On a random Tuesday in February, a conservative provocateur and talk radio host made a bold proclamation about the state of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump had won over young men, and nearly a majority of young voters overall in November, because “Democrats, for men, are pussies.”
“There are no masculine men in the Democrat Party right now,” Clay Travis, the Trump-supporting sports and politics commentator, said while speaking on a panel hosted at the University of Chicago. “Who’s the most masculine Democrat right now in America? Mayor Pete?”
His audience gasped in response. The moderator intervened. And so began a week of debate and commentary about the relationship — or lack thereof — between the Trump-era Democratic Party and the Gen Z men who abandoned them last year.
In hindsight, all the signs were there that the 2024 election would feature a yawning gender gap between Trump-curious men, and more liberal women. What polls predicted came true: a shift of Gen Z voters toward Republicans, driven by young men voting for Trump. Since then, plenty of postmortems have tried to wrestle with just what went wrong with the Democratic pitch. Still, the question remains: Will this dynamic linger? And if so, how worried should Democrats be?
A month into the second Trump presidency, the alarm bells are still ringing. While the president’s honeymoon is fading, he remains quite popular with the youngest cohort of men.
As Democrats attempt to redefine themselves ahead of next year’s midterm elections, they’ll need to accurately diagnose why young men have jumped ship in large numbers.
In reviewing the data and talking to experts, three main explanations emerge.
First, there’s the structural: the effects and aftermath of the Covid pandemic and economic pressures that explain the shift of young men to the right.
Then, there are Trump-specific dynamics, related to his persona, his campaign and media strategy last year, and his ability to define himself independently of the two-party, liberal-conservative spectrum.
And finally, there are cultural, education, and gender dynamics that explain the divide — which Democrats have driven, and can still fix.
But if Democrats are to make any progress, their first step must be rooting out denial: When it comes to young men, the party has a real problem.
What the Democrats’ young male problem looks like
The Gen Z gender gap isn’t easy to map out, so it’s helpful to look at a few factors — vote choice, political ideology, partisan identification, and favorability ratings — to try to figure out what’s going on.
The first, vote choice, is the easiest, but also bluntest, tool to use. Using estimates from AP VoteCast surveys, in 2024, young men backed Trump by a 14-point margin; young women backed Harris by a 17-point margin. Trump’s share of the young male vote increased from 41 percent in 2020 to 56 percent in 2024 per AP VoteCast data by CIRCLE at Tufts University. And it’s young white and Latino men who shifted most dramatically to the right, by 22 points and 38 points respectively.
Partisan identification shows some of this change too. Over the last 20 years, it’s young men who have been more likely to identify as Republicans, according to Gallup polling data. The share of young women, aged 18-29, who identify as or lean toward Democrats has remained steady since about 2003, while the share of young men who identify with Republicans has steadily grown since 2015.
Puzzlingly, the change in partisan leaning has not been accompanied by a corresponding self-reported change in young men’s political ideology. They have not been calling themselves more “conservative” over that same timeline. Instead, it’s young women who have gotten much more liberal over the last two decades, while the share of men who call themselves conservative has remained steady. According to Gallup polling, women 18 to 29 who call themselves liberal are now at the highest level they’ve been since 1999, a trend that picked up during the second Obama term and the first Trump presidency. A plurality of young men, meanwhile, have called themselves moderate over the last 20 years, with shares of young conservatives and young liberals also remaining steady.
What this all suggests is two opposite shifts: Young women are identifying as more liberal, but not necessarily more Democratic. Young men, meanwhile, are identifying as more Republican, but not more conservative. It’s a point that Daniel Cox, the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, was trying to make on the same panel that Travis blew up at the University of Chicago. His argument is that issues, and the positions the political parties are taking, only explain so much.
Young women are identifying as more liberal, but not necessarily more Democratic. Young men, meanwhile, are identifying as more Republican, but not more conservative.
“You have a slow decline. This didn’t happen in just one election. There’s been a deterioration of Democratic identity among young men for over 10 years,” Cox said. “This group looks a lot more liberal on paper. You had six in 10 young men who are moderates vote for Trump, and more than one in five liberal young men vote for Trump…There’s something about Trump that was attractive and then there’s something about the Democratic Party, at least in its current manifestation, that was repellent.”
Explanation No. 1: It’s bigger than America
There is no one explanation for these dynamics, but breaking out a few theories can help explain the situation.
