Before the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night between Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, I joined a briefing by Donald Trump’s campaign about what to expect. As the speakers talked up how formidable Mr Walz would be, I was struck by the way one Trump adviser, Jason Miller, chose to describe the governor: “He’s not going to be the wildly gesticulating, effeminate caricature we see at rallies.”

I got the “wildly gesticulating” part. But “effeminate”? It seemed an odd adjective for Mr Walz, a former football coach and farm hand. Yet it was in keeping with the particular stereotypes about gender that are core to Mr Trump’s politics: that he is masculine, and therefore strong, and the Democrats are womanly and weak. 

As my colleague Sacha Nauta writes this week, the Democrats are trying to project a more complicated story about gender: They play up Kamala Harris’s skills in the kitchen, emphasising a traditional women’s role, while Ms Harris also speaks of her toughness as a prosecutor and has said of anyone breaking into her house, “they’re getting shot”.  Men associated with the campaign, such as Mr Walz, emphasise their eagerness to support women while also seeming keen to stress more conventionally macho bona fides. As he extolled his wife as a “joyful warrior” during his speech at the Democratic convention, Doug Emhoff, Ms Harris’s husband, also found a way to mention “the guys in my fantasy-football league” and his devotion to the grunge band Nirvana.

As far back as 1991 Chris Matthews, a legislative aide turned commentator, defined the Democrats as the “Mommy party”, concerned with improving education, providing health care and the like, and the Republicans as the “Daddy party”, focused on fighting crime and protecting America against foreign adversaries. The partisan gap between male and female voters looks to be particularly wide this year, and Sacha notes a new dimension: Trump voters are more likely than Harris voters to believe American society discriminates against men, whereas Harris supporters are more likely to believe the opposite. On the stump Mr Trump and Mr Vance are at pains to motivate disaffected men who might not otherwise be inclined to vote. 

All of which helped contribute to the surprise of Mr Vance’s debate performance, which I wrote about in Lexington. Vanished was the pugilist who used terms such as “sociopathic” to describe supporters of abortion rights and who called the very idea of universal day care a “class war against normal people”.  Instead, Mr Vance empathised with women who had had abortions or wanted child care, and praised his own wife. “I’m married to a beautiful woman who is an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids, but is also a very, very brilliant corporate litigator,” Mr Vance said, “and I’m so proud of her.” He sounded like a sensitive modern man, or at least like a politician worried about the gender gap, yet, to me at least, he did not sound at all effeminate. 

Thank you for reading Checks and Balance. If you have thoughts on this newsletter, you can write to me at jbennet@economist.com. 

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