It’s been more than six months since Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to President Donald Trump. But as Democrats gear up for next year’s mid-term elections, and eventually, the 2028 presidential election, the party is trying to figure out how to win over a key voting block: men.
Males ages 18 to 44 favored President Joe Biden by 7 percentage points in the 2020 election. But just four years later, Trump won the group by 8 percentage points. Those voters are now the focus of a Democratic initiative to regain their support.
The Speaking with American Men project has a two-year, $20 million budget to study how Democrats can reach young men. But pollsters have been tracking the shifting sentiments of people across the globe for years.
“We know that across the world, not just in the United States, there’s a widespread belief that the system is broken, that the establishment no longer delivers on people’s basic needs, that parties and politicians don’t worry about the average person, [and] the system is rigged,” Clifford Young, president of polling and societal trends at Ipsos, told Straight Arrow News.
“We see it in politics here,” Young added. “We can understand [Donald] Trump as an example of that, but we see it in Latin America, Europe. We see it a bit everywhere. I think we have to understand the trend in young men, their attitudes and behaviors within that context, in a context where, across the board, there’s disbelief in the system, that the system actually works.”
Young men around the world seem to be trending more conservative, he said. “They’re more conservative than women. This is a longer-term trend, but it’s especially acute among Gen Z.”
Gender issues influence political views
How young men feel about gender equality may be tied to which political party they support.
A Kings College London/Ipsos poll from March found that 56% of Millennial men and 57% of Gen Z men believe promoting women’s equality has gone so far that it is discriminating against men. Further, 57% of Millennial men and 60% of Gen Z men said they are being asked to do too much to support gender equality.
Among American men polled, 55% said they believe gender equality is important to them personally — well below the worldwide average of 63%.
“Saying that the system is broken could mean to some people that the economic opportunities are not there,” Young told SAN. “But to other people, [it] could mean the America that once was no longer is, it doesn’t look the same. Or to others, and especially [to] men, it might fall on the fundamental issue of fairness. ‘It’s no longer fair. America isn’t like it was.’”
“Whether that’s true or not, that’s another issue,” he said. “That’s a value judgment. That’s sort of the perspective that many have that ‘I no longer have a fair shake in this system. And, you know, the odds are tilted against me. Therefore, we have to blow up the system to fix the system.’”
According to POLITICO, which received an early round of research from Speaking with American Men, many Millennials and Gen Zers are confused about what it means to be a man in 2025.
The group’s research also found men perceive conflicting messages about masculinity — a sentiment detected in other recent studies.
Republicans have capitalized on that feeling.
“Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong,” Ilyse Hogue, co-founder of Speaking with American Men, told POLITICO.
Favoring the anti-establishment
How voters see the two major political parties is key to understanding the Democrats’ recent struggles, Young said.
“It’s very structural,” he said. “So when you look at the data, the Democrats are [seen as] the party of the establishment. The attitudes are much more rule-based, more establishment-based than the Republican Party. And the Republican Party has become the party of the anti-establishment.”
Trump amplified those feelings in the closing months of last year’s campaign when he sat for interviews with online heavyweights such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Adin Ross.
Harris, meanwhile, appeared on podcasts such as “All the Smoke,” which targets an African-American audience, and “Call Her Daddy,” which largely appeals to young women.
It’s not just men
While Democrats focus on young men, young voters of both genders have become increasingly critical of the party’s elected officials.
Approval ratings for Trump and congressional Republicans have changed little among young voters since 2017, according to the Harvard Youth Poll.
But the same poll found that support by young men and women for Democrats in Congress fell from 42% in 2017 to 23% this year.
How Democrats can move forward
Young said any political party tends to struggle to define itself after losing an election.
“I think coming out of a loss, a presidential loss, you’re always kind of discombobulated,” he said. “The party that loses always has to find its north. I think that’s natural now. I don’t think the Democrats are in any worse place than any other party coming out of a problematic election. They can focus on multiple things. So they should probably focus on women and some very specific sort of issues there.”
For now, he said, they’re off message.
“They’re talking about democracy and authoritarianism,” Young said. “That just doesn’t resonate. That resonates with their base, [but] the simple retort to that is, ‘Then how can half the population or 77 million people have voted the other way?’ It’s a problematic place to be. The economic issue, like why are you allowing those billionaires to take your stuff away? Like that could be resonant. And that’s something that young men will listen to.”
The Speaking with American Men project has faced some ridicule online. Nevertheless, commentators are free with their advice about how Democrats can gain support from young men.
MSNBC columnist Natalia Mehlman Petrzela wrote that Democrats need to meet young men at fitness clubs.
“The right has done an excellent job parlaying young men’s healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics,” Mehlman Petrzela wrote. “Across the political spectrum, craving the surefire sense of accomplishment the gym provides is an age-old response to an unstable political and economic environment.” And historically, championing physical fitness with appeals to American manliness has not been a partisan issue.
If the Speaking with American Men initiative wants to be more than the object of “online snark,” she wrote, “its leaders should appreciate that this history suggests the party’s path forward might just begin at the gym.”
But conservative columnist Ed Morressey says the problem for Democrats may be more about identity politics than gender.
“Here’s a challenge for the Democrats reading this study: Define ‘man,’” Morressey wrote in Hot Air. “The problem isn’t ‘conflicting cultural messages,’ it’s that Democrats have endorsed fantasy life over biological reality.”
