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August 2, 2024
The Dude Abides—and He Supports Kamala Harris for President
“White Dudes for Harris” raised $4.5 million for the presumptive Democratic nominee. Why are some people trashing it?
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech during her presidential election campaign in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 30, 2024.
(The Yomiuri Shimbun / AP Images)
“I’m white, I’m the Dude, and I’m for Harris.” That’s how beloved actor Jeff Bridges, “the Dude” in the cult-film classic The Big Lebowski, kicked off the unprecedented “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call Monday night. “A woman president—how exciting!”
It might have been “cringe,” as they say, but it was also endearing and adorable from the get-go. And often moving.
The event was organized in a rush and yet drew a huge crowd. More than 200,000 people—not all white dudes; I was there, and so were many Black and female friends of mine, and we didn’t have to sneak in—joined the three-and-a-half-hour Zoom call, and another 175,000 have watched it on YouTube. The event raised $4.5 million from 70,000 individual donors and counting.
The coordinator of the Zoom, Ross Morales Rocketto, is a cofounder of the group Run for Something, which has been recruiting young people to run for office since 2017. How did organizers land the Dude? I asked Morales Rocketto. Getting Bridges was a defining coup for the fledgling group; I assumed they’d worked hard for it.
“His people reached out to us!” less than an hour before the event, Morales Rocketto told me, marveling. The pitch from Bridges’s people, he recalls, “was basically what he said on the call: ‘Hey, I’m white, I’m the Dude, and I’m for Harris—I should be part of this.’” Morales Rocketto and his co-coordinators scrambled the Zoom lineup and put Bridges up high. Talk about serendipity.
White Dudes for Harris, of course, followed White Women: Answer the Call, which was inspired by a ginormous Zoom organized by Win With Black Women only hours after Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris on July 21. The Black Women Zoom was immediately followed by Black Men for Harris, then by Latinas for Harris, then South Asian Women for Harris, which was followed by South Asian Men for Harris last Saturday night.
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Morales Rocketto and others—including Brad Bauman, a communications consultant who’s worked for many progressive causes, including Run for Something, and Ilya Sherman, formerly of MoveOn, and others—essentially organized the “White Dudes” call on a WhatsApp chat late last week, recounts Micah Sifry, who was also part of the organizing. Sifry described the on-the-fly organizing in his excellent Substack, The Connector (subscribe!).
As Sifry explained:
White Dudes for Harris (WDFH) literally started with nothing more than a few hundred men, but it was a highly networked group from the start, with many of them veterans of years of digital organizing.…
With little more than a Google Form signup page, WDFH grew organically, with people inviting their friends, colleagues, and relatives. I used a simple script a friend of mine had suggested, texting people saying, “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy? If so, are you around on Monday? Some friends and I are joining a national call to support Kamala Harris for President. RSVP here.”
Believing in science. Wow. I’d find that alluring on a dating app. But I digress…
“We thought we’d get 10,000 people, and raise half a million,” Morales Rocketto told me. Boy, was he wrong.
On the South Asian Men for Harris call, writer Salman Rushdie (yes, Salman Rushdie) captured the mood: “Something very extraordinary—transformative–has happened in American politics in just the last week,” he said. “The conversation has absolutely changed with the arrival of Kamala Harris’ candidacy. It’s changed in a kind of joyful way—a way of optimism and positive forward thinking.”
Critics worry about all of this racially siloed organizing—and especially about organizing a group for white men. “I got randomly put into white guys for Harris WhatsApp group and then was almost immediately thrown out after I said a whites only group was nuts. This is apparently common now,” Matt Stoller of the Economic Liberties Project complained last week on X.
“Ethnic grievance politics never ends well,” he added. That may be true, but the call was not organized to express white male grievance, and nobody in 210 minutes ever did.
Morales Rocketto understands the hesitation. “As I said on the call, when white men organize they were often wearing pointy hats,” referring to Ku Klux Klan hoods. He had his own doubts, he confesses. “I made a lot of calls to evaluate my blind spots.” He and others on the call repeatedly made the point that Democrats have ceded white men, and especially non-college-educated white men, to Republicans for decades. Could there be a non-racist way to reclaim some of them?
Perhaps most fundamentally: This was white men organizing not behind a white man, or a conservative agenda, let alone a white hood, but to support a progressive Black/South Asian Indian pro-choice woman president. We’ve never seen anything like it before. Folks trying to understand it through their narrow political silos are missing the big picture.
