In an email, Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican media consultant and Trump loyalist, put forward his view of why Trump and his supporters are immune to the attacks of the #MeToo movement:

Trump displays unalloyed masculine strength. His supporters do not care if he is predatory, insulting, or offensive as long as he is never in doubt, especially if he is kicking the limp Washington establishment around. Trump’s instinct-driven behavior confirms that he is the archetypal alpha-male, the unfiltered reptilian brain, concerned only with sustenance, survival or sex. If anything enters his world, they know he must either eat it, kill it, or mate with it. That’s why they like him. For about half of America, that is terrifying. For the other half, Trump’s strength is the only thing they can count on to protect them from return of the elite bloodsuckers who would devour them.

Castellanos continued, heating up his rhetoric:

Trump’s supporters don’t expect his unrestrained id to ponder the details of briefing papers before he eats the red meat in front of him. As long as Trump displays strength and grabs the media, the establishment and America’s adversaries by the pussy, he’s the T Rex many of his supporters want.

Musa al-Gharbi, a fellow in sociology at Columbia, sees the possibility of backlash from voters — such as those Castellanos describes — who are angered or offended by the #MeToo movement. Al-Gharbi emailed me:

If the idea is that Democrats can win over and mobilize people who did not vote for them last cycle by calling Trump a sexist, and Roy Moore a predator — even if many voters agree and are disturbed by Moore and Trump — many of them can also sympathize with Trump in a sense. The same people who are bashing Trump have also disparaged them (Trump supporters) as misogynistic, racist, homophobic, ignorant, etc. — to their minds, unfairly. So they don’t put a lot of stock in those messengers, and indeed, hearing Democrats sling these kinds of labels around will probably just stir up resentment against the left.

In an essay in Salon in May 2016 that contended that Trump’s path to victory was much easier than conventional wisdom had it, Al-Gharbi argued that Democrats and

progressives have done a great job framing racial inequality, feminism and LGBTQ rights as part of the same basic struggle. However, this association works both ways. Accusations of misogyny, for instance, are often heard in the context of a fundamentally anti-white, anti-Christian culture war — a zero-sum campaign waged against ordinary hard-working Americans by condescending and politically-correct liberal elites.

The issue of sexual harassment is a useful tool to mobilize Democratic voters in liberal states and districts, according to Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at Stonybrook, but, like Al-Gharbi, Huddy thinks that such tactics should be deployed with caution:

Feminism and anti-feminism are essentially baked into the political parties at this point and it is difficult to believe that there are many people left for the parties to capture on the basis of gender-linked issues including sexual harassment.

Huddy warned specifically against Democrats adopting “a singular focus on harassment and gender issues” given the 2016 election outcome:

Gender issues were front and center in Clinton’s campaign and that had something of a polarizing effect that likely contributed to weaker support for Clinton among white working class men.

More important, according to Huddy,

Democrats need to figure out how to combine issues linked to gender/feminism, race, and immigration — identity politics — into a more coherent economic framework that reduces the sense that one group wins at another group’s expense.

In a recent paper, “Trending Towards Traditionalism? Changes in Youths’ Gender Ideology,” two sociologists, Joanna Pepin, of the University of Maryland, and David Cotter, of Union College, found evidence of a retrenchment on key gender issues among the young.

Using polls of high school seniors over the past 40 years — conducted by the Monitoring The Future project at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center — Pepin and Cotter documented a shift on two key questions: “It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” and “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” The accompanying chart shows the trend line on both of those questions.