I want to start this line of thought with a comment by Margaret Talev in Thomas Edsall’s New York Times column this week. She said, “Voters want to belong. If you want someone’s vote, you should ask for it. When it came to men, Trump did.”

It still seems odd to me to see an unqualified reference to “men,” but there is a meaning here that is clear enough that the reference is justified. She doesn’t mean “men” as a statistical category; she means “men” thinking of them in gendered terms. Men as males.

And Trump did ask for their vote, where Harris did not.

I was still thinking about Gov. Abbot when I ran across Heather Cox Richardson’s post. She cites an exchange that undoubtedly begins with a reporter asking who is to blame for the deaths caused by the flood in central Texas. Here’s what he said.

“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

Abbot dismisses the question of responsibility as a “word choice.” It is only losers who wonder whose fault an unfavorable outcome was. Then he doubles back to make his argument impenetrable. The word that does it for Gov. Abbot is “ma’am.”

This is not a reference to the reporter who asked the question. This is the language of legend. It is the women who are told not to worry and they are told this by the men. By the “real men,” presumably, like Gov. Abbot.

The gulf between the question of who is responsible for Texas’s inexcusable unpreparedness, on the one hand, and a woman “worrying about it” is a huge gulf. And in the context of that news conference, I would think that trying to cross that gulf would be hazardous in the extreme. A reporter who tried to do that would have to fight the charge that he is or represents the perspective of losers; that he is not making a charge about public accountability; and that he is not a (mere) woman, indulging herself in “worrying.”

That is the size of the gulf. It is a situation of great hazard. For the reporter. On the other hand, to return to Margaret Talev’s remark about belonging, Gov. Abbot offers a place to belong. You can be one of the real men who take it on themselves to reassure the worrying women. Or if you are a woman, you can take seriously the reassurance by this man that you are only worrying and things and well in hand. The next election, for instance.

It is hard not to focus on the blatant culpability of the governments involved, but I think the more important question here is whether Gov. Abbot is offering voters a place to belong and whether they want that more than anything.