Some Democratic presidential candidates — as well as their spouses — are trying to figure out on the fly what voters want to see from political husbands
When Amy Klobuchar was first breaking into politics two decades ago, a TV news crew in Minneapolis asked if they could film her family at their house one morning getting ready for the day. But Klobuchar, who started out in public office as the top prosecutor in Minnesota’s largest county, turned them down.
Klobuchar’s husband, John Bessler, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, sat alongside her on an Iowa bus tour last month, fielding voter questions one-on-one at events and watching his wife from the crowd.
That’s because political strategists, academics and other observers have long seen a pattern play out when female candidates put their husbands front and center: “People start to question, who’s really in charge?” said Kelly Dittmar, a Rutgers University professor who studies women in American politics.
A primary in the year 2020 is a relatively safe space to begin pushing past these questions, according to Democratic campaign operatives. And the campaigns still have to focus on managing public impressions of the candidates before they can worry too much about their husbands. Voters have not often seen men in the “supportive role” in campaigns, said Jen Palmieri, a former communications director for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. And when they have, it has largely been for legislative roles, not executive ones: Only 3 percent of governors in American history have been women, according to an analysis by Dittmar.
But the 2020 husbands also said that in some ways, they feel little has changed from their spouses’ previous elections — “although the scale of this is much, much bigger,” said Bessler, Klobuchar’s husband. Nor has the pressure of the national campaign forced them to change who they are, Chasten Buttigieg said.
Mann, her second husband, said he “commented rather ruefully, at one point, that when she didn’t make the distinction, some people looked askance at me.”Emhoff and Buttigieg, who is on leave from teaching during the campaign, are the most public-facing husbands on the trail, often posting selfies together and sounding off on each other’s social media game.
On the trail, the husbands appear most comfortable when they talk about their partners. Bessler said he frequently gets stopped by voters, asking about his own agenda as potential first gentleman, but “I try to keep the focus, move it back to Amy,” he said.“We’re not competing,” Mann said. “Our wives may be, but we’re not.”
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