Part of what surprised me about WDFH is how personal and moving it was. Morales Rocketto opened by talking about the spike in white male suicide, and declared, “There is a crisis of loneliness in this country.” Actor and union activist Sean Astin recalled an old friend going to a men’s group decades ago, and Astin thinking, “Are you in a cult?” Then Astin watched his brother kick addiction by clinging to a support group of men in recovery, later coming back to meet with his old group regularly when he moved across the country.
“The idea that men can gather to talk about how we feel? Interesting, powerful concept,” Astin said.
Actor Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in the girl-power Frozen movies, and father of two girls, recalled “weeping over their beds on Nov 8 [when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton] because I let them down. I felt betrayal and shame…that I’ll never allow myself to feel again.”
Governor Tim Walz led with the fact that his oldest daughter is named Hope, in the spirit of the way he and his wife “spent seven years on fertility treatments. IVF, things that [Republicans] would ban.”
There was also humor. “What a variety of whiteness we have here,” declared West Wing star Bradley Whitford. “It’s like a rainbow of beige.” (“Rainbow of Beige for Kamala” T-shirts are coming, Whitford told me.) Illinois Governor J.D. Pritzker quipped: “When I’m invited to an event called White Dudes for Harris…it doesn’t sound like something I’d usually join, but this is a great cause.” Comedian Paul Scheer opted not for wisecracks but for an impressive, rapid-fire recounting of Kamala Harris’s entire civil rights record, going back to when, as a teenager, she organized her neighbors to get their apartment building to let children play in the courtyard.
Scheer needs to be a Harris surrogate, fast.
There were singers Josh Groban and Lance Bass, and building trades union leader Jimmy Williams Jr. Longtime People’s Action organizer George Goehl talked about his “30 years organizing the working class,” and how important multiracial coalitions are. At the same time, “I do care that we organize white working-class men,” Goehl told me Thursday.
The conversation on the call, not just the numbers of participants and donors, exceeded Morales Rocketto’s dreams. “You get a group of white guys together, you never know where things will go.” He loved where it went.
Morales Rocketto has been thinking about how to work on the issue of white male alienation, from Democrats and from society, for a while. He grew up in an exurban subdivision north of Houston, and he thinks a lot about his old white working-class friends, “where they’ve ended up, and where they haven’t ended up.” He’s done a lot of research into so-called deaths of despair—suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses—which are disproportionately killing white men. Organizing in this space might be his next project when he leaves Run for Something after this cycle.
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The Dude Abides—and He Supports Kamala Harris for President
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Many young white men feel adrift, he says, so they drift to the toxic “manosphere,” and become acolytes of misogynistic hucksters like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, “who give them a playbook and a community.”
Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell was the second person to speak on the call, and he wholeheartedly agrees. “We have a niche extremist MAGA movement that claims they speak for the majority of white men, but they don’t,” says Mitchell, who is Black. “I believe there is a silent majority of white men who don’t support MAGA, but MAGA is the only group speaking to them. What would happen if we tried to convince those men to organize as a bloc so they don’t get spoken for any more?”
The idea of a “white dude” affinity group doesn’t scare Mitchell, as long as its purpose is clear. “Affinity groups of all kinds can help people with a shared story come together, so we can become a bigger ‘We.’” He adds: “We need more white dudes standing up against racism and misogyny in this election.” Mitchell continues: “And are we really comfortable with all [white] race conversations being dominated by MAGA? We need to get in the game!”
Even with a Black booster as respected as Mitchell, WDFH continued to get pushback. The right-wing reaction was predictable.
Senator Josh Hawley compared the upbeat Zoom meeting with Donald Trump’s ludicrous, ugly, and false remark Wednesday that Harris has always been Indian, but “just turned black.” “It’s not a great idea for either of the parties to be playing racial identity politics, whether it’s ‘white dudes for Kamala’ or whatever this is,” Hawley sneered. Never-loved nepo-baby Donald Trump Jr. mocked them as “Cucks for Kamala.”
The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, who is Black, was among the sharpest critics on Twitter, calling the effort “paternalistic white savior bullshit” and adding, “I just sincerely think Zoom calls organized explicitly on the basis of white identity, whatever their justification, are bad and a slippery slope to bad things.”
