Back in October, Politico dubbed this the “boys vs. girls” election, due to a yawning partisan gender gap that showed up in most of the polling. Now, the boys have won. Many factors contributed—a global anti-incumbent wave, malaise over lingering inflation—but one salient factor was the rightward lurch of men, particularly young ones.
Trump explicitly courted male voters. In the runup, he made a flurry of bro-oriented podcast appearances, discussing crypto and aliens and boxing and golf. On election night, he called into radio shows in Pennsylvania urging men—specifically men—to head to the polls. Throughout the campaign, Trump wielded masculinity. He trotted out wrestling personalities at events, took the RNC stage to the James Brown song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” and stoked misogyny at rallies. (Among other inflammatory remarks, he accused Harris of sleeping her way to the top and suggested that someone point a gun at Liz Cheney’s face. A now-deleted ad from Elon Musk’s PAC referred to Harris as a “big ole C word”—the joke was that it stood for “communist.”)
Richard Reeves, founder of the DC think tank the American Institute for Boys and Men, recently wrote that, “Ironically, an election that was supposed to be about women because of the issue of abortion rights may in the end be decided by the votes of young men.” That seems to have been somewhat true. On Thursday, we called Reeves for an election postmortem. What happened with men this cycle? Why are they so drawn to Republicans, and what can the Democrats do to win them back?
In broad strokes, how did gender shape this election?
Going in, it looked like it was a contest between a women’s party and a men’s party, and Democrats were hoping that by gaining with women, they could make up for any losses among men. This is a very blunt way to put it, but the Republicans ran a more successful campaign as a men’s party than the Democrats did as a women’s party.
But the gender gap wasn’t as big as expected. What happened there?
It’s actually not because there wasn’t the expected move among men—especially young men, Latino men, and Black men—towards the Republicans. That move seems to have happened. But there wasn’t the expected move among women towards the Democrats. If anything, the Democrats lost a little bit of ground with women. Their calculation that any losses among men would be compensated for by gains among women turned out to be a big miscalculation.
Why didn’t women vote in greater numbers for Democrats?
This is not my area of expertise, but it looks pretty clear that the issue of abortion didn’t weigh heavily enough. Elaine Kamarck, my former colleague at Brookings, has an explanation that I’ll just parrot. Basically, with Trump saying he would veto a national abortion ban, and all the [pro-choice] referendums passing, it felt as if that wasn’t quite as existential an issue as it had been in 2022. So Elaine’s view is that a lot of those efforts at the state level had actually taken some of the heat out of that issue. Compared to the economy, inflation, and immigration, it just wasn’t a weighty enough factor to pull women in the Democratic direction. I think, to some extent, Democrats were playing the 2022 playbook on this issue.
And why do you think Republicans had such success with men this cycle?
Well, first, the reason Democrats lost ground among men is that they didn’t really compete for their vote. You can’t win a fight if you’re not in it, and there wasn’t really a concerted effort on the part of Democrats to reach out to those men—the inexplicable decision [by the Harris campaign] not to go on Joe Rogan, for example.
I think a lot of young men had the sense that the Democrats didn’t see them as having problems. They saw them as being the problem. There was also a tone deafness to [the Democrats] trying to browbeat men into voting for them. Some of the language was more about, “If you care about women, you’ll vote for us.” Frank Luntz did a focus group of men and found that actually it drove men more securely into the Republican column. As did claims that the only reason men might not be voting the right way was because of sexism. That really backfired.
Meanwhile, the Republicans laid out a welcome mat for men—without any policy substance behind it, to be clear. But the Republicans basically said to men, “We see you. We like you. We like the things you like. Vote for us.” And then they were able to claim that the Democrats didn’t care about men—that they’re just obsessed with women’s issues, and that to the extent they thought about men at all, it was in terms of toxic masculinity and patriarchy. And so basically, the Democrats ceded that ground, and the Republicans happily took it.
A lot of men told pollsters that they supported Trump for the economy.
Men seem to have been generally a bit more motivated by economic issues, which the Democrats perhaps didn’t spend as much time on as the culture war issues. [At the American Institute for Boys and Men], we did a paper on working class men: stagnant earnings, declining employment, huge death rates from drug poisoning. Life is not great for men without college degrees in America, and it hasn’t been for the last few decades. A lot of men are worse off than their fathers were. And so I think Republicans spoke to the sense that men are struggling economically and unsure of their place in society. I think people got a sense of real respect for working class men from the Republicans. And I just don’t think the Democrats had a good counter to that.
What happened specifically with young men in this election?
So, obviously the exit [polls] will need to be adjusted, but I think the overall picture is pretty clear: Young men shifted significantly to the right compared to previous cycles. And the surprise wasn’t that young men were trending Republican. The surprise was that they turned out [to vote]. It was something the Republicans were really worried about. They spent the last few weeks trying to make sure those men turned out, and they did.
On election night, turnout in college towns looked high. Democrats were celebrating that—like, “Oh, look, all these young women are turning out to vote for us.” And then you looked at the lines, and there’s a lot of men in those lines. A lot of young men. It’s too early to know this for sure, but I suspect that even among college voters, Republicans made inroads. A Democrat told me before the election, “We know these young men are not going to vote for us, but we don’t think they’ll vote at all, so we’re okay.” That calculation seems to have been wrong.
What do you think worked with young men?
In their communication strategies, it feels to me like Republicans tried to go to where men were, whereas Democrats tried to tell men where they should be. A lot of these guys listened to Trump and JD Vance on Joe Rogan—and they actually listened to them at length—so I think they got a more nuanced sense of Vance and Trump, a more rounded and human view than maybe some on the center left did who just saw clips of some of the most outrageous things that they’d said. I am in no way excusing some of the more reactionary comments that either of them made. But if you sit down for three hours with Joe Rogan, people get a sense of who you are. And what people saw was someone who they may not particularly like or admire, but who was at least making the effort to reach out to them and ask for their vote. And they just didn’t get that from the other side.
Did Republicans offer men much on policy, or was it just culture and vibes?
In terms of the policy framing, a couple of things may have resonated with men. One is the focus on protecting US jobs. Leaving aside policy wonk debates about the effectiveness of tariffs, the messaging there was, “We’re going to protect American jobs, and in particular, manufacturing jobs,” and those are very male.
The issues around tax cuts and the economy for sure resonated with men. And I think another thing is the language around a more lightly regulated crypto market. Crypto skews very male. Just talking about those issues was important, because those are issues that a lot of men are interested in. You’d look in vain for much policy substance behind [any of it]. But it wasn’t really an election that was fought on policy issues.
Speaking of policy, though, I wanted to ask about Biden’s infrastructure bill. It created tons of jobs for men, but Democrats didn’t message it that way.
No, quite the opposite. They apologized for it. Joy Reid pointed out to Pete Buttigieg [that the infrastructure bill primarily created jobs for men], and he said, we’re working on that, we’re trying to get more women into construction and manufacturing.
I think the infrastructure bill was a missed opportunity. Two thirds of the jobs went to working class men—and not just white ones: Black and Hispanic men are overrepresented in transit and construction, respectively. A lot of Republicans voted against that bill. It seems to me that if Democrats had messaged it right, they could have said that working class men haven’t had a great time in recent decades, and these Republicans over here claim to care about that, so why did they vote against it?
Why do you think Democrats didn’t say that?
You’d have to ask them, but I think they thought it would somehow be seen as anti-women. It’s just absolutely batshit crazy to think that you can’t signal support for men without it diluting your support for women, but there’s been an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to directly acknowledge and address the issues being faced by men. It’s a bad blind spot in Democratic politics.
I would talk to reporters and they would say, “Well, I just spoke to the Harris-Walz campaign, and they gave me a long list of all the policies that they’ve either enacted or planned that would help men, so what are you talking about?” And I would always say, “Well then ask them why the hell they’re not telling voters that.” Telling think tank directors that your policies are going to help a particular group is not a very effective political strategy. You might want to consider telling voters.
You sound really frustrated.
The debate I hoped for in this election was around competing visions of how to help men today. “How do we find a place for men in a society that’s committed to gender equality, and what do the policies need to look like? What do we do about this crisis in male suicide? What do we do about employment among men? How do we help dads who are not living with the mums of their kids?” These are huge social issues that a lot of men are facing, and we could have a really good debate about that with competing visions, different policies, et cetera. We didn’t have it. What we had was performative masculinity from the right and deafening silence from the left.
The problems of men are real. And unfortunately, I think too many people on the center left have failed to recognize that, and have instead thought that this must just be backlash fueled by misogyny. But during the campaign, Democrats couldn’t expose the lack of substance on the Republican side, because they wouldn’t even acknowledge that there were problems that needed solving. So men did just deliver for Trump. The question is, is Trump going to deliver for them?
