California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday, July 30, meant to support men and boys and improve their mental health. Newsom’s executive action is the latest effort to lower suicide rates among the group, as men make up the majority of suicides in the United States.
“Too many young men and boys are suffering in silence — disconnected from community, opportunity and even their own families,” Newsom said in a statement detailing the order. “This action is about turning that around. It’s about showing every young man that he matters and there’s a path for him of purpose, dignity, work and real connection.”
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What’s in Newsom’s executive order?
Newsom’s order calls on the California Health and Human Services Agency to propose a plan to address suicide rates and broaden access to services to improve the mental health and well-being of young men. The state is also required to connect struggling young men with education and career opportunities, including funding for job training programs.
It also calls for the state to recruit more men and boys to take part in volunteer programs. Meanwhile, it will provide avenues to help more male students become teachers and school counselors.
Democrats struggle with young men
Democrats placed a focus on attracting young men following President Donald Trump’s election win over former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
Males aged 18 to 44 favored former 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.
In the waning months of the 2024 election, Trump sat for interviews with online heavyweights such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Adin Ross, all of whom are incredibly popular with young men.
Newsom is a mainstay in conversations about who the Democratic nominee for president will be in 2028. His latest action focused on young men echoes that.
“In this last election, obviously, so much focus on his outreach, in terms of focusing on the quote, unquote, manosphere, focusing on sports, more of a hyper masculine frame of outreach and engagement,” Newsom said during an episode of his podcast “This is Gavin Newsom” in April. “But, with the DNC’s lack of engagement to young men, [it’s] non-existent, [it] doesn’t exist in the Democratic Party, [it] hasn’t in the past.”
The Speaking with American Men project has a two-year, $20 million budget to study how Democrats can reach young men.
“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 in June.
“It’s very structural,” he added. “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.”
Lost Boys
In June, Straight Arrow News produced a three-part series on the crisis of masculinity facing young men today.
Males make up roughly 50% of the population, but account for nearly 80% of suicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A survey by the National Research Group found that 43% of young men don’t know what it means to be a man today.
What men see as masculine may depend on their age. A 2023 YouGov poll found that a majority of older men are more likely than their younger counterparts to perceive themselves as completely masculine. Among male respondents aged 65 and older, half described themselves as masculine. However, among men between 18 and 29, the youngest cohort in the study, just 30% gave the same answer.
“The reality is that for a very long time we just used the term ‘masculinity,’” Matt Englar-Carlson, a mental health researcher and professor of counseling at Cal State Fullerton, told SAN earlier in 2025. “And I think the problem with masculinity is that –– at that term with a ‘Y’ –– is that it seems to denote that there’s like one form of masculinity, when the reality is that there’s multiple forms of masculinity, meaning that masculinity is a variable, but it’s also influenced by other elements of identity.”
Will Adolphy, the focus of SAN’s masculinity series, encapsulated why some young men, himself included, feel lost and run to those “manosphere” influencers.
“I remember having some experiences where I got told, ‘Men have it so much easier than women, you have male privilege,’” Adolphy — who now runs M-Path, an organization based in the United Kingdom that presents talks on masculinity and mental health — told SAN. Around the time the MeToo movement took off, he said, a friend went to a party dressed as toxic masculinity. Another time, the singer of a band announced, “Men to the back, men to the back.”
A King’s College London/Ipsos poll from March 2025 found that 56% of Millennial men and 57% of Gen Z men said “promoting women’s equality has gone so far that we are discriminating against men.” Meanwhile, 57% of Millennial men and 60% of Gen Z men agreed with the concept that men are expected to do a lot to support equality.
