Where Kamala Harris’s ‘White-Boy Summer’ goes from here

It’s kind of hard to ignore the fact that white guys who support Vice President Kamala Harris are having a moment.

During Harris’ rally in Atlanta, Parker Short, the president of the Georgia Young Democrats, went viral for dancing along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not like Us”. And the current VP is virtually guaranteed to pick a white male Democrat as her running mate, whether it be Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

Then there was the surprisingly wholesome White Dudes for Harris Zoom call that raised $4 million thanks to cameos from Mark Ruffalo, Mark Hamill, Pete Buttigieg and “The Dude” himself, Jeff Bridges, — before Elon Musk’s X/Twitter briefly shut down the account for the call. And of course, Harris has benefited from the fact that the White Boy in Chief, Joe Biden, chose to not seek re-election and endorsed her.

But all the jokes about Harris’s White Boy Summer, as The Atlantic called it, underpin a more serious predicament: to win the White House, Harris will genuinely need to shore up a lot more support among white men.

When Harris’s presidential campaign lagged in 2019, she alluded to the “Obama coalition” in one of her final debate performances. The Obama coalition holds a special place in Democrats’ memories, given the broad, multiracial swath of voters who cast their vote for the first Black president.

But as friend of Inside Washington Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report noted last week, that coalition “included lots of white, working class voters.” That contributed to Obama not only winning Iowa and Ohio twice as well as flipping Indiana and North Carolina in 2008, but nearly winning places like Missouri and Montana in 2008.

Indeed, Obama