We can start with structural, post-Covid explanations. The shift of young people to the right in general isn’t only happening in the United States, but all over the world. Something about this generation’s experiences, regardless of gender, is causing a rightward shift.
That shift mirrors the anti-establishment, anti-incumbency trend that democracies have been experiencing since the start of the coronavirus pandemic: frustration with the economic prospects; the squeeze of inflation and prices, and distrust in institutions, which in the US were represented by the Democratic Party. This theory would explain the dramatic shift in vote choices and partisan representation of young men over the last decade, and it is boosted by the fact that both young men and young women swung to Republicans last year — despite those swings being uneven.
Outside of the US, it’s young voters who drove some of the surges of far-right and right-wing political parties across Europe in 2024. As the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it recently:
In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.
Thompson points to political science research that has tracked a negative effect on trust in scientific authorities and political leaders as a result of pandemics and epidemics, particularly with those people between the ages of 18 and 25. Declining trust in American institutions — such as the Supreme Court, news media, the presidency, Congress, and big business — all make sense under this view.
The economics writer Kyla Scanlon argues something similar: that the youngest cohort of Gen Z faces a world of AI-driven disruption and institutional distrust and instability. They’re surrounded by echo chambers that feed their anxiety, and feel looser social connections. In response, they’re embracing more extreme, polarized identities and approaches to the economy and politics.
“Many younger Gen Zers came of age watching political gridlock, rising inequality, and a system that seemed increasingly detached from their lived reality. They saw institutions that refused to adapt (and as of recently, have shown a lack of resilience). They were locked inside during their formative years,” she argues, and so view reality much differently than even the older range of Gen Z.
In the context of the 2024 election, this theory explains why young Democrats in particular were so down on Joe Biden, and eventually distrustful of Harris and the establishment she came to represent. My own conversations with youth Democratic activists during the election cycle and in its aftermath brought forth many of the same takeaways — that young Democrats found themselves talking to young people who were distrustful of the status quo, of incumbents, and of an older generation of politicians promising change.
But while these explanations do a solid job explaining the overall shift of Gen Z, they’re less strong on explaining the dramatic lurch right by young men specifically.
Explanation No. 2: There’s something unique about Trump
Whether it was the issues Trump talked about, the salience of those issues to young people, or his campaign strategy and appeal to traditional masculinity, these candidate-specific factors are more persuasive in explaining how a group that reads more liberal on paper could be willing to swing so drastically to the right.
As Cox of AEI told me, “They’re Trump Republicans, they’re not [traditional] Republicans.” They hold much more progressive views on a range of issues, and are much less aligned with the traditional Republican orthodoxy than standard conservatives, but were Trump-curious, or felt less stigma in being open to voting for him.
Much of that was due to the media and messaging apparatus Trump and his allies built over the last year, specifically to reach young men. Whether through specific advertising, social media and influencer outreach on YouTube and TikTok, podcast interviews, or other campaign events, Trump saturated the feeds and platforms that young people, especially men, love to consume.
It worked. Trump posted his strongest gains with groups of young voters who fall into two buckets: those who prioritized the economy and “low-propensity” voters. That second category can be further divided into youth who were least interested or engaged with political news and youth who were voting for the first time.
These aren’t hardcore conservative, reactionary, or ideological voters. They’re just “not dug in when it comes to politics,” Cox told me. “You look at where young women are on gun control and climate change and reproductive health and LGBTQ rights, and they prioritize these things. Young men are less likely to prioritize any of them. They support some amount of gun control, they’re more pro-choice than pro-life, but it’s not that central to their politics or political identity.”
In other words, the Trump pitch was persuasive enough to win over a group that might have been destined to break with a Democratic Party that was using the wrong message to try to hold onto their support. But this explanation is unique to Trump and his personal brand and doesn’t necessarily apply to the Republican Party in general or to other Republican politicians.
Explanation No. 3: Democrats are doing something to turn off young men
If Trump was able to win over young men through his media presence and appeal to masculinity, it suggests Democrats failed to counter that influence — or even did something to make it worse.
Cox told me that beyond the specific candidates, there has been a general cultural drift of the Democratic Party’s identity, or perception, among young men that may be a missing piece. Beyond not being “masculine” enough or “too feminine,” there are cultural, class, and educational divides making it harder for the party to hang onto younger men — a party moving left faster than young men are.
“If you look back to George W. Bush and his affect — he went to Yale, he was from an elite pedigree, but he leaned into the blue-collar identity, going out and scrubbing brush and clearing land in his Texas ranch,” Cox said. “This was true then, and it’s more true now, but in an era where people don’t trust slick-talking politicians, the idea of someone using their hands for a living, or pretending to do so, is really resonant. It’s not just a gender gap, but an education divide.”
