Want to Win Over Male Voters? Harris Should Talk about Boys Failing in School

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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2024 election.

Centrist democrats like me are incredibly nervous about the all-too-soon presidential election that could decide the fate of our country. Do we persist with an admittedly imperfect democracy or plunge into a crazy-ass, no-coming-back autocracy?

Yes, it’s that serious, which is why Kamala Harris urgently needs to do something she should have done months ago: seize what appears to be a “red” issue and run with it. Make it her own. Send a message to those right-leaning independent voters who still see her as a San Francisco liberal.

Harris has the perfect issue staring right at her: the indisputable fact that boys have slipped dangerously behind in K-12 schools, lag far behind in earning college degrees and enter the workforce frightfully ill equipped for a modern economy.

Many of those failure-to-launch boys turn into failed-to-thrive adults, who today wear red “Make America Great Again” baseball hats.

Talking up the problem is a win-win for Harris. Yes, it will anger teachers unions and groups such as the American Association of University Women, who persist in denying the obvious, that boys, not girls, are in trouble.

That public anger is pretty much the point. The louder they protest the better. Besides, most of those teachers and activists already voted early for Harris. And it might help to recenter a race where men are rapidly shifting red while women move into the blue camp. 

Will talking about the boy troubles lose female voters? Not necessarily. College women, for example, can look around their campuses, where they make up as much as 60% of the student body, and sense that imbalance as detracting from their own fuller experience of young adulthood. 

But it just might sway some independent male voters, who clearly worry about Harris’s true allegiances. Weighing in on the boys, an issue implausibly seen as a red cause (mostly because so many progressives insist that boys don’t need help) can only help. 

The final win-win: The hardest hit among all males are minorities, the very group Harris is having trouble reaching.

Other than revealing she owns a Glock, Harris hasn’t sent out any firm signals that she’s not a San Francisco progressive. And appearing on air with Howard Stern, toying with an interview with Joe Rogan and sitting down for some tense exchanges with Fox’s Brett Baier doesn’t cut it.

The boy troubles, an ideal choice for Harris, is not a new issue. My book, Why Boys Fail, was published in 2011, one of several books around that time to lay out the problem.

My research focused on schools failing to teach literacy skills to boys – in part by pushing literacy at early ages when boys aren’t ready. Thus, by third grade boys were made to feel like academic underachievers. Understandably, they lost interest in school and dug into video games. Other books focused on the rising rate of fatherless families and the increasing confusion over what it means to be a man, all important contributors to the problem.

Today, the best updates on the gender problems come from author Richard Reeves, who formed the American Institute for Boys and Men. If anything, the boys’ issues have deepened since my book. Some examples he cites:

• In high school, two thirds of the highest GPA students are girls; two thirds of the lowest scorers are boys.

• In 1972, men were 13 percentage points more likely than women to earn a college degree. Today, women are 15 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree.

• In 1979, the weekly earnings of the typical American man who completed high school was, in today’s dollars, $1,017. Today it is $881.

• –Deaths among working class men, what’s often called “deaths of despair,” have risen from 60 per 100,000 in 1991 to 191 per 100,000 by 2022.

So how does Harris seize this issue? I’ll leave that to the political pros, but some obvious options include showing up at a college with lopsided gender gaps to demand answers. 

Or, she could visit a rural county health office in a Trumpy state where the suicide rate among working-class men has soared. Unfortunately, that won’t be hard to find. Again, demand answers. 

Done properly, with gusto, she’ll have her against-the-grain moment, but Harris better act fast. We are two weeks away from what will likely be the closest presidential race in U.S. history and its outcome could turn on whether Harris can reach these disaffected boys-to-men.

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