White Dudes for Harris have assembled. What comes next?

Vic Meyers is the kind of White Dude you wouldn’t expect to find going viral with the libs. He lives on 100 acres of ranch in “the sticks,” out by Trinidad, Colo., near the border with New Mexico. He goes into town to work as an armed security guard, hauls his water back home because the wells aren’t any good, used to own horses but it got too expensive between the drought and the cost of hay. He doesn’t really talk to his neighbors. But he has been posting TikToks this year.

“I’m a 56-year-old rural, gun-owning White guy,” he said in a video posted a few days ago that has been viewed more than a million times, cowboy hat on his head, tractor in the background. “Kamala Harris favors an assault weapons ban and background checks and red-flag laws and thinks I’d vote for her.”

“And she’d be right.”

He’s grown disenchanted with how Democrats talk to people like him. Or the fact that they don’t really. Donald Trump won his county by double digits in 2016 and 2020. He left the Democratic Party about six or eight years ago, after an ill-fated run for Congress, and switched his registration to unaffiliated.

“I didn’t feel like I fit. I think that’s why so many people in the rural areas are gravitating towards Trump, it’s because the Democratic Party has left them. They don’t bother to go out there and meet them,” Meyers says.

When people interact with him on TikTok, they assume he’s a Republican. That Democrats have allowed those stereotypes to take hold, he says, is “a big mistake of the party.” So, he’s hoping others might see a White guy like him and realize they’re not alone in supporting Harris.

In the beginning there were White Dudes. Lots of them, disembarking the Mayflower, signing the Declaration of Independence, electing themselves to office. Lately they find themselves in political fashion, and it can be disconcerting for everyone involved, White Dude or not.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman who is trying to break the mostly White, exclusively male streak on the presidency, picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate this week. It was a commonly accepted analysis that she needed a White Dude to run alongside her to attract the votes needed to win. A New York Times headline christened the plain-spoken Walz as “a battleground strategy dressed in Carhartt.” The campaign sold $1 million in Realtree-esque camo hats on Tuesday.

For the first time, White men are trying to talk to one another about how their identity can be of use to Democrats — perhaps trying to redeem themselves from past perceptions on the left. Last week, 200,000 people got on a “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom fundraiser that has poured almost $4.5 million to the campaign, according to its organizers.

It was an unusual moment in a string of identity-focused call-a-thons that included fundraisers for Black women, Black and Latino men, and White women.

“Everybody needs space. We’re not the segregated South of the 1960s, we’re just organizing,” says Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist and Harris ally. “There are conversations that White men have to have amongst themselves, there are conversations that Black women need to have amongst themselves — issues that matter to them more than they matter to others.”

The theory for the call went something like this, says Ross Morales Rocketto, who was its main convener: Democrats have been bleeding support from White men because of intersecting economic crises that have chipped away at narratives of men as protectors and a rise in “manosphere” communities on the right. Plus a loneliness crisis. Plus a mental health crisis. “We haven’t provided a counterbalance for folks,” he says.

The call felt less gender studies seminar, more share-your-feelings campfire with elected officials, organizers and Hollywood stars. The presence of “The Big Lebowski’s” Jeff Bridges (The Dude himself) made headlines, while a ticker at the bottom of the screen gave a flavor of who was there: Benjamin J. donated $500. Joseph J. donated $100. Ryan S. donated $10.

But, as it turns out, the politics of getting a bunch of White men together to show their electoral might are a bit tangled for everyone involved — at least on this side of the political spectrum.

“I’m ever so slightly uncomfortable with, like, a space for White guys,” says John, an orthopedics surgeon from Tennessee who asked to use his first name because he worries about repercussions for speaking in favor of Democrats in his mostly Republican town. “I just feel like that brings along a little bit of a negative connotation, despite whatever positive intentions may be present.”

“Attaching myself to anything White, White Dudes for Harris, or anything like that, I was hesitant on that,” says David Clayton, a 45-year-old from Southern California who recently moved to North Carolina to prepare for a congressional run. “Then I came to the realization of, I can’t just sit in the background and say, the Black women for Harris or the Indigenous (people) for Harris — I can’t just let them do the heavy lifting.”

“Truth be told, I think a lot of us had discomfort with this,” says Brad Bauman, a D.C.-based communications consultant who threw out his wedding anniversary plans of visiting Virginia wineries to help organize the call.

In a 1,000-plus-person WhatsApp group called the “nerve center,” one member made the discomfort explicit: Segregating people along racial and gender lines was problematic, even if it was for a good cause. Was this really the way to do it?

“If the goal is to elect Harris this whole effort should be disbanded immediately,” he wrote, according to a chat log obtained by The Washington Post. “If the goal is a more equal America this whole effort should be disbanded immediately.”

The member was removed from the group soon after, according to the log. Morales Rocketto says the point of the group is to generate ideas to elect Harris: “Whenever folks are being toxic, that’s when we step in because, you know, this is about positive organizing.”

A Pew Research study from April found that White men lean Republican whether they have a college degree or not, unlike women and members of various racial groups. Republicans have achieved that in recent years without any formal outreach.

“I’d actually be a little bit afraid to see what kind of a Zoom call we would get for some folks,” says Jason Osborne, a Republican strategist and former senior Trump campaign adviser, adding: “If there was an organized effort like that, it would be mocked by the other side. I know what they would say, it’d be like, ‘Well, that’s just a normal campaign rally for Trump.’”

“I think the call is cool,” says Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at University of California at Davis who studies rural populations. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that is really serious outreach to the White working class who feel alienated, unseen and in many instances, they feel, when they are seen, they’re maligned.”

Soon after the White Dudes call, Trump allies launched a $20 million initiative to target young men.

The Harris campaign doesn’t have any immediate plans to create an initiative specific to White men. (It has them for other demographics.) Although the campaign didn’t coordinate with or organize White Dudes for Harris, it dispatched national co-chair Mitch Landrieu as its representative on the call.

White Dudes for Harris is selling merchandise online to benefit the Harris campaign. It’s trying to figure out next steps, but the Dudes are hoping to fundraise and get White men to volunteer for the campaign, helping them “feel like they belong to on the left,” Morales Rocketto says. (He spoke of planning “dude parties.”) They’re being careful about keeping themselves separate from the campaign. “This is a taboo topic. White dudes on the left is a taboo topic,” he says. “We didn’t want to do any harm, in case it didn’t go super well.”

In the meantime, Walz has become the campaign’s White-Dude-in-Chief, playing up his small-town upbringing and a mind-your-own-business Midwestern way of life. On Wednesday, Harris’s battleground states director wrote in a campaign memo that Walz’s popularity in Trump-supporting counties he represented in Congress offered “a blueprint for how to cut margins in rural areas across the country.” (“An ideal white dude!” someone wrote in the chat when he got the VP nod.)

“This is preaching to the choir,” Walz had said on the call, “but the choir needs to sing.”