A chill wind swept through Europe this summer. On the continent, far-right parties rose triumphantly in the EU elections, hoisted not just by the grumbles of older xenophobes but on the shoulders of young men. When news crews went out on the streets to train their cameras on these extremists in France, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, they found no blackshirts, just barbershop trims and Zara chinos worn by young men, enthralled by dreams of ethnonationalism and a return to the values of the 1980s or the 1940s or some other period long before their birth. Then, in Britain this weekend, gangs of mostly young far-right men marauded through northern towns, attacking mosques and accommodation for asylum seekers. The nationalist right is rising once more on the tides of gelled-backed hair and Nike swooshes.
A similar transformation could befall America in November. Until now, twentysomething voters were a thorn in Donald Trump’s side, opposing him robustly in previous elections and making their resistance corporeal as leaders in the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter protests and climate movement. Yet recent election polls suggest that while young women remain committed to the cause, there has been a tremulous withdrawal from young men. In 2016, 51% of young men identified with or leaned toward the Democratic party. By last year, it was down to 39%. Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and their support for Trump has grown since 2020.
The Democratic strategist James Carville (he who told Bill Clinton “it’s the economy, stupid”) has been warning Democrats that the party’s eroding numbers among young men and young people of color are “horrifying”: “We’re not shedding them; they’re leaving in droves.”
Of course, many of these fears were emerging when Joe Biden, an octogenarian white man, was still the presumptive Democratic nominee. But while early polling suggests that overall, gen Z is excited by Kamala Harris’s likely nomination, she hasn’t made much impact on gen Z men. Research by the Young Men Research Initiative (YMRI), a group set up in recent months to observe this unexpected drift, shows that men aged 18-29 are split 32% for Harris and 33% for Donald Trump, with Robert F Kennedy Jr taking 15%. This is an almost identical split to when Biden was the frontrunner.
Young men used to vote more like young people: left. Now they might start voting like men: right. What changed?
Some pollsters believe we are witnessing a new politics of resentment – that young men feel #MeToo has gone too far, that feminism has left them behind, and that they can only see a home for themselves in a testosterone-fuelled Republican party.
Others – including Richard Reeves, head of the recently founded and influential American Institute for Boys and Men – say this isn’t a cultural issue. While a small, loud minority of men might have become more extreme in their views on feminism, most are responding to other economic and social factors that have meant they have lagged behind women for some time. Young men statistically are more depressed, financially worse off and less educated than young women, and looking for electoral answers. “This is less about young men being pulled towards the right than it is about them being pushed away from the left,” Reeves says.
Blue-collar workers, Hispanic voters in Florida, white married women: Democrats have blundered before in assuming they had certain demographics locked up only to find they had taken them for granted. Unless the party can work out why it’s losing young men and how to win them back, Democrats may wake up to a cold new dawn in November, as Europe did in June.
‘A very scary time’: the politics of resentment
In 2018, a gaggle of the White House press corps asked Trump for his opinion on the allegations that Brett Kavanaugh, his nominee for the supreme court, had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when she was 15 years old. Trump, almost drowned out by the whirring blades of Marine One, could only offer superlatives in response. “High quality”, “top student”, “a great judge”. The reporters sounded desperate: what does it say to boys that someone facing such a serious accusation is still being considered for the supreme court?
“Well, I say it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump replied. “You could be somebody that was perfect your entire life and somebody could accuse you of something … and you’re automatically guilty.”
Trump had dismissed his own boasts of sexual assault as “locker room talk” during his 2016 campaign, but now he was making his pitch directly to the locker room. Having harnessed the racial resentment of white voters who felt society had become too diverse, could he do the same with young men who felt society had become too feminized?
The answer was a resounding no. One month later, in the midterms, the Democrats won 72% of young people’s votes overall, including at least 57% of young male voters. In 2020, Biden only won the popular vote narrowly but among young people (men and women aged 18-29), it was another landslide: a 24-point win. Time Magazine declared that young voters had reshaped “the contours of American politics” – if you were young, you were a Democrat.
The feeling was that members of gen Z share a unique set of economic circumstances (a lifetime of renting, high student loans), will suffer most from environmental catastrophe, and are racially diverse and socially aware. A 2022 Gallup poll in the US found that more young people aged 18-29 had a favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. These sentiments have filtered into our cultural image of young people, too. Google images of gen Z and you’ll see groups of gender-ambiguous, ethnically diverse, septum-pierced activists clutching a smartphone in one hand and a protest sign in the other.
