Republicans’ ‘Tampon Tim’ joke about Walz is already backfiring

Earlier than Tuesday, vice presidential contender Tim Walz was hardly a family identify. Now that the Minnesota governor has been the topic of round the clock information interviews and viral movies, he has additionally picked up a brand new nickname. Enter “Tampon Tim,” conservatives’ response to the 2024 state legislation Walz signed that requires public colleges to offer menstrual merchandise in scholar loos.

It hardly looks like a lot of a “gotcha” moniker, although. Intervals have been a mainstream public coverage precedence for the higher a part of the final decade. And California has been on the forefront. Since 2017, the Legislature has handed a sequence of legal guidelines — together with ones that remove the state gross sales tax on menstrual merchandise; mandate the supply of menstrual merchandise in all public faculty restrooms for college students in grades 6-12, in addition to at California state universities; and require county jails and state prisons to offer free entry to tampons and pads to people who find themselves incarcerated.

California has additionally proposed laws to enhance public well being disclosure necessities across the substances in menstrual merchandise — an particularly well timed effort in mild of latest headlines: A research final month out of UC Berkeley exhibits that poisonous chemical substances together with lead and arsenic had been present in a number of name-brand tampons.

Whereas California is a pacesetter, it’s hardly an outlier. It’s certainly one of 30 states which have scrapped the “tampon tax” up to now eight years; the newest to hitch the roster is Texas, with a signature from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on a invoice that garnered notable bipartisan assist. Throughout the nation, 28 states additionally mandate the supply of menstrual merchandise in public colleges; one other 25 states require the identical of their jails and prisons.

In an period of typically intractable political polarization, menstrual coverage has confirmed one thing of a unicorn. Hardly the butt of jokes, “menstrual fairness” is a bipartisan agenda on which the 2 main events have discovered frequent floor — and agree that ameliorating the financial burden and easing the stigma of menstruation is apparent frequent sense.

So why the Tampon Tim uproar? Principally it’s concerning the language of the Minnesota legislation, which states that pads and tampons should be out there to “all menstruating college students” and “in restrooms frequently utilized by college students in grades 4 to 12,” moderately than qualifying that solely “feminine restrooms” inventory the merchandise. Although an modification to change the wording failed, it didn’t set off a tradition conflict, nor did it stymie assist for the invoice. One Republican lawmaker, Dean Urdahl, remarked, “Simply speaking with my spouse and relations, they felt prefer it was an necessary subject I ought to assist.”

Making menstruation into an web meme appears destined to backfire now too. To start with, who however foolish preteens does that? As Walz would say, it’s simply plain bizarre.

Second, latest elections and polling present that reproductive well being and rights are wildly standard to voters. As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is a robust, regular voice — together with on an array of adjoining points like menstrual literacy and the necessity for information safety relating to interval monitoring apps. (I joined a White Home dialogue together with her on these matters after the Supreme Court docket resolution that reversed Roe vs. Wade.)

Republicans know their positions on reproductive rights are out of step with standard opinion — a lot in order that they barely whispered it at their nationwide conference final month. They’ve extra substantive harm management to do for their very own vice presidential candidate. JD Vance’s controversial commentary about “childless cat girls” and assisted fertility may simply be bested by his personal congressional voting document — which incorporates … look forward to it … enabling menstrual cycle surveillance by state legislation enforcement companies. And lest we neglect Trump’s personal crude remarks on the matter: On Aug. 8, 2015, he accused newscaster Megyn Kelly of getting “blood popping out of her wherever.”

Gone are the times when intervals had been a punchline. In 2024, they might effectively show to be probably the most highly effective political rallying cry. Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton posted this week that it was “good of the Trump camp to assist publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and commonsense coverage.”

She added, “Let’s do that in all places.” Hear, hear.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, government director of the Birnbaum Ladies’s Management Middle at New York College Faculty of Regulation, is the creator of “Intervals Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Fairness” and the forthcoming “Interval. Full Cease. The Politics of Menopause.”