The Return of the Democratic Manly Man
· The Atlantic
Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland when he delivered a message that, coming from a Democratic House candidate in the year 2026, sounded almost provocative. “There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”
Visit somethingsdifferent.biz for more information.
Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order. The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker. He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard. Now Poindexter is running for Congress, trying to flip a Republican-held seat in Ohio with a pitch aimed at a constituency that has abandoned the Democratic Party over the past two decades: men.
In 2024, Kamala Harris won just 43 percent of the male vote against President Trump and an even lower portion—39 percent—of white men, according to exit polls. A Democratic presidential nominee hasn’t captured a plurality of men since Barack Obama in 2008, and even then, Obama edged out John McCain among men by only a single point. The party-wide reckoning that Trump’s win spawned has centered in part on why Democrats lost working-class men whose life experiences resemble Poindexter’s—and how the party can win them back. In Poindexter’s view, Democrats’ struggles with men like him owe less to policy than to culture. “It’s all vibes,” he said. “The Democrats have catered too much to, you know, the softer side,” he said. “We should be well-rounded people. We should be tough when we need to be. We should be soft when we need to be.”
Critiques such as Poindexter’s have gelled into a consensus over the past two years, repeated ad nauseam by starchy senators and governors with an eye toward running for president in 2028. Closing the gender gap now seems to be an official electoral strategy for Democrats. A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”
In addition to Poindexter, the list included Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union leader running in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Chaz Molder, a Tennessee mayor who’s an avid turkey and duck hunter; and Jamie Ager, a lifelong farmer in North Carolina. One of the Democrats running to unseat a first-term Republican in Michigan is Matt Maasdam, a Navy SEAL who carried the nuclear football as Obama’s military aide.
Running capital-M men has yielded mixed results for Democrats in the past, particularly in Rust Belt states. And this week, the party’s quest for so-called authenticity backfired spectacularly in one of its highest-profile, must-win Senate races. Graham Platner, a Maine oyster farmer who shot to the top of the polls with an Everyman appeal and a staunchly progressive agenda, dropped out amid allegations of rape and mistreatment of women. (He has denied the accusations.) Infuriated Democrats directed their anger at both Platner and the left-wing consultants who had recruited him, faulting their failure to fully vet a candidate who had never before endured the public scrutiny that comes with running for office.
[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats]
Centering a campaign on authenticity can fall flat in other ways. There’s nothing more cringey than a candidate trying too hard to be a man (or woman) of the people. “You really can’t fake it,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who helped lead recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me. He said that people can tell a lot about a candidate just by shaking their hand—“Do they have calluses?”—and mocked politicians who send staffers out to buy them Carhartt jackets as a sort of blue-collar costume. “It’s brand-new with no creases, and everybody in the world knows they’ve never worn that, never worked a day in their life,” Crow said. “Voters see right through it.”
The battle over what it means to be a man is a major campaign theme in Texas, where Republicans have made emasculation their central campaign strategy in the state’s marquee Senate race. The GOP nominee Ken Paxton, who was impeached by Republicans in the state legislature and divorced “on biblical grounds” by his wife, has called his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”
[Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this ]
In a pair of competitive House races, Democrats believe that the candidates they’ve chosen won’t face such attacks. Bobby Pulido, the nominee in the Fifteenth District, is a Tejano music star who named his son Remington after his favorite gun. Johnny Garcia, the Democratic pick in the Thirty-Fifth District, spent years as a hostage negotiator in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. Both are running for GOP-leaning seats that Republicans redrew to bolster their party’s advantage, and both need to attract support from Latino voters—particularly men—who have drifted right during the Trump era.
Garcia describes himself as “an old-school Democrat,” distancing himself from the party’s contemporary brand. “The Biden administration got it wrong on the border,” Garcia told me, citing one issue on which he hopes to appeal to independent and Republican voters in the district. When Garcia campaigned in a Christmas parade last December, he recalled, he chafed at a decision by organizers to place a large Democratic Party flag on the truck he was walking alongside. “I was just like, Damn, man, we’re gonna have a pretty tough time walking this parade,” Garcia said.
He described getting into a debate with a self-described MAGA Republican who had worked as a police officer and previously been a Democrat. The man told him that the Democratic Party had left him behind, accusing Democrats of being anti–law enforcement (among other complaints). By his own recollection, Garcia calmly but directly parried the man’s critiques; his experience as a hostage negotiator and then a public information officer came in handy. The man did not promise him his vote, but Garcia felt that he had won him over. “I think we got one,” he said to the people who were watching the interaction. More than any specific policy conversion, Garcia told me later, he believed that he had made a human connection with a voter who related to his outlook and experience. “It’s just being able to communicate in plain language,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of sounding like pundits. You have one shot to win somebody over.”
