‘Dobbs Dads’: The Sleeper Coalition That Could Turn out for Kamala Harris

The latest Marist poll highlights a potential “sleeper” voting group for Democrat Kamala Harris in the race for the White House.
In the poll released Wednesday, Harris leads former President Donald Trump, 59 percent to 39 percent, among college educated white men, a group referred to by some as “Dobbs dads.”
The term is defined as fathers of girls or young women who may have traditionally voted Republican, but who Democrats think will switch their ballots in November out of concern about their daughters’ reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case that had made abortion a constitutional right.
The Dobbs decision led to the ushering in of a string of restrictive individual state abortion measures.
The Supreme Court decision has played a big role in elections since the ruling, serving as a motivating factor for not only women voters, but also fathers of girls—the “Dobbs dads”—who worry about the decisions their daughters might face when they grow up, Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and cofounder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told reporters in Iowa earlier this year.
For its poll, Marist interviewed 2,021 adults, made up of registered voters and likely voters, and the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.17 percentage points.
Among registered voters questioned in the poll, 38 percent identified as Democrats, 33 percent as Republicans and 28 percent as independents. Among those who identified as likely voters, 40 percent said they were Democrats, 33 percent Republican and 26 percent independent.
A previous Marist poll published October 3 showed that the same “Dobbs dad” demographic broke 54 percent to 40 percent for Harris with 5 percent saying they were still “unsure.”
The latest poll’s findings were spotlighted on social media by journalists and Harris supporters.
“At @ProjectLincoln, we call them Dobbs Dads. And they are breaking to Harris. One our most important target groups,” Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Greg Sargent, a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast, wrote on X, “[Democratic strategist] James Carville said on our pod that a sleeper demographic to watch in this race is college educated white men who don’t like what Dobbs means for their daughters and other female loved ones. Well, the new Marist poll finds Harris leading among them 59-39.”
The Marist poll comes as Trump appears to have gained some momentum in recent swing state polls.
Averages of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight show that in recent weeks, Trump has expanded his lead in Arizona, overtaken Harris in North Carolina and pulled even in Nevada. The former president has also narrowed the leads for Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
On the issue of abortion, voters in two swing states, Arizona and Nevada, will have the ability to directly decide the future of access this fall through general election initiatives.
Anthony Fowler, a professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, told Newsweek via email Wednesday that he was skeptical of the ability of “Dobbs dads,” specifically, to swing the election for Harris.
“Trump only got approximately 53% of the male vote in 2020, and looking at survey data over time, there is little evidence that gender is becoming increasingly predictive of vote choice,” Fowler said. “College education, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly predictive of voting Democratic. College-educated men (and women) were trending Democratic before Dobbs, and I suspect that trend was going to continue regardless of Dobbs.”
The Marist poll shows that Trump leads Harris, 53 percent to 46 overall, overall, among white men.
Trump won male voters in both the 2020 and 2016 presidential races, according to New York Times exit polls, and gender polarization—a term that describes recent trends of men shifting toward Republicans as women become more Democratic—is expected to continue in the race between Trump and Harris.
Three recent surveys suggest Trump may be gaining even more ground among male voters.
A Pew Research Center survey released earlier in October showed Trump with an 8-point lead over Harris. Fifty-one percent of male respondents said they plan to vote for him, compared to 43 percent saying they plan to support Harris in November.
Recent New York Times/Siena College and YouGov/The Economist polls showed similar findings.
The Times poll, conducted among 3,385 likely voters from September 29 to October 6, showed Trump with an 11-point lead over Harris among men (53 percent to 42 percent).
A YouGov poll, which surveyed 1,230 likely voters from October 6 to October 7, showed Trump up by five points among men (48 percent to 43 percent), while an October 2020 poll showed him trailing Biden by five points among men, with 50 percent backing Biden compared to 45 percent backing Trump.
Newsweek has emailed the Harris and Trump campaigns Wednesday for comment.
Lakshya Jain, cofounder of Split Ticket, an election analysis website, said that Harris has made “minimal gains” among male voters since she entered the 2024 race and therefore an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast could improve her numbers.
“Democrats are absolutely going to hate it, but Harris needs Rogan way more than the other way around,” Jain posted on X, formerly Twitter.
“She has a problem with male voters and a Rogan podcast appearance gives her exposure that *nothing* else would.”