Young people aren't the problem for Democrats. Young men are.
Democrats are right to worry about losing young voters to Trump, to third parties, or to apathy. But the media narrative is too broad in its focus.
If you’ve been following politics at all for the last couple of months, there’s a consistent theme that you’ve probably seen: young voters are leaving the Democratic Party, or at the very least are leaving Biden.
It’s been reported time and time and time and time again. It’s been reported in left-leaning and right-leaning outlets. It’s inescapable. If you want to see Trump lose, it doesn’t paint a good picture.
And as someone who really wants Trump to lose, here’s what’s Not Quite Right… It’s not that all young voters are moving away from Democrats. The shift that we’re seeing is almost entirely attributable to young men.
The chasm between young men and young women
This recent poll of 18-to-29-year-olds nationwide is jarring:
For a while now, there has been a gap in how men and women vote. Yes, that’s accelerated, but the phenomenon is nothing new.
What appears to be new is the growing gap between young men and women—even as of the last election cycle, that wasn’t really happening. Now all of a sudden, it’s something we’re pretty consistently seeing in polling.
This isn’t unique to the United States, by the way. We’re seeing similar swings in other countries around the world too. So while some of this is probably attributable to Trump, certainly not all of it is.
What’s going on?
Generally, I don’t think Democrats do a particularly good job talking about just how hard it is to be a young man today, and I think it’s worth outlining the extent of some of those challenges:
In the United States, men are nearly 4x more likely than women to die by suicide. Among younger men, that imbalance is even more extreme.1
The opioid crisis is an enormous problem for everyone in America. But men are 2-3x more likely to die of opioid overdoses than women, and younger people are more likely than older people to die of an overdose. Young men are hit by both.
Young men have higher unemployment rates than young women and than the rest of the population. And if that weren’t enough, some of the jobs most commonly held by men are at the highest risk of disruption by AI and technology. Trucking, the most common job for men in the U.S., is at the doorstep of a self-driving revolution that will lead to a dramatic change in the workforce.2
Very much related, young men are attaining college degrees at a significantly lower rate than women: among people ages 25-34, 46% of women but only 36% of men have a bachelor’s degree. Women have been graduating college at a higher rate than men for a while now, but those differences have been accelerating in the last decade or so:
The crisis of loneliness3 in America is an enormous problem and impacts everyone. But the problem is more acute among young people and more acute among men,4 so it’s particularly brutal for young men.
Very much related, from The Hill: “More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male.”5
In short: a lot of the incredible social challenges that many Americans are confronting today—addiction and loneliness and a feeling of insecurity in one’s job and a bunch of other things—seem to be hitting young men particularly hard.
Why is all of this making young men more Republican?
Some of what’s driving the gender divide among young voters isn’t just that men are moving away from Democrats but also that young women are becoming more liberal. And some of it is demographic; people without college degrees are more likely to vote Republican, and as established above, far more young women than young men have college degrees.
I’ve also read other explanations—a backlash from #MeToo or from cancel culture, for example—that may or may not be true in part, but I think the truth is simpler than that.
More than young women, many young men feel like the status quo isn’t working for them. Today, Democrats represent the status quo, and Republicans represent what feels like—to them—a needed change.
Obviously, I don’t agree with that. I don’t think these issues are attributable to Biden or to Democrats. In fact, I believe that a lot of what Biden has accomplished really helps young men.
But I don’t hear many Democrats talking directly to young men. And say what you will about Trump, he is probably better at courting young men than Biden is, and he’s doing it more explicitly.
Remember that the youngest voters in the ’24 election were only nine years old when Trump announced he was running for President in 2015. For the youngest voters, their whole conscious lives have been spent in the Trump era. Much of what we see as aberrational is, for younger voters, their normal.
The argument that Trump is a norm-busting candidate, therefore, doesn’t resonate with younger voters. If you see both parties as corrupt and rigged, as most Americans do, you might as well vote for the candidate who shakes up the status quo.
I think two other key things are at play here as well. First, the Democrats—rightly—expend a lot of energy attacking extremist positions the Republican Party is taking on abortion access.