The emergence of candidates like Poindexter and Garcia is not, for the most part, the result of a top-down recruitment strategy by Democrats. On the whole, the party is running its usual diverse slate of candidates across the country, and its nominees in several high-priority races are women. In Wisconsin, Rebecca Cooke secured the Democrats’ early backing for her second bid against Representative Derrick Van Orden, as did Janelle Stelson, a former local-TV anchor, for her repeat run against GOP Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. In the New York City suburbs, Cait Conley, a decorated Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran whose campaign-launch video shows her doing pull-ups and flipping a tire at the gym, is challenging Representative Mike Lawler.
But senior Democrats are clearly pleased that at a moment when voters are recoiling from establishment figures, the party is fielding candidates with nontraditional political backstories. “The point here is that this isn’t contrived or formulaic,” Crow told me. “We’re just looking for good people who are looking to serve their country and to do the right thing—who have not been clamoring for the last 20 years just waiting for a congressional seat to open up.”
Some of those campaigns, including that of Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist who is running for Senate in Iowa and calls himself a “poor, disabled kid,” highlight the stubbornness of the gender gap in today’s polarized politics. Recent polling showed that Turek was winning over women and that the female GOP nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, was easily carrying men. Before Platner ended his campaign in Maine, a June poll—taken after he was accused of mistreating women but before the campaign-ending allegations of rape—showed the Democrat winning a majority of women voters while 51 percent of men backed the 73-year-old Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.
[Read: We’re about to hear a lot more about Iowa ]
As we sat in the deli, I asked Poindexter what he made of that gender divide and how he thought he could break through it. He did not have a ready answer. “I’m not an expert on the human psyche,” he replied. “All I can do is what my life experience has shown me, just getting out and talking with folks—shaking a man’s hand, looking him in the eyes, and saying, ‘Hey, I want to fight for you. I don’t care if you’re Republican; I want to make sure you put food on the table for your family too.’”
“And,” Poindexter concluded, “I hope I can get through to enough of them to win.”
Amy Lynn Powell for The AtlanticAn electronic campaign sign outside Poindexter’s headquarters.Poindexter is not entirely a political novice, having served for the past several years on the city council of Brook Park, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. He grew up in Cleveland, not far from where he lives now. He describes his upbringing as “a Brady Bunch situation”; he was one of six kids in a blended family, and his father worked as a union machinist. Poindexter told me that he got into trouble as a teenager—he was once caught with a bag of marijuana, and at 18, he was charged with assault after a neighborhood fight. “I was rough and rowdy, and it took a long time to grow out of that,” he said. Records show that Poindexter was also charged with disorderly conduct in 2002 and aggravated disorderly conduct in 2003, when he was in his early 20s. (Poindexter told me that both charges stemmed from drunken tussles at Cleveland Browns games.)
More recently, and while he was serving on the city council, he pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of illegally setting off fireworks in Brook Park, where they are banned. Poindexter told me that he’s prepared for his opponent to attack his criminal record. “I don’t blame others for the mistakes I made,” he said. “I owned it; I took care of it; I grew from it. I didn’t sue my accusers into silence. I didn’t say it was the policeman’s fault. I didn’t blame the courts.”
Poindexter’s political journey is unusual for a Democratic congressional candidate. He voted Republican as a young adult, supporting both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and then McCain’s in 2008. He traces what he calls his “great awakening” to the financial stability he found as an ironworker, when he saw firsthand the bump in salary and benefits that a union job could provide. He started organizing in 2012 and voted for Obama’s reelection that same year. “I’ve been a solid Democrat pretty much ever since,” he said.
Bernie Sanders’s candidacy in 2016 inspired Poindexter to run for city council the following year, and he remains a huge fan of the Vermont senator. When Sanders held a rally for him in May, the event drew an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 people, Poindexter told me. “It was like Santa Claus coming to your house for Christmas dinner,” he gushed to a crowd earlier this month. (Presuming, apparently, that Santa was an 84-year-old Jewish man from Vermont.)
Poindexter is running in a district that voted for Trump by more than 10 points. He won a crowded Democratic primary in May with help from a coalition that spanned the party’s ideological spectrum, including Sanders and super PACs tied to the AI industry and the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats. His opponent is the Republican incumbent Max Miller, a Trump loyalist who is in his second term. A big reason why the race is competitive is that Miller has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who alleges that Miller threw boiling water at her in front of their young child. (He has denied the allegations and is suing her for defamation.) The scandal has played out in the media, and Miller last month shared “secret recordings” of Moreno with the New York Post in an effort to rebut the allegations. Moreno is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, another Trump-backed Republican, who, Miller says, is aiding her “malicious campaign to ruin my life.”
