The Democrat Party is struggling to connect with male voters. White men favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, and polls show black and Latino men are breaking for the GOP at an unprecedented rate.
That is what led Barack Obama to scold “the brothers” backing Trump at an unplanned campaign stop for Harris last week and the drop of the cringe “Man Enough” ad. It is likely also what led Tim Walz to head out for a pheasant hunt over the weekend.
While Walz has proudly proclaimed that he is a gun owner, many are now questioning his experience handling firearms after he appeared to struggle to load his shotgun. On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke and Michael Brendan Dougherty to discuss how the latest pander backfired for the Harris-Walz campaign.
What Happened
Walz was armed with his Beretta A400 semiautomatic shotgun in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, on Saturday for the start of his state’s pheasant hunting season.
Reporters were present as the vice presidential nominee, clad in a bright orange vest and chaps, waded through tall, straw-like grass for three hours as part of the annual Minnesota Governor’s Pheasant Hunting Opener.
The governor has often mentioned that he is a gun owner in favor of “common sense” legislation on the campaign trail and boasted about having one of the best shots in Congress when he was in the House of Representatives. But you would have been hard pressed to know that from his performance over the weekend.
CBS News campaign reporter Shawna Mizelle was at the photo op and captured video of Walz seemingly fumbling with his firearm. At one point in the clip, he appears to fiddle with the gun while complaining that something “never fits quite right.”
Walz’s misfortunes continued on the hunt. CBS News reported that a friend of the governor made the sole kill of the day, but the group failed to produce the carcass despite recovering the body of the birds being a top priority of the event.
The Blowback
Megyn said the whole thing came off like Michael Dukakis’ much maligned ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank in the lead-up to the 1988 election. “They are comparing this moment by Tim Walz to that because he looked so inept and like a faker,” she noted. “It looked like he didn’t belong there, and he was trying to convince us of something that wasn’t real.”
While experienced gun owners had a field day with the clip of Walz on social media, Megyn said the bigger issue for Walz is that his lack of prowess was obvious even to novices. “The problem here is that if you are going to do anything that you don’t do often when you are running for president or vice president, you need to nail it. You are not going to fool anybody,” she explained. “And even to the untrained gun person like yours truly, it was very clear he was not adept with the gun.”
Dems’ Men Problem
In Cooke’s view, this is but the latest instance of Walz proving to be “a fraud.” But the issue for Team Harris runs deeper than that. “The Harris campaign seems to have a misunderstanding of why it and the Democratic Party writ large has a problem with men,” he shared. “And it is not that there aren’t enough videos on the internet of Tim Walz loading a shotgun. It is because of their policies and a long history of political tendency that has been designed to attract women to the party.”
Those efforts, he said, have been successful – but they have been successful at the expense of the male vote. “They have gone so far down that road now that they have begun to repel men of all races,” Cooke added. “And they seem to think that the way that they can fix that is to have Tim Walz go hunting, or to have Tim Walz show up on this or that TV show, or to let it be known that Tim Walz likes football. But that is just not the problem.”
Dougherty said the backfired stunt was revealing. “That video looked like it was a negligent discharge video that was going to end with his head cut off and a lesson for YouTubers about gun safety,” he joked. “The fact that Democrats didn’t even know it looked like that is a problem and tells you something about the problem they have connecting to these voters that they don’t understand anymore.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Dougherty by tuning in to episode 916 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.