It’s a critical wedge issue, but it’s also one that matters much more to young women than young men. “Women’s reproductive health” is the fourth-most important issue for female voters under 30. For young men, it’s not even in the top 10.
Growing extremism
Second, there is an alarming thread of extremism in young men that’s absolutely driving part of what we’re seeing. Young men are, on the whole, still more liberal than older men, but the most extreme young men are more extreme than the most extreme older men.
Young men repudiate feminism more than older men, for example. They’re far more likely to say that the use of violence in politics is justifiable.
Needless to say, this is horrifying.6 And again, this extremism is hardly limited to the United States—in fact, the problem appears to be more pronounced in other parts of the world:
The United Kingdom is having an election later this week, and polling I’ve seen for that has anywhere from 1% to 13% of younger voters supporting the incumbent Conservative Party. It seems very likely that more men under 35 are going to vote for the extremist Reform Party—a party whose candidates keep praising Hitler and doing all sorts of other racist nonsense—than the Conservatives.7 Even more startling data in the UK: “Almost half of young men (46%) believe that political violence can be necessary in extreme circumstances.”
From The Economist: “Nearly 80% of South Korean men in their 20s say that men are discriminated against. Barely 30% of men over 60 agree, making their views indistinguishable from those of women in their 20s or 60s.”
Democrats, acknowledge the challenges of young men
Nothing here is to dismiss the very real concerns that young women are facing in this country: they still make less money than men,8 they’re way less represented in political office, access to good health care is being stripped from them because of extremist Republican policies, etc.
But: I hear Democrats talking about all of this more. What I don’t hear are very many Democrats trying to talk to young men. Republicans are doing just that, and their messages—especially from online influencers—are in many cases outright toxic.
Democrats need to do more to reach out to young men. Recognize what they’re experiencing and what they’re feeling.
Men have all kinds of systemic societal advantages—I’m not arguing that point at all. But I worry that maybe that’s kept Democrats from doing more to acknowledge just how hard it is to be a young man right now.
Recognizing their genuine challenges doesn’t validate the extremism or “men’s rights” or anything of the sort. If anything, it begins to diffuse it.
Finally, please take a moment to fill out this survey. I’d love your thoughts and ideas.
It is worth noting that the ratio at which men attempt suicide vs. women is not as extreme, and that difference has to do with the fact that men are far more likely than women to attempt suicides using guns. Guns are tragically effective as a method of suicide, and in 2021, 54% of all firearm deaths in the U.S. were suicides. According to Mike Anestis, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health: “Only 2% to 3% of the folks who attempt suicide using an overdose die. Almost 95% of folks who use a firearm do.”
This is part of the reason why laws like Donna’s Law, which allows people struggling with mental health to put themselves on a do-not-buy list for firearms, are so important. It saves lives. Donna’s Law is on the books in Utah, Virginia, and Washington state so far.
On the other hand, the most common jobs for women are nurses and teachers, occupations that aren’t likely to be hit by automation or AI particularly soon.
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have written articles recently about how to make friends. The fact that we need those articles written is maybe not a great sign for society.
This data, reported by The Economist (and I’m sure others), is really striking: “In 1990, 55% of American men reported having at least six close friends; today only 27% do. The survey found that 15% of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, but the dating market—one that generally impacts young people much more than older people—has some extreme inefficiencies, if you want to call them that: “Sixty-one percent of single men were looking for a relationship or dates, but only 38 percent of women reported doing so.”
As The Economist noted (in the context of nations that practice polygamy, but the point is worth thinking about), “when large numbers of men are doomed to bachelorhood, they get desperate” and violence often follows.
This is all way outside what I’m talking about here, but it unfortunately, at least to a degree, ties into the extremism among pockets of younger men that I wrote about above.
This is a vast topic that I won’t get into here, but there are a bunch of reasons for this: a breakdown in communities, extremism on the internet, the “manosphere,” the popularity of people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and others on YouTube and social media, etc.
It’s an imperfect parallel, but this would be akin to a bunch of young American men deciding to forego the Republicans and vote for the Constitution Party or someone equally nutty and right-wing.
Though that gap is closing among younger Americans.