Do Democrats Know How to Win Back Men?
Recent signs suggest they’re struggling to find the right answers.
One of the top quandaries for the Democratic Party following the 2024 election is how to bounce back with male voters. Some of the largest rightward shifts last year came from men—specifically, young and minority men. New data from the Democratic firm Catalist showed that while the party’s vote share among men overall fell by five points compared to 2020, the erosion of support was larger among Asian (six points), black (eight points), and Hispanic (twelve points) men.
This followed more than a decade of sustained rightward movement among all three non-white groups of male voters.
Additionally, exit polls suggest that the youngest cohort of men—those aged 18 to 29—broke for Trump by two points last year after backing Biden by 11 in 2020, and post-election analysis from Blue Rose Research similarly suggests that Trump narrowly won non-white 18-year-old men.
Some Democrats seem well aware they have a problem with male voters, but it’s less clear that anyone in the party knows what exactly to do about it.
The signs were there even before the election. Democrats thought one way they could address their waning support among men—especially white, working-class men—was by nominating Tim Walz to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. It was a move rooted in an identity-politics argument that these men needed to see someone who looked like them, someone who presented as a manly man from a blue-collar community, to feel comfortable voting for a female candidate. (Of course, this did not ultimately work.)
Since then, some have turned their attention to the “manosphere”—including prominent podcast hosts like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Lex Fridman, and Andrew Schulz—arguing that it has had an impact on the rightward shift of younger men, specifically, and that Democrats need to counterbalance it with their own such figures. The party has begun encouraging its donors to open their checkbooks in service of building up a competing media infrastructure on the left designed to move young men back to their side.
This past weekend, The New York Times reported on another outreach effort:
The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM—short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan”—and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.
But these ideas demonstrate that the party still doesn’t fully grasp the roots of their problems or understand the population they’re trying to reach.
Democrats seem to not only believe (wrongly) that these podcasters are conservative but also that their young, male audiences seek them out for their political opinions. In reality, the podcasts often discuss a variety of non-political topics, which is likely what attracts many of their listeners in the first place. And insofar as they’re “political,” they are generally more anti-establishment than partisan. For example, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Rogan interviewed Andrew Yang on his podcast and later endorsed Bernie Sanders—neither of whom had close ties to the party and both of whom were favored among young men. In 2024, Rogan endorsed Trump, who is among the most “down with the establishment” Republicans in recent memory.
Thinking that these young men can be swayed back to Democrats by developing more politically left-leaning media outfits for guys misunderstands the situation. As Daniel Cox has previously outlined for TLP, young men haven’t necessarily become more ideologically conservative, but many are politically disaffected and uninterested in traditional party politics. In fact, they often to have dour views of both parties. Cox’s polling found that many were drawn to Trump’s irreverence and find his shtick “entertaining.” And though they may not agree with Trump on all policy matters, they were much likelier to believe he was looking out for men more than Harris.
Essentially, though young men often actually agree with the Democrats on the issues, many still don’t view the party favorably. These men have deeper concerns, including that they don’t think Democrats are prioritizing their interests. Some of the disconnect may also be due to a bad overall vibe surrounding the party, as suggested by activist and DNC member David Hogg shortly after the election:
I feel like Democrats have just become uncool. For a long time, Republicans were the ones walking around with moral superiority. If you weren’t a God-fearing, straight person that has a white picket fence and a nuclear family, you were inherently the problem with America. That was before. Then people reacted so viscerally to Donald Trump’s election that a lot of liberals started policing everybody around us. It gave us a sense that we’re morally superior, we’re better than other people.
We’ve got to change that. Young men might not even disagree with us. They agree that we need to address gun violence and climate change. But they don’t want to be judged.
Another astute observer of Democrats’ woes has been U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who recently tied all this together, saying:
I’m sure you guys heard like, “Oh, well, the Democrats need to have their own Joe Rogan.” We had Joe Rogan. We canceled Joe Rogan years ago. Democrats don’t want to admit this. We did, and then it…became questionable whether we should go on Joe Rogan or not. We did this to ourselves.
Democrats can’t afford to treat men as just another identity-based group whom they can win back simply by turning a few knobs to create a more precise messaging formula. As former party staffer Rotimi Adeoye remarked in response to the Times’ reporting, “Democratic donors treating men like an endangered species on a remote island they need to study probably won’t rebuild trust. People don’t want to be decoded, they want to be understood and met where they are.”
Indeed, most people can sense inauthentic outreach a mile away. Rather than propping up new partisan outlets to cleave these voters from the “manosphere,” Democrats would instead do well to show up in men’s communities and listen to their concerns—to talk to them, not at them, as some have begun to do. It may not win back their support overnight, but it’s perhaps the best place to start.
Editor’s note: a version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.
The hostility towards men (especially white men) is overt and undeniable. And to make matters worse, the Democrats try and gaslight their way out of it, which compounds the problem by insulting the intelligence of the group they are trying to reach.
I don't see a path out of this because the feminist base won't tolerate a detente.
Read articles in the NYT and WaPo if you want to understand why Democrats can't win back males.
And read the commenters.
It is all anti-white and anti-male. Progressives dislike whites and males, and it is reflected over and over and over.
Democrats can win back male voters only by kicking progressives out of the party. Progressives have driven whites and males (and Blacks and Hispanics) to the Republicans.
Progressives blame white males for all of society's problems. Trump celebrates them. It's a no duh why they switched to Trump.