he becomes an adult, a succession of powerful mentors and institutions. If Walz has been cast as America’s freelance dad, Vance is a man perpetually in search of a father. “Hillbilly Elegy” leaves off before he nestles under Peter Thiel’s wing or kowtows to Donald Trump. “Normally, I would hesitate to psychologize to this degree,” the labor historian Gabriel Winant wrote in an essay that identified Trump as “Vance’s great white father stand-in”; it is almost too on-the-nose that Vance’s biological father was named Donald.