Yet Trump’s dog whistles and Kavanaugh’s eventual appointment to the supreme court led to an embryonic neo-chauvinism. Kavanaugh, describing his confirmation hearing “as a national disgrace”, seemed to support Trump’s read that he was a victim of his gender and nod towards a politics of grievance.
A few years later, Kavanaugh was instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade, destroying the hard-won freedoms of women and transforming the Democratic party – and its sometimes reluctant, whispered pro-choice position – into an explicitly pro-abortion-rights party. It also entrenched a situation in which young women passionately hated Trump; about 74% of young women had a negative view of him immediately after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, compared with 57% of young men.
So if Democrats were clearly the party of young women, Republicans tried to take advantage of being the de facto party of young men.
Tucker Carlson, the most powerful commentator on the right at the time, monologued nightly on Fox News about their plight.
“[Young men] know that their lives will not be better than their parents, they’ll be worse,” he said. “Yet the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male! You’re privileged.’ Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that. So a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised?”
It was the night after the Highland Park Independence Day parade shooting, and Carlson was explaining why a 21-year-old man like Robert Crimo might want to murder seven people at random.
The Republican senator Josh Hawley, who raised his fist in salute to rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, picked up the baton in Congress and in his book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. “Why don’t you turn off the computer and log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date – how about that?” the senator yelled at the rightwing Turning Point USA conference.
The message was amplified by Trump-supporting figures outside the party too, chief among them Andrew Tate, the misogynist podcaster with a huge following among teenage boys.
“Tate’s telling men that they are in a worse position than they should be because of feminism,” says Matt Shea, the journalist and documentary director who spent four years with Tate and hundreds of his young fans for two BBC documentaries and a new book, Clown World.
He says Tate’s skill is in linking a feeling of incompetence in the dating world with a political impotence. Tate promotes the myth that the “sexual marketplace is dominated by a small number of alpha males, and that other men are sexually starved – and the reason for that is that women have more choice now”, says Shea.
While there have always been sexually frustrated men, Shea believes that “now those men feel that they’re owed sex and have coagulated into a political movement that lays the blame on society for denying it to them”.
Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market thinktank, agrees we need to look “upstream from politics” to relationships to see why men are becoming less progressive. “Women are less willing to overlook the same kinds of qualities that maybe their mothers and grandmothers were … in terms of what [men] need to contribute to a romantic partnership, the emotional labor that they need to do. Some young men have a kind of zero-sum mentality where if women are gaining, they’re losing.”
In Germany, far-right candidates are already trying to capitalize on men’s supposed dating woes. The controversial AfD candidate Maximilian Krah posted on TikTok saying: “One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them? … Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air … Real men stand on the far right … That’s the way to find a girlfriend!”
Within days of being re-elected to the European parliament this year, he was expelled from his party after making sympathetic comments about the SS.
Unease about gender roles is reflected in polling. A July poll by YMRI found that 65% of young men aged 18-29 agreed that “guys can have their reputation destroyed just for speaking their minds these days” – an eerie refrain of Trump’s Kavanaugh statement – and 52% of men under 30 agreed that “things are generally better when men bring in money and women take care of the home and kids”.
Armed with this sort of feedback, it seems Trump has been heavily courting the young, resentful male vote. He has attended Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts until the early hours, walking out to Kid Rock’s American Badass. He has lately worked hard to position himself as the crypto candidate and is heavily promoting himself on TikTok. When Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and Dana White, CEO of UFC, introduced him at the Republican convention, Kid Rock screamed at everyone to put their fists in the air and shout “fight!” as Trump had done after the attempt on his life. Trump even attended a sneaker conference to launch his own golden hi-tops.
There are millions of progressive young men who won’t be interested in his proposition. LGBTQ+ men, for example, remain solidly progressive, as do young Asian American voters. But for others, Cox says Trump’s effort could work. “Logan Paul just had Trump on his show. He’s got over 7 million followers. Some young men who are not very political might say, ‘Oh, hey, you know, Trump showing up, he’s talking, he’s engaging. I kind of like this.’”
‘Shrugging shoulders, not raising fists’
Fortunately for Harris, for all the many headlines about Trump’s successful overtures to young men, the polls are laden with caveats. Harris’s support jumps dramatically when pollsters measure only young men who are registered to vote (from 38% to 52% in a head-to-head matchup, according to the YMRI poll), suggesting that if Republicans want to capitalize on their popularity with this group, they will have to get them registered to vote (something they have made much harder over the past 20 years). She also takes a lead over Trump among all young male voters if RFK Jr isn’t offered as an option.
