Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then. And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.Obviously, Republican voters won't respond well to this. But I don't think negative responses to this passage (which I assume will become part of Harris's stump speech) will be exclusively ideological. For many people, I think it will be a measure of how they feel about men and women.
For many people, including people who didn't think of themselves as Republicans before they got on the Trump train, what's appealing about Trump is that he seems to be a powerful man who does what he pleases and gets away with it. We say that, as a businessman, he's cheated and defrauded people, and they respond that you have to be a little devious and crooked to get by in the cutthroat world of New York business. And as for his sex life, many people see him as a stud rather than a predator, and while they won't admit it to themselves, they thrill to the idea that he sexually imposes his will on women. And some of them will admit it to themselves:
This is a shirt pic.twitter.com/SjFNHpZlMi
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) October 14, 2016
Many men think they should be able to get away with financial chicanery because everybody does it. They think behavior toward women that you and I would see as predatory is simply normal. And some women agree with them.
To people like this, Harris will undoubtedly come off as a finger-wagging scold who doesn't want men to engage in perfectly healthy behavior. I think some normally Democratic men will fall into this category as well, though I hope it won't be a large number.
On the other hand, there could be a number of Republican women who know what bad men are like, and who'll appreciate what Harris says.
Harris isn't leading in the polls, though she's scrambling the race. She's doing much better with young voters -- her lead over Trump is 20%, according to a new Axios poll, compared to a 6% Biden lead in Axios's last youth poll. And she's doing better with union voters in swing states, according to a new Emerson poll.
But attitudes about bad men and prosecutorial women might affect the votes of some Americans who are normally reliable Democrats or Republicans. Trump was already making inroads among men of color; I wonder what the effect of Harris's candidacy will be on the white male vote. On the other hand, I think Harris could impress some normally Republican women with talk like this. I certainly hope so.
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