Gender has always been crucial in US presidential elections, not just in terms of gender voting patterns but also in the realm of competing performances of masculinity. Such performances also involve mobilising gendered emotional effects. In particular, strong male leaders are meant to make people feel protected from physical, social and economic harm.
I have argued that one factor contributing to Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat was a protective masculinity failure, especially in regard to COVID-19. Former President Barack Obama, for example, argued that, unlike Biden, Trump could not be counted on to protect Americans:
“Eight months into this pandemic, new cases are breaking records. Donald Trump isn’t going to suddenly protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself […]. Joe understands […] that the first job of a president is to keep us safe from all threats: domestic, foreign, and microscopic.”
Biden was also depicted as a leader who could empathise with the feelings of vulnerable American people. Consequently, Obama explicitly contrasted Joe Biden’s form of kind and caring protective masculinity with Trump’s divisive, hyper-masculine one.
However, after his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump resurrected himself as a strong masculine protector. He claimed that “enemies” are trying to use legal charges to take away his freedom and silence him because he “will always stand” in the way of their attempt to silence the American people and take away their freedom.
He also vowed to be a vengeful protector, declaring: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution. I will totally obliterate the deep state.” His proposed appointments since the 2024 election suggest that that is exactly what he intends to do.
In his performance of protective masculinity, Trump has mobilised feelings of resentment, fear and hate against those he claims he will protect Americans from (for example immigrants and transgender people as well as the so-called ‘deep state’). He has also activated notions of shame (in the claimed decline of America) but also pride, love and hope in the America he declares he will make great and economically prosperous again. In other words, Trump mobilises negativity, then promises to be the strong male protector who will restore the American people’s positivity.
Trump has also long appealed to feelings of masculine self-esteem, especially among men who sense that traditional masculinity, and its related entitlements, are under threat. His electoral strategy successfully courted White males, the youth manosphere, “techno bros”, “crypto bros”, conservative male unionists threatened by globalisation and offshoring, and conservative Black and Latino men. Trump promises to make (some) men feel great again.
In the process, Trump also explicitly sparked misogynistic instincts, by making lewd references to Harris, for example. J. D. Vance assisted Trump’s efforts.
Nonetheless, Trump claimed that he would be a strong male protector of women, defending them from illegal immigrants, crime, foreign threats and other anxieties while restoring feelings of happiness, confidence and freedom: “You will be protected and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free.” Trump even promised that, as a result, women “will no longer be thinking about abortion”. This is all despite his own alleged history of sexual assault.
Biden and Harris
By 2024, Biden’s apparent physical and cognitive decline meant that he was no longer a convincing masculine protector (or viable ongoing presidential candidate). The choice of Harris as his replacement candidate had financial and organisational advantages, but it was also a gamble given the combined matters of gender and race. After all, despite the long history of US racism, it had still proved easier to elect a Black man (Obama) to the presidency than a White woman (Clinton).
However, the Democrats believed that the women’s vote would be particularly important in the election. They hoped that as well as Harris’s appeal to younger and Black women, she would appeal to White women, including some who’d previously voted Republican. Anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney attempted to help Harris appeal to the latter.
Harris tried to counter Trump’s politics of emotion in several ways. She tried to evoke fear of what Trump would do to women’s rights, especially with regard to abortion, and what he would do to democratic institutions. But she also tried to stimulate joy, excitement and hope in an alternative future. As former President Bill Clinton stated at the Democratic National Convention,
“I … want an America that’s more joyful, more inclusive, more future-focused. Just think what a burden it’s been on us to get up day after day after day after day, buried in meaningless hot rhetoric … We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us.”
Mobilising joy included evoking humour about the ‘weirdness’ of Trump’s world.
Harris’s campaign also tried to appeal to different feelings of masculine self-esteem. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s ‘America’s dad’ image (of being a warm, caring but sports-loving coach, National Guard-serving, gun-owning hunter) was used to contrast his ‘tonic masculinity’ with Trump’s ‘toxic’ masculinity. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, was depicted as a supportive ‘wife-guy’ who had ‘reshaped the perception of masculinity’.
However, given the major role of gender in US presidential elections, a key issue was whether Harris could successfully embody a caring, motherly, protective femininity that promised security and economic benefits to voters and helped to counter Trump’s protective masculinity.
Other women politicians have been able to do so, such as Angela Merkel. Women leaders particularly mobilised protective femininity during the COVID-19 health crisis – remember Jacinda Ardern. However, it always seemed likely that masculinist leadership stereotypes would re-emerge once the economy needed rebuilding after the pandemic.
Harris attempted a form of protective femininity. She promised to “create an opportunity economy” to counter voters’ feelings (however questionable) that they had been better off economically under Trump. She pledged to “protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do”. She promised to be the kind of president “who cares about you and is not putting themselves first”.
Yet, such appeals to voters were to prove unsuccessful.
Multiple political, economic and social factors determine electoral outcomes. However, one of those factors was that the Harris campaign’s politics of emotion simply proved less effective than Trump’s. Affective performances of gendered leadership stereotypes arguably played a key role in that.
Carol Johnson is an Emerita Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide.
This article reproduces some material that was previously published in The Conversation under a creative commons licence.
Feeling protected: protective masculinity and femininity from Donald Trump and Joe Biden to Jacinda Ardern by Carol Johnson is available on Bristol University Press Digital.
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