The way in which age and gender overlap with race is also contested. Polling suggests a stark drop in support for Democrats in the past five years from both young Black men and young Hispanic men, with YMRI data showing both groups preferred Trump to Biden by a two-point and 19-point margin respectively. Harris changes things somewhat, but support for Trump remains high. “Young men, including men of color, are drifting away from the Democratic party,” says Shauna Daly, co-founder of YMRI, who conducted the research. “It’s just not reality if we don’t acknowledge that.”
But Mondale Robinson, founder of Black Male Voter Project, which exclusively works with Black men who haven’t voted in previous elections, is dubious. He says that before every election, some polls say Black men are becoming less progressive, and yet in the elections it never comes to pass. He points to Black men in Ohio voting in 2023 on women’s right to abortion “more than anybody, 88%, even by eight points more than Black women”.
What we do know is that women are becoming much more liberal. While the number of young men who identify as liberal has held pretty much steady around 25%, the number of young women who do soared in the space of a decade to almost 45%. A major Gallup poll unveiled by the Financial Times in January revealed that “women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries” in the US – a gap that opened up in just the last six years. (Polling found kindred patterns in the UK, Germany, South Korea and China.) Young women have become easily the most progressive generation in history – on abortion, healthcare, taxation and trans rights.
But the shift in young men’s political attitudes can’t be explained simply by young women moving leftwards. Nor is it simply a story about young men resenting them for it.
Richard Reeves – whose 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, has become a foundational text on what has gone wrong for young men in the country – is damning of framing that puts young men’s rightward turn in terms of UFC fights and incels, when he believes it’s about deep-seated inequalities of outcome in education, mental health and employment.
“I want to talk about why only 60% of Black boys graduate high school on time in Michigan, or the fact that the share of male teachers has gone from 33% to 23%. Or that we’ve lost more than half the men who work in social work and psychology,” he says. “I’d want to talk about that rather than, for example, whether the Barbie movie was unfair on Ken.”
He says people are misinterpreting the polling. “It’s not enthusiasm for the reactionary right, it’s a sense of being taken for granted by the left. There are more young men shrugging their shoulders than raising their fists.”
It’s true that there is now a growing gender gap in education; for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. In many US cities, young women are earning more than young men and moving out of parents’ homes earlier than them.
Reeves is careful to say that improving conditions for men and boys should not mean slowing down similar efforts for women and girls. But he says that government institutions do have a tendency to purposefully avoid naming the problems young men face. Suicide is one of the clearest areas in which there is a huge gender divide – there’s a fourfold gender gap in rates for young people – and yet, says Reeves, “the CDC website breaks down suicide rates by every demographic except gender. Why? Why don’t the Democrats have a taskforce on male suicide when there are 40,000 deaths a year?”
He gives other compelling examples of how Democrats have failed to signpost their achievements to young men. Biden’s infrastructure bill – his key piece of legislative success – was a huge jobs creator for working-class men, “but the administration tied itself in knots not to say so”. Instead, it focused on the million women in construction initiative to ensure women got some of the funding. “That’s amazing. Now, er, where’s the million men into teaching initiative? … There are so many initiatives for women in Stem; why not one for men in teaching? Who is going to attack that?”
On the Democrats’ own website is a page titled “who we serve” that lists 14 different groups. Men are not among them.
Reeves believes there are some simple solutions – although he acknowledges they are “pallid” in terms of “the vividness” of Trump’s trips to UFC fights.
“I’ve been thinking about writing the speech Biden should give,” he said before Harris became the likely Democratic nominee. “It would talk about vocational training, technical high schools, all things that are massively pro-men. And rather than apologizing for it, he could just say, ‘These would be particularly helpful for young men even though of course we want more women to do it too.’ Then I would want him to say, ‘I’ve asked the White House gender policy council to stop only focusing on women and girls’ issues, but also focus on some issues of boys and men, starting with issues of Black men, education, mental health.”
Message testing by YMRI bears this out. Researchers asked two groups of men about the same hypothetical infrastructure bill, calling it “the Democratic Agenda for America” in one group and “the Democratic Agenda for Men” in the other. In another poll, they asked about a hypothetical female presidential candidate who promised one group to make history as the first female president, and the other group to focus on progressive policies like affordable housing and healthcare. There was “a 5-7 point swing in support, either an increase if you centered the policy agenda around men or a decrease if you focused on the historic nature of the candidate”, says Daly.
