Obama pitches black men on Kamala Harris

Former president Barack Obama made his pitch on Thursday to black men on why they should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of having hang-ups about voting for a woman. Obama stopped off at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh ahead of a rally in the city and said he wanted to “speak some truths” to black men as recent polls show former Donald Trump doing comparatively well with the group.

“Part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama opined, adding that women are the ones “out there marching and protesting” when black men have problems with the system.

Harris was notably not at the rally, instead doing a town hall on Univision — where she told a Hispanic voter concerned about wait times for veteran health care that she comes “from the middle class” — and headlining her own rally in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Obama’s comments echo those of his wife, Michelle Obama, who told men in 2017 that they needed to “figure” themselves out. 

“Y’all should get you some friends. Y’all need to go talk to each other about your stuff, because there’s so much of it! Talk about why y’all are the way you are,” she said during a sit-down with poet Elizabeth Alexander at an Obama Foundation event. She also asked women, “Are we protecting our men too much, so that they feel a little entitled, a little self-righteous?” 

Republican strategist and CNN commentator Scott Jennings questioned the wisdom of insulting the voters that Democrats need to win over: “Dems struggling with men of all races and Obama goes out and insults them?” he asked on X.

Nina Turner, a progressive and national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, questioned why “black men are being belittled” and argued that the Democratic Party needs to understand and respect why black men are choosing to vote a different way. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

IT’S LIKE A MAGNET Former president Donald Trump will attend a Fox News town hall featuring an all-female audience in Georgia as he polls well behind Harris with women voters. The event will be hosted by Harris Faulkner and will air on Wednesday morning. 

‘WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO FOCUS ON IT’ Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff dismissed stories about his personal failings — including a confirmed report that he knocked up his family’s nanny, as well as other stories accusing him of domestic abuse and mistreatment of women — as a “distraction” from his wife’s campaign. “We don’t have time to be pissed off,” he said during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. 

BIDEN HEADS TO FLORIDA President Joe Biden will visit parts of Florida impacted by Hurricane Milton this Sunday, but the White House did not say if he would meet with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. The men have praised each other’s commitment to Americans dealing with the fallout from the storm. 

Kamala goes Vogue

Vice President Kamala Harris graced her second Vogue cover this week and was immediately trashed for posing for the Annie Leibovitz-led photoshoot on October 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the same day she accused Florida governor Ron DeSantis of playing politics with his response to Hurricane Milton.

The mostly glowing profile from the women’s fashion magazine, which describes her as the “candidate for our times,” however, wasn’t without its hidden warning signs about Harris. The author notes that when she asks a follow-up of Harris on the situation in Gaza, which Harris described as “complex” and “nuanced,” that Harris “starts a couple of sentences, abandons them, and starts again.” The profile goes on to explain that she adopted most of her policy positions from President Joe Biden before adding a few of her own, but glosses over her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign wherein she adopted many of the opposite positions.

The piece is also notably short on commentary on Harris’s fashion choices, only briefly mentioning the colors of suits she wore and praising her decision not to follow other women in wearing white to her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech.

–Cockburn

GOP gets good news from NYT 

Republicans are favored to flip control of the Senate, according to the latest round of polls from one of their least favorite outlets.

None other than the New York Times rolled out polls in Montana, Florida and Texas — and found that Republicans lead in all three. By this point in the cycle, these results aren’t a surprise. Montana senator Jon Tester’s days of defying political gravity appear to be over, with him losing by almost double-digits to Republican Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, who avoided a contentious primary and is benefitting from massive leads from his ticket-mates, former president Donald Trump and Governor Greg Gianforte, both of whom are up by around twenty points over their Democratic Party opponents.

Elsewhere, the Times is pouring cold water on Democrats’ desires to expand the Senate map into Texas or Florida. In the former, Senator Ted Cruz is leading his Democratic Party opponent, Representative Colin Allred, by four points, as Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris by seven. In Florida, Trump is leading Harris by thirteen points, and Senator Rick Scott is leading his opponent, former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, by nine points. 

Allred is regarded as a better candidate by most than Mucarsel-Powell is. Her 2020 loss was part of the Democrats’ spectacular collapse in South Florida and was marred by reports about her husband’s ties to foreign oligarchs. 

Perhaps most interesting is which races were not included in the latest roundup: Ohio, in which Senator Sherrod Brown is being vastly outspent by Republicans backing his opponent, Bernie Moreno; Nebraska, where Democrats are trying to make hay out of Independent candidate, Dan Osborn, who is being heavily bankrolled by their party infrastructure; and Maryland, where the state’s popular former governor, Republican Larry Hogan, is hoping to ride a wave of last-minute spending to a huge upset win.

In the latter race, Democrats are implausibly arguing that Hogan holds the keys to a Senate GOP majority — according to the latest round of polls from the Times, that’s a whole lot of hogwash.

–Matthew Foldi