By Benjamin Rothove
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Democrats are scrambling to figure out why Gen Z men
voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in 2024, breaking the party’s nearly
four-decade win streak with young men.
Party strategists are pouring $20 million in the Speaking
with American Men (SAM) project to explore how they can reach male voters.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee is producing a “postelection
review,” groups such as the Progress Action Fund have created plans to target
young men, and progressive media figures are buzzing about the need for a
left-wing podcast sphere able to compete with Joe Rogan and his comedian
friends.
As Democratic consultants, progressive activists, and
media figures grasp about for a strategy to reach alienated voters decades
their junior, National Review spoke with the campus activists who
interact every day with the illusive young American male.
For some of those campus leaders, it’s not what Democrats
have done wrong to lose the young male vote, but what amoral, cynical
Republicans have done right.
The GOP has “encouraged young men to punch down, and
blame their lot [in] life on immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and the women who
seem to be outpacing them,” College Democrats of America president Sunjay
Muralitharan said.
Muralitharan predicts the GOP’s gains will be
short-lived.
“Such a message caused a temporary electoral shift, one
that will inevitably flip when disillusioned young men realize which party
actually improves their lot in life.”
While the trend Muralitharan describes was made visible
with Trump’s election in 2024, it’s not new: American men have been shifting to the right for about ten years. The shift isn’t
confined to the U.S. either: Young voters in Europe have also become more conservative.
To further complicate Muralitharan’s “punching down” theory, the drop
in Democratic Party support among Black and Latino men and working class men
has been especially pronounced.
So what is going on?
Jack Howard, president of the California College
Democrats, believes these men are drawn to the Republicans’ faux machismo.
“We need to break the illusion that Democrats are weak
and Republicans are strong,” he told NR, “There is nothing strong about
supporting a president who gets off on arbitrary belittlement and greed, and
has no substance beyond that. Democrats need to return to pursuing substantive
policies that have clear, simple, material returns.”
Muralitharan argues that the party is pursuing exactly
those policies. Democrats, he said, “empower young men to achieve what they
deeply desire: becoming successful providers for themselves and their
families.”
The party has a history of supporting men through
policies such as “making homes more affordable with housing rebates, keeping
grocery prices low through cracking down on price gouging or creating
well-paying blue collar jobs with the IRA,” Muralitharan argued.
So, either the message isn’t getting through to young men
or it is, and they just don’t like what the Democrats are offering.
Post-election polling suggests it’s the latter: Young men increasingly see the
Democrats — with their focus on providing a social safety net for the poor — as
overly risk averse and even hostile to competition.
Democrats are now viewed as the party that polices speech
and behavior, while Republicans are seen as more approachable. Republican men are nearly twice as likely as Democratic men to see themselves as
“highly masculine.” Moreover, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to
say people in the U.S. place too much value on men who are confident,
assertive, risk-taking, or physically strong.
“We’re tired of being told we’re to blame for everything
that’s wrong with society,” said JT Marshburn, chairman of the College
Republican National Committee.
For some young activists, like Rishita Nossam,
communications director for the High School Democrats of America, Democrats
aren’t consistently pushing their message through the right channels.
Democrats need to reach out to men in a “meaningful”
rather than “performative” way, she said.
“The party must maintain consistency and commitment so
young men see that Democrats are willing and able to appeal to their concerns.”
Campus Democrats may have something to learn from their
political opponents.
Last election cycle, GOP campus activists showed
themselves to be quite adept at going to the places young men congregate and
extending a hand to them.
College Republicans, Marshburn said, “did a lot of solid
work to win young men for Trump like creating a fraternity council that we
plugged into the Trump campaign and developed programming targeted toward men
like tailgates.”
A group of University of North Carolina fraternity
brothers who gained national attention for raising an American flag during the
anti-Israel encampments spoke at the Republican convention last year, and groups
such as Turning Point specifically targeted
fraternity members in the November election.
“We helped create a social atmosphere that welcomed
everyone, and men in particular connected with the message of conservatism,”
Marshburn concluded.
Cody Miller, vice chairman of the National Federation of
College Republicans, said young men increasingly believe in the importance of
“faith and family,” but the left “obstructs that.”
Gen Z men are more likely to regularly attend religious services than millennial men, with many
young people turning to religion for community after the pandemic lockdowns.
This is a worldwide phenomenon, as church attendance has quadrupled among Gen Zers in the U.K., and the Catholic
Church in France baptized more adults in 2025 than it has in the last 20
years.
Miller believes College Republicans have been able to
reach male students because their chapters are “a place where young men can
finally be themselves on college campuses that alienate them.” He said Gen Z
men need “a strong sense of community and belonging.” However, the left focuses
too much on “privilege” and tells men they have “an inherent advantage that
never actually appears.”
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