Poindexter lacks the polish of more experienced politicians, occasionally struggling to find the right word or phrase. It’s something that the campaign hopes can be a strength with voters who are tired of candidates who seem like they were born in a suit and tie. “I don’t know a whole lot about how AI works,” Poindexter admitted to voters at a town hall last week. “I’d be the first to say that I am not a tech guy.” He did not mention the support he has received from the AI industry and has adopted a fairly middle-of-the-road position on the question of data centers and AI regulations. “There should be a balance,” Poindexter said during the town hall. “We should not hinder technology advancements, but we should also put protections in place, making sure that we’re taking care of the people that are displaced from their jobs.”
The Cook Political Report and other election forecasters give Miller an advantage in the race, but they have moved it into competitive territory. Last month, an internal poll conducted for Poindexter’s campaign showed him within a point of Miller. Poindexter is content to let outside groups attack Miller’s personal life, and when I asked him whether the allegations were disqualifying, his answer was one of the few he gave me that sounded workshopped. “The accusations should be investigated thoroughly,” he said. “But I didn’t get in this race because he was a monster in his personal life. I got into this race because the policies that he supports are monstrous for working people.” In response, Miller spokesperson Clayton Henson didn’t address Emily Moreno’s allegations but touted Miller’s record and attacked the support Poindexter has received from the AI industry. “The people of the 7th District deserve a congressman who answers to them, not to the special interests that bought his primary or the far-left agenda championed by Bernie Sanders,” Henson told me in a written statement. “Congressman Miller will always fight for Ohio families, while Brian Poindexter will always be indebted to the special interests that put him on the ballot.”
Poindexter hardly talked about Miller at the town hall that I attended, but he praised his opponent’s former father-in-law, saying that he agreed with a bipartisan proposal from Senator Moreno and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to raise Social Security taxes on high earners to extend the lifespan of the program.
Poindexter seems to understand that although his GOP-leaning district might like making high earners chip in more for Social Security, its voters might not be all in for Sanders’s agenda. He says he wants to “work toward” Medicare for All, for example, but he does not support adopting a single-payer health-care system immediately. Poindexter has also tacked away from the left on a few other flash-point issues. “I am not a democratic socialist,” he said at the town hall, although he welcomed the Democratic Socialists of America as “part of our party” and said “they have some ideas that I like.” He’s also not for abolishing ICE. “I do think we need a secure border,” he said at the event, although he added that he opposes “blanket raids” and “terrorizing communities” in search of undocumented immigrants to deport.
The small town-hall crowd—about 30 people in total—was friendly to Poindexter, and attendees told me afterward that they found him straightforward and appealing. The closest thing to a confrontational question came from an older woman who seemed to see, in his male-centered platform, a glaring omission. “I want to know where you stand on women’s rights,” she told him. Poindexter appeared briefly taken aback. “I am running on a campaign of workers first,” he replied. “I took for granted when I got in the race that people would see the workers and understand that that meant all workers.” He noted that he is the father of two daughters and also highlighted his support for equal pay and for restoring a national right to abortion after the fall of Roe. “I’m a fierce advocate for women,” he said.
Poindexter’s campaign remains modest. His campaign manager is a buddy and a fellow member of the Brook Park City Council, Thomas Dufour, who typically rides shotgun while Poindexter drives them around to campaign events in his truck. The two built a wooden lectern to use at the campaign launch and the Sanders rally. (Poindexter proudly showed me the autograph Sanders affixed to the bottom of the lectern.) Poindexter wore his old hard hat—covered with stickers representing the many job sites he’s worked at—during the rally he held with Sanders, and again when he visited construction workers just outside his district last week.
The DIY nature of Poindexter’s operation both suits his message to voters—here is a man who builds things with his hands—and reflects the real challenges faced by candidates who aren’t rich and aren’t connected to the political-donor class. At the end of the first quarter, Poindexter had just over $90,000 in his campaign account, compared with more than $1.1 million for Miller, according to Federal Election Commission filings. He’s trying to get on the DCCC’s “Red-to-Blue” list, a designation reserved for the party’s most promising House challengers that would unlock additional money and campaign-infrastructure support. Late last month, Poindexter teamed up with other labor-backed Democrats, including Brooks in Pennsylvania and Sam Forstag, a former smoke jumper in Montana, to form a joint fundraising committee they’re calling the “Blue-Collar Brigade.”
For the most part, Poindexter and the other men Democrats are running this year aren’t offering up any new male-centric ideas. That’s not what’s needed, Poindexter told me. Within the party’s agenda, he said, “I can’t think of a single piece of legislation that’s bad for men.” But, he argued, Democrats have hemorrhaged support from men like him—the ones who sweat more than type for a living—because the party has relegated them to the periphery. If nothing else, Democrats are embracing their masculinity again, and they’ll soon find out whether that’s enough to win men back.