This education polarization — of Democrats becoming more of a party of wealthier and better-educated white voters — applies not just to its base, but to its leadership as well. When the messengers, and staffers, running campaigns and formulating the pitches to young voters look less like the people they are trying to reach, “you have just fewer people who are immersed in culturally conversant in ways that can help you craft a winning and effective political message,” he said.
That cultural shift among Democrats, which includes the party’s embrace of identity politics and progressive social justice-speak, Cox has found, has led to some serious branding problems with young men on a small but influential set of beliefs, specifically affirmative action, LGBTQ, and DEI policies.
“For young white men, their attitudes on various policies related to race are far more conservative than for young white women. There was a really significant divide in perceptions,” Cox said, about privilege and discrimination.
Here, a theory from Vice President JD Vance might actually speak to something that goes beyond ideology or partisanship. Speaking at CPAC last week, Vance argued that “our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge … don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive.”
Young men, especially young white men, over the last 10 years, have grown to feel like underdogs as Democrats and the national culture moved to prioritize marginalized groups or minority communities, the Gen Z writer and strategist Rachel Janfaza explained in the fall. “The left has increasingly focused on uplifting marginalized groups — especially women. But the unintentional consequence of this focus has left young men feeling like no one is speaking to them and that there is no home for them in the Democratic Party.”
Stepping into that void are conventional voices like Vance’s or radical ones, like the podcaster Andrew Tate. “Young men are seeing these content creators, podcasters, even politicians, telling them that society is cutting white men out of the picture, or even just all men. And they point to DEI initiatives as this form of wokeness,” Cameron Kasky, a former March for Our Lives gun control and progressive activist, told me. “They say this is an attack on men and white men, and we gotta fight back” by offering alternative models of masculinity that put economic and educational opportunities first.
On that front, part of the Democratic issue in 2024 might have been that it did not offer an effective alternative “masculinity,” a pro-social, community-focused pitch shared by a credible messenger, instead of mocking young “bros” as “mediocre” or denying that young men feel more isolated.
“Multiple things can be true at once,” Gen Z Democratic strategist Annie Wu Henry told me about this relationship between progressive Democrats and young men last year. “We can acknowledge that white men have historically been the ones given the most privilege and power in society, while also not creating an environment where they feel completely alienated and then turn to spaces like the manosphere online — where they feel seen and accepted — but we also know lead to radicalization and validation of harmful viewpoints of other groups of people.”
Democrats did not offer an effective alternative “masculinity,” a pro-social, community-focused pitch shared by a credible messenger, instead of mocking young “bros” as “mediocre.”
To do that, Kasky says, “Democrats need to figure out how to get some swagger back,” and move beyond “Ivy League, fancy” communications.
Even something as small as making a tonal shift will be important. Trump’s favorability among young men, though still higher than with young women, is beginning to trend down, suggesting that last year’s rightward shift might be moderating already.
None of this has to be permanent
The fundamental point these theories all make is that none of these attitudes, shifts, or realignments are ironclad — some were specific to the post-pandemic moment, some to the peculiarities of specific candidates, and some to cultural shifts that seem to have stalled. And while voters’ attitudes and perceptions of political parties tend to get ironed out in their youth, this moment of ideological and identitarian tumult might be different.
Importantly for electoral politics and next year’s midterms, the 2024 results suggest that Trump benefited from a youth coalition that isn’t firmly Republican or consistently engaged in politics. The crossover support he received from young moderates and liberals, for example, might not come out to vote in a midterm election, or a non-Trump candidate. And many of their underlying beliefs are still liberal, or progressive on the issues.
“These are not your traditional GOP voters, so whether they come up for a GOP governor or a Senate candidate is very much an open question,” Cox said. “The idea that these voters are not winnable in 2026 and 2028 is crazy. They absolutely are, and I don’t see JD Vance being particularly appealing to them. So the Democratic Party should really think hard about those kinds of voters and the voters that they lost to Trump in 2024.”
But that Democratic soul-searching will likely create some tensions with other parts of their base and coalitions. Particularly because the most progressive or activist-minded members of the party feel ideologically committed to continue prioritizing minority groups, party leaders may be wary of catering to straight white men. But caring for this demographic will be necessary if they want to reverse Trump’s 2024 gains — and win future elections.