Refreshingly, Harper admitted after joining the call that he got it wrong—at least a little. “Imagine my shock when I found myself, slowly but surely, charmed by the White Dudes for Harris call,” he wrote. Like me, he was moved by the stories of “loneliness” and the “earnest” dads and others trying to be more present for women—the women in their lives, and women politically, and especially Kamala Harris.
But he remained stubbornly unclear on the concept.
“The Democrats have a problem with appealing to male voters that cuts across racial lines. The ‘White Dudes’ name risks solidifying the public’s impression that the Democratic Party is for overeducated elites with laptop jobs and performative progressive politics, which is particularly shortsighted at a moment when the GOP is on its way to achieving a multiracial working-class coalition, cobbled together with increasing shares of Black and Hispanic voters driven by male defections from the Democratic coalition.”
Longtime working-class organizer George Goehl replied to me, with a hint of frustration: “Tell me your better idea, and organize it.”
“I do want to acknowledge the siloed aspect of [WDFH],” Bradley Whitford told me. “But does that feel weird? No! The whole impulse came from the Black women’s call. We were following their lead. And we know white male support is being ceded to the Republicans right now.”
“This is the wonderful paradox of this country, and it always has been,” he went on. “We wanna assimilate, and we wanna have our affinity groups!” In earlier generations, the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Germans tried and were allowed to do both—partly because they weren’t entirely accepted. But eventually, the dual identities worked out.
“Also, we didn’t want to be colonizers!” Morales Rocketto said. “We’d already had Black men, Latino men, South Asian men—who were we to call together a generic ‘Dudes for Harris’ group?”
I wondered if any of these (young) critics of WDFH know about the long history of Black civil rights workers begging white people to organize among their own people? As early as 1964, the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) endorsed a “White Folks Project.”
“Project organizers wanted to bring poor whites into the movement, or at least limit local hostility to it,” the SNCC archive explains. They failed. Later, in a regrettable racial fracture, SNCC ejected its white members, and again told them to organize among their own. Not sure how much that happened.
In 2020, the call arose again. “Good White Folks: Get Your Own Damn People.”
White Dudes for Harris, and the white women answering the call, could be a start.
What comes next? Morales Rocketto was honest. “We don’t know!” It was 36 hours after the Zoom call and he hadn’t had much sleep. Since organizers hadn’t expected the overwhelming response they got, they are giving themselves this week to take it in and think how to turn this upsurge of energy into something lasting. “I’m an organizer and I want to organize,” he told me.
Mitchell said he hopes they “keep the conversation going, but also organize more men volunteering hours on the ground, knocking doors, in the swing states. Talking to other white men, with a voice they will trust.”
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“I want to see people realizing politics is more important than culture,” says Whitford, who admits that’s another paradox, since he’s an actor.
“But The West Wing did not help you with your preexisting [health] conditions. Handmaid’s Tale didn’t help you if you’re a rape victim who needs an abortion. I really want people to know it’s about doing politics.”
The other thing is, WDFH doesn’t block anyone else from organizing. As I write, “Deadheads for Harris” is kicking off. (My cousins are wild about it.) Caribbean-Americans for Harris are having their first call. On Friday Disabled Voters for Harris are having their first virtual meeting.
Tyler Austin Harper could organize “Working-Class Dudes for Harris,” and nobody would stop him. I hope hundreds of thousands would join him. I would join him.
“We need good white dudes! Plenty of them!” says Black Voters Matter cofounder LaTosha Brown.
Slate’s Luke Winkie was another white dude “White Dude” skeptic, but he joined the call and loved it, writing:
Is this what it’s like to be a part of a movement? One of the more interesting aspects about the White Dudes for Harris stream was how all the speakers resisted the desire to scold or lecture the assembled Caucasians about the many, many world-historic crimes they have unleashed upon the face of the earth. The tone was positive and empathetic.… The opportunity to extinguish MAGAdom is so enticing that it has purged one of the most self-sabotaging inclinations in the American liberal’s coalition: the fractious adjudication of identity that can too often become a priority over winning elections. The White Dudes for Harris cause grows stronger every day. We are cringe, but we are free.
“Agree,” says LaTosha Brown. “This is the America that I want. A nation where everyone can live their full potential, celebrate their culture, raise their families, and respect the right of everyone else to do the same.
“Go white dudes!”
And I believe, with that, the Dude abides.
Can we count on you?
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Joan Walsh
Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.
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