In the months leading up to election day, pollsters were fixated on one demographic: young men. This group, often elusive in political data, was showing signs of a notable swing toward Donald Trump and away from the progressive viewpoints of young women.
Traditionally a policy wonk, Richard Reeves became an unlikely media mainstay this election cycle, sought after by those trying to decode the concerns and motivations of these gen Z male voters. Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he started in 2023 to create research-based approaches to bettering the education, mental health, and work and family life of men. Many of the institute’s policy proposals were outlined in Reeves’s 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
Before the election, Reeves told the Guardian he was critical of the Democrats’ inability to talk directly to men about their policy platform. He pointed to poorer educational outcomes with fewer men graduating from college and worsening standardized test scores. He also spoke about the worsening mental health, loneliness and suicide crises among this group and the lack of willingness by Democrats to address them directly. Now, with Trump claiming victory with significant support from American men, he says he understands why so many chose to vote Republican.
The day after the election, I spoke with Reeves to hear his take on the results and what they reveal about this misunderstood voting bloc.
Exit polls after an election are notoriously inaccurate. But do you think, from initial data, that young men played a big role in this election?
I think we need to wait and see before quoting specific numbers, but I think it’s fair to say that gender did play a big role in this election, but not in the way we expected.
The expectation was we’re going to see this break towards Trump among men overall and we’re going to see a break towards Kamala Harris among women overall. But only half of that really seemed to come true. Trump did overperform among young men, but Harris underperformed among young women. That is a surprise. I think that an election that was initially expected to be about women and women’s issues turned out to be an election about men. My former colleague Elaine Kamarck, now of Brookings Institute, was on NPR saying that abortion just didn’t play as big an issue as people thought. It’s not that women didn’t care about it. It just wasn’t as salient.
When we spoke a few months ago, you made a case for ways in which the Democrats could speak to men and women. It seems like the Democrats went in the opposite direction – they really presented themselves as the party of women.
Correct. And not only do I think that was a gamble that didn’t pay off, I think it was an unnecessary gamble. This was an opportunity. The Harris-Walz campaign could have leaned pretty hard into a pro-male policy agenda and presentation. When you have a woman at the top of the ticket, no one thinks she’s a closet misogynist. With Walz, you’ve got the first public school teacher to run for high office, who is also a coach. I mean, if you’re ever going to have a ticket that could speak to men, for the love of God, it was this one.
They could have gone out there with some pretty substantive ideas. Instead, zip. Even my progressive feminist friends were watching the DNC and saying: “Is there going to be anything for men?” Whereas the RNC was a carnival of masculinity. The Republicans put out a welcome mat there for men and said: “We can see you, we’re cool with you being guys, we like guys, the Democrats hate you, they think you’re the problem.”
Absent a proper Democrat response to that, I think Harris just ceded the ground.
So you don’t think it was inevitable that Harris would actively lose the votes of young men?
I think you don’t win votes if you’re not fighting for them. And the Democrats didn’t really fight very hard for the votes of young men. But they could have said: “There are so many progressive young women who are worried about the mental health of their boyfriend or brother. There are so many progressive women who wanted a party that would support their reproductive rights and do a better job of educating their son.”
Instead, at the very last gasp, they started to say to men: “Well, if you care about the women in your life, you should vote for us. Or maybe the reason you’re not voting for us is because you’re secretly a little bit sexist?” Trying to either shame or guilt trip or scare men into voting Democrat was spectacularly unsuccessful.
In the end, the Dems just didn’t do well enough among women to offset the gains that the Republicans made among men. It turned out that was a fatal miscalculation.
Meanwhile, Republicans did a good job of stoking resentment. They had one ad that told men: “You did everything right in life, you went to college, you got a job, and now the Democrats and women want to hold you back.”
The zero-sum framing around this issue has been a huge problem on both sides. On the Democrat side it led to political failure. They benched themselves from the argument about men, because their zero-sum frame meant that they couldn’t address issues of boys and men and still be taken seriously as a party for women.
On the other side, the Republican zero-sum framing was: you are struggling and we know who’s to blame for that. We have someone to point to: women and Democrats. The reason that was a politically successful sentiment was because those men’s problems are real, and for a long time they’d been neglected, so they actually did turn into grievances, and then those grievances could be weaponized.
So Republicans found success in the idea that the success of women has come at the expense of men.
In reality, it’s not zero-sum. Men are not struggling because women are flourishing. But absent other reasons, it was allowed to become a more effective political strategy. What men heard from the right was: you’ve got problems, we don’t have solutions. What they heard from the left is: you don’t have problems, you are the problem. And between those two choices, it’s not really surprising to me that more men chose the Republican one.
The Republicans also seemed to successfully detoxify Trump among young men.
One way they did that was through new media and podcasts. On [The Joe Rogan Experience], Trump went on these weird rants but you just got the sense of Trump figuring it out. Sure, he’s got weird views on stuff, but he didn’t come across as a hateful figure. The claims on the Democrat side about just how awful Trump was didn’t resonate with the men who had just watched him do that podcast.
[The journalist and podcaster] Ezra Klein talks about Trump’s disinhibition and that being both his strength and his weakness. I think that for quite a few men, just the injection of a bit of humor, a bit of irony, a reduction in some of the earnestness, a lowering of the stakes, it all helped humanize him.
Why didn’t Harris go on Rogan? Why would she not do that? I mean, literally, the biggest platform in the world. She would have come across as real and human. It’s not that that it would have changed the outcome of the election, but it’s symptomatic of the Democratic attitude.
Your institute has a number of policy proposals for the betterment of boys and men. How do you feel about your chances of advancing those in the context of a Republican presidency and Republican Senate?
Well, I do think that with men having delivered for Trump, Trump now needs to deliver for men. The question is: OK, is the CDC now going to actually take male suicide rates seriously and recognize the gender gap in suicide?
A super wonky one for you is, what’s going to happen to the gender policy council in a White House? Now, I may be one of the very few people asking that question today, but I’ve criticized the gender policy council for being one one-sided. You can easily imagine that Trump and his folks would just abolish it as a kind of woke relic of the Biden-Harris era. What I hope they’ll do is retask it so that it looks at gender issues both ways.
What about more concrete policies? Do you expect anything from Trump?
One big question is whether Trump will actually work seriously on apprenticeships, which he did, to be fair, a little bit in his first term. Getting an apprenticeship bill through, redirecting some of the money that currently goes to elite higher education into apprenticeships, trade schools, technical schools – all of that would be fantastic for boys and men.
What do the Democrats need to learn from this?
The danger is that they just say all these men became sexist, that they were lured by misogyny. The danger is Democrats believe they just need to double down on attacks on patriarchy and toxic masculinity. That would be disastrous.
Instead, they should show young men that they’ve got an agenda that’s more up their street. Instead of going on and on about cancelling student debt, which is not a popular policy among men, they should talk more about trade schools and manufacturing jobs. I hope that they’ll conclude that they need to win men back by explicitly pitching them, rather than trying to recruit them as allies to the cause of women, which is a political theory that they just tested to destruction.
I presume the conclusion they’re also going to reach is that they can’t run a female candidate for a really long time?
I really, I really, I really hope they don’t draw that conclusion.
There’s a reason the General Social Survey stopped asking the question about a female candidate in 2010: because it hit 96% support, and it’s even higher among young men. I suppose it’s possible that those men are secretly sexist or racist and won’t tell pollsters that, but that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, we can’t know.
If Democrats draw the conclusion that it was because it was a female candidate, that will be the wrong conclusion. Empirically. It will insult the male voters they need and it will hobble the careers of female politicians, potentially for a long time.
This interview has been condensed for clarity
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