Perhaps the “white dudes for Kamala” and “Black men for Kamala” fundraising calls are early steps towards Democrats acknowledging men as an important voting bloc in 2024 (even if those calls were mostly for rich donors). Biden’s attempt at masculine swagger, telling Trump to “man up” and debate Harris, could be seen as a sop towards that kind of messaging too.
It’s not just about the message, though; it’s also about trusted messengers, says Robinson of Black Male Voter Project: “These young men don’t take marching orders from anyone.” He says turnout is a real issue, especially among non-college-educated Black men, among whom the distrust in both parties is so high that even having a Black candidate in Harris won’t make a difference. He says higher turnout can only come with grassroots organization – earning trust – that goes beyond election years.
“[Our organization] doesn’t do that ‘Washington DC told us this is what works’ shit with Black men. Black men are suffering from not having their basic needs met … The Black men we engage with have no delusion that their vote is going to fix everything that’s plaguing them. But they do understand that when a vote becomes the tool to address the hunger, it starts yielding fruit.” Or, as he later put it, “if they’ve got a racist police chief, they can unelect the fucking mayor.”
Reeves, however, says it almost doesn’t matter what the message is – the mere fact of someone from the Democratic party standing up and acknowledging men would be a huge shift. “Take someone like Jordan Peterson. His appeal does not lie in the brilliance of his policy proposals, or his advice. His appeal is simply in allowing a lot of young men to be heard. He says ‘I get it, you’re hurting’ and he fills stadiums with that message.”
Can Democrats win men without losing women?
Men, overall, are not the ones who are being legislated against. Over the past eight years, the Republican party, remade in Trump’s image, has cruelly gutted women’s right to abortion. It has decimated female representation at every level of government. It has given unwavering support to the police, even as police sexual assault against women reaches epidemic levels and police routinely murder Black women. They have emboldened the most misogynistic corners of the internet by putting forward a presidential nominee who has been found liable for sexual abuse, has bragged about sexual assault and rates women on a 1-10 scale (“in the same way that we do”, wrote the pick-up artist and alt-right blogger Roosh V after Trump won in 2016).
“The messaging of the Republican convention was a message of male supremacy, of female submission. Women are afterthoughts in reproductive policy, health policy, the proposed marriage policy of no divorce,” says Bonnie Honig, professor of culture, media and political science at Brown University and author of Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump.
When women’s very safety is at stake, should the Democrats really be worrying about how to appeal to disaffected men?
First, Honig says, it’s a mistake to think of abortion purely as a women’s issue: “The loss of women’s rights is a loss for men.” She suggests that Democrats should start using the line “women’s health is not a women’s issue”, adding that “women who don’t have choices, in my opinion anyway, are not fun to live with”.
More broadly, she feels that the Democrats need to avoid falling into the young men v young women dichotomy laid out by the Republicans – and pollsters. “To over-extrapolate from these polls risks feminizing the Democratic party, which is what Republicans want to do, so that they can claim to embody a kind of masculinity that is fascist-forward.”
Republicans have used this gendered messaging before. “They made Obama into a representative of a kind of feminized liberal man,” Honig says. “With Biden, there was an objective fact of his age, but that was turned into saying he had aged out of any masculinity he might once have had. They did something quite similar to John Kerry, who was a war hero, but by the time they were done with him, he was just a guy who was married to a wealthy woman.”
Rather than trying to appeal to young men as an aggrieved demographic group, she suggests, Democrats should try to think beyond gender to the other economic, class and community groups young men are part of: unions, professions, students, parents. “I think by supporting the United Auto Workers, for example, [Democrats] are supporting men between the ages of 18 and 30.”
Three months out from the election, the political reality remains that Republicans have nothing to offer men legislatively, but lots to offer in messaging. The Democrats have lots to offer in policy but are afraid to say the “m” word.
But things can change quickly. After the far right performed so well in the European elections, Emmanuel Macron called snap French parliamentary elections – an incredibly risky strategy that paid off. Among voters 18-24, the far-right National Rally still did well, with 33% of first round votes. But the leftwing New Popular Front fared even better, winning 48%. It did so by promising to invest in public services, freeze prices, raise the minimum wage and embargo arms to Israel.
America is not in the same political reality as France, but its election is not a done deal either. Young men’s votes are still up for grabs. “Democrats are missing a huge opportunity to say that they see and hear the issues of a certain kind of young man,” Reeves says, “and that they are at least open to acknowledging them.”
