If, without further context, I told you that there was a mission in the United States to get out the white-people vote, which party would you guess this was in service of assisting? Or would you be too distracted by how unnerving such an endeavour sounds? The white vote, really?
So here’s the context: Many Democrats have been wringing their hands since the 2016 election over the number of white women who vote Republican generally but for Donald Trump specifically. There was, remember, a Women’s March to protest his election! And yet nearly half of white lady voters were like, yep, that’s my candidate. What gives?
There was all sorts of analyses—these women are voting for their husbands’ preferred candidates! they’re aligning themselves with white male power and abandoning the sisterhood!—but maybe not a ton of recognizing that white women vote Republican for the same reasons as anyone else does, namely this is the side they agree with on whichever issues, or they’re part of communities where everyone votes Republican.
Because the real (boring) reasons were so elusive, though, there was all this talk about how liberal and progressive white women should gather up the other white women and make them (by what mechanism? and were all white American women ever even rooms together, physical or otherwise?) vote for Democrats. Vote for Democrats, but also join in a broader project of self-flagellating over white privilege. The idea is for white people to do the work, to leverage privilege into getting privilege-demolishing politicians into office.
In some strange amalgam of 2017 and the 2020-2021 lockdowns, a bunch of white women got together to self-flagellate I mean get out the vote via a mass Zoom call on Thursday night. Black voters were organizing on Zoom to get Vice President Kamala Harris elected. White women needed to do their part! And gather they did. Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason watched more of it than I did, and has the full report.
If the whole thing struck you as a bit sexist—why are white women responsible for getting Democrats elected? are white men a lost cause?—then fear not because white men are having their turn too.
It has not gone unnoticed—certainly not by antisemitic trolls—that a number of the more prominent self-identified whites-for-Harris are Jewish. (Did you know singer-songwriter Pink was Jewish? Allow me to be very old-school Jewish newspaper and inform you of this fact you probably did know if you knew who she was to begin with.) As is activist Leah Greenberg (I did Google to confirm, you never know if this is the world’s one gentile Leah Greenberg.) As is Michael Skolnik, who best as I can tell is ‘famous’ for having had a viral post announcing the dudes’ event.
On one level, all we’re looking at is the fact that U.S. Jews tend to be white and to vote Democrat and therefore are going to be over-represented in whites-for-Harris and underrepresented in the ranks of whites who support Trump. It does not (sorry, antisemites) speak to a Jewish conspiracy to speak for the people you consider the real white people.
That said, there’s also something interesting about Jews doing identity politics as white people. Not that they aren’t white, but they are also, you know. It hearkens back to do-Jews-have-white-privilege discourse, a big thing during the Obama administration, and since all time is one, I guess maybe we’re due for another round. It just seems odd, given the post-Oct. 7 landscape, to have this conversation as if we’re not living in a world where things are rather different for this one set of white people. But it makes sense pragmatically to foreground whiteness rather than Jewishness, given the number of votes at stake and what’s likely to swing this election.
Everyone’s looking for strategies to caricature everyone else, ostensibly in the name of getting out the right votes. The Republicans are “weird,” is the new pivot, away from calling them fascists. “Weird,” in this context, means embracing the memes and biases of the hyperonline far-right. You can appeal to a radicalized anti-woke 16-year-old or to an undecided 50-year-old and for some reason the GOP thinks the former is the way to go.
Weirdness might be capturing something true about what happens when people are so stuck in their own echo chambers that they don’t know how they sound to offline normies, or just to people in different echo chambers. Denigrating those Karens from HR may play well among very-online conservative men, but less so to the country at large. Same with DEI-influencer-speak and its appeal, or lack thereof, to wider audiences.
It’s cringe, sure. But the replies mocking the women—who for what it’s worth helped raise millions of dollars for the Harris campaign—arguably help the Democrats. The same pattern is already underway, with the trolls questioning the masculinity of the “white dudes for Harris.” It could be that if there are a bunch of A-list white people involved in these proceedings, this winds up being effective and gets Harris, noted non-white person, into office.
But before Canadian supporters of the Liberals or NDP opt to emulate the whites-for strategy, consider the longer-term implications. If left and centre-left politics become associated with whites and with white people organizing themselves along racial lines, this is a gift to any right-wing movement pointing to (and they can absolutely point to this) the racialized people who support their cause. And do you really want to encourage segregation, which is what whites-for organizing amounts to?
And, because I cannot not point this out: if the hot new thing is white people discussing their whiteness, this is going to work out poorly for Jews. I’m not enough of a prognosticator to say exactly how it will do so this time around, but it always does.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
