Things took a funny turn for the accidentally hilarious on CNN when political commentator Peter Hamby, who generally is on the left, accidentally roasted Minnesota Governor and 2024 Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz when comparing him to Donald Trump, whom he described as a “cool guy candidate.”
Making the incident all the funnier was that CNN’s Dana Bash, who infamously conducted the “softball” interview with VP Kamala Harris and Gov. Walz, the first interview of Kamala’s campaign, and who has been in various spats with Senator and 2024 Trump running mate JD Vance in recent weeks, scrambled to move on after Hamby’s roasting of Walz.
In any case, Hamby, commenting on the various candidates involved in this election and how Trump, through his associations with men like Theo Vonn and Bryson DeChambeau, looks quite cool, said, “Donald Trump, he plays golf with Bryson DeChambeau, he goes on Theo Von, he talks about Zyns, and you know, Democrats, I’m sorry, like, they haven’t had a cool guy candidate in awhile.”
He then noted that Tim Walz, on the other hand, is quite the opposite and doesn’t appeal to the same cool, masculine demographic. He said, “With all due respect to Tim Walz—like, Tim Walz appeals to a lot of men, but he also appeals to that guy, Bruce, who’s just packaged; he’s wearing a ‘Future is Female’ shirt. Uh… like, he’s wearing a ‘Future is Female’ shirt.”
Further, Hamby noted that Trump is going on popular spaces and appealing to the male demographic through doing so. he said, “Can anyone name a Democrat who can go into the media spaces where Trump is popular-the Nelk Boys, Theo Von, Joe Rogan-and make the case for Harris? Bernie Sanders has done several of them, but it hasn’t moved the needle.”
Continuing, he noted that Walz is going to have a particularly hard time appealing to the young male vote, saying, “Walz himself could appear on ’New Heights’ with the Kelce brothers or ‘Pardon My Take’ to talk football… But again, I don’t see how that changes the Gen Z bro vote in a meaningful way at this point.”
Emphasizing as much, he argued that the young male vote is essentially unrecoverable amongst the Harris ticket, though young women are flocking to Harris in huge numbers, He said, “The Gen Z men vote is kind of unrecoverable at this point. So ABC News/Washington Post had a poll last weekend that sorta tracks with some other data I’ve seen.”
He added, “Harris is winning young women by like 38 points, so that gender gap is massive. She’s only winning young men by 3 points over Trump. That drift from 2020 is very real. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama twice, they could all count on young men, even if they were losing older men. That advantage is now completely gone.”
Explaining why that is, and why young men are flocking to Trump in huge numbers, he said, “Some of it is culture, some of it is Trump‘s macho brand, a lot of it is the economy.” He also noted that “young men’s college enrollment is down and their involvement in the labor force lags behind, even compared to a few years ago.”
It was then that he got to the part about Walz being unappealing in a “Future is Female” shirt, and Bash scrambled to move on:
