How Democrats Can Win Back the Young Men They’ve Lost

As conservatives have beat a steady retreat from our shared American culture over the last few years, Democrats have won a slew of interesting things in the national divorce: patriotism, football, camo, crass humor, and beer. The Democratic Party’s messaging is perhaps more traditionally masculine-coded now than at any other period since the Kennedy-Johnson era.

Where Barack Obama once made wonky metrosexuality cool, Vice President Kamala Harris is joking about shooting home invaders on prime-time television. (She owns a Glock, she says; she’s also protected by the Secret Service.) Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is posting TikToks of him changing carburetors. In Texas, Congressman Colin Allred’s Tennessee Titans gear is ever-present in campaign ads targeting Senator Ted Cruz—a haughty college debate-club refugee who behaves as if he sprang to life from the pages of a Molière play.

Here’s the thing, though: Male voters do not appear to be impressed, and Democrats should be concerned.

The 2024 contest will likely prove to be the most gendered election in American history. According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris currently holds a 16-point lead over former President Donald Trump among women (56 to 40 percent). However, Trump enjoys an 11-point lead among men (53 to 42 percent). This dynamic has hardly shifted since President Biden passed the baton to Harris in late July.

The voting “gender gap” describes the difference between the percentage of male voters and the percentage of female voters who cast ballots for the winner of an election. Back in 1992, former President Bill Clinton’s gender gap was a mere four points. The gender gap in 2004 and 2008 expanded to seven. In 2012, it grew to 10. Trump’s run in 2016 saw it rise to 11. Most recently, in 2020, the gap hit a new high of 12 points.

What does the latest Times/Siena College poll have to say? Should Harris secure the White House in November, she will do so with a whopping 13-point gender chasm. This electoral battle of the sexes is even more extreme in some swing states. The September Times/Siena poll of likely voters in Michigan suggests Trump’s and Harris’s gender gaps could be as wide as 20 and 24 points, respectively.

All of this explains why both parties are so aggressively engaging in what can perhaps be described as “testosteronic cosplay.” The Harris team recognizes its electoral prospects are nigh-upon-entirely dependent on how many men it can claw back from Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the former president’s top advisers have all but conceded publicly that given the salience of abortion rights and Trump’s long history of misogynistic language, making real inroads with female voters is effectively impossible. They seem to have decided, in fact, to lean into it—and lean in hard. You can see this at work in Tucker Carlson’s recent remarks at a Turning Point rally, in which he compared Trump’s reelection to a father’s savage disciplining of his daughter:

There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know.

When Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.”

Needless to say, the young men in the audience ate it up.

Harris, it should go without saying, is able to discuss the world without lapsing into a feverish psychosexual fantasia. But she’s still obviously working to play catch-up with young male voters. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the vice president proclaimed, “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Last month, Harris joined the All The Smoke sports podcast to chat about marijuana reform. And from the vice presidential debate stage, Walz shared that as a high school football coach he kept a shotgun in his car so he could hunt pheasants after practice.

If polling is to be believed, these appeals—like previous appeals before them—will not work. Democrats must ask why. The answer may be as simple as New Coke and Coca-Cola Classic.

While the gender gap in American politics has never been so wide, Republicans have held an advantage with men dating back three decades. American men are predisposed to associate the GOP with masculinity—and long before people like Tucker Carlson started publicly spinning the sort of elaborate daddy-kink scenarios that could make Humbert Humbert blush, Republicans viewed their leaders as strong father types, in contrast to Democrats’ nurturers.

Moreover, in their attempts to win over male voters, Democrats have been vocal about their desire to promote a neo-masculinity—a confident-yet-kind, “non-toxic” approach to manhood. Young male voters, in particular, seem resistant to this messaging; few Democratic strategists have laid out a comprehensive theory as to why. It’s possible these voters are hung up on how some liberal activists spoke about men during the height of the #MeToo era. Perhaps they feel alienated by progressive stances on social issues. Or maybe they earnestly believe Republicans are better equipped to handle the economy.

The Trump campaign’s outreach to men has been ostensibly unconventional. The former president attended a U.F.C. fight with Dana White. He invited Hulk Hogan to partially disrobe at the RNC. He’s cozied up to the crypto community. And he has conspicuously embraced a host of personalities in the “manosphere,” like the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul, and Theo Von. This strategy appears to be working.

It also doesn’t hurt that Trump’s performance of masculinity—his bravado, his casual cruelty, his perceived business savvy—is conventional and therefore reads as genuine; yes, even with his penchant for bronzer and culturally queer music. To channel former Senate Leader Mike Mansfield, only Nixon could go to China and still be thought of as conservative. Only Trump could walk onstage dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” and still be thought of as masculine. Perhaps the greatest trick he ever pulled was exposing the Republican men with whom he first clashed upon the debate stage in 2015 as cringing fops. He told dick jokes and insulted their wives, and the Bushes and Rubios and Cruzes who thought themselves to be GOP luminaries shrunk like violets, allowing Trump to emerge as the alpha dog by default.

How do Democrats counter a force that so effectively emasculated the GOP’s chosen father figures? Simply put, either the party’s messaging or its chief messengers must change. The former is a nonstarter. The notion the Dems would ever risk alienating female and LGBTQ voters in order to mimic Trump’s coarse, inflammatory bombast is absurd. Besides, this is the side of their politics that’s already working.

But Democrats can expand their range of surrogates. They can invest more heavily in the young men already in their ranks who have the background and cultural coding to appeal to Coca-Cola Classic voters. Candidates with experience in the armed services, professional sports, manufacturing, and farming should be brought to the fore. The world of union organizing is packed with men who are effective communicators; like the ubiquitous Shawn Fain, they frequently have to navigate a more diverse world of constituents—young and old, liberal and conservative, a robust admixture of races and religious faith—all while having a facility with the lives of working class families. Democrats should elevate more of these figures, and get their flocks more of what they need to live good lives.

Democrats have flirted with success in this vein before. In the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reportedly interviewed hundreds of veterans to run for office. DCCC officials rightly felt these former members of the military were the ideal candidates to flip red districts. Of the 24 GOP congressional incumbents unseated by Democrats in the 2018 midterm cycle, one third were ousted by either veterans or candidates with backgrounds in national security work. Inevitably, this process will result in PACs and party elders backing a young, male candidate over a long-serving incumbent. Democrats must be willing to get new blood in the mix.

But Democrats cannot afford to wait until they elect more young men. Today, liberal lawmakers must engage with the much derided “manosphere”—at least the parts that aren’t giving Tucker Carlson his weird ideas. Yes, Wes Moore should chat with Joe Rogan. John Fetterman should be on Barstool Sports. Pete Buttigieg should debate Lex Friedman. Ruben Gallego should sit for an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. This must become routine. Democrats can no longer act as if these personalities or venues are beneath them. Liberals must compete in these spaces; refusing to do so is choosing to squander the support of voters and even potential candidates, who might only need Democrats to make it clear that they don’t disdain them.

As they embrace new faces and new forums, Democrats need only be smarter about how they go on offense. Every swing voter should know that Project 2025 plans to ban pornography by now. Democrats should be working to frame abortion access as an issue that affects not only any American with a uterus, but anyone who enjoys sexual freedom—and because the rollback of reproductive rights has had far reaching consequences beyond abortion, anyone who aspires to father a child as well. To channel Tim Walz, Democratic surrogates have an immensely effective line of attack in merely calling their GOP opponents sad and sexless weirdos; adolescents in a world that requires adults.

Right now, most of the brightest rising stars in the Democratic Party are women: New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and perhaps future Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger—to name a few. This is all to the good: These are ruthlessly effective politicians in their own right and Democrats are right to elevate them. It’s imperative they also recruit, elect, and ultimately raise male candidates to a similar esteem—especially those whose life experiences allow them to credibly communicate with Coca-Cola Classic voters. Failure to do so risks alienating young men, instead of illuminating the range of brighter possibilities that come when a young man gets to become part of something much greater—a family.