Fellas, We Gotta Talk.

One reason young men aren't voting for Democrats is because they don't think the Democrats want them.

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We will probably be talking about the reasons Harris lost for the rest of our lives. Democrats could write off what happened to Clinton in 2016 as a fluke, a near-miss or an electoral college technicality. But there’s no such balm in 2024. Harris got beat. Resistance liberalism is dead. The Obama era is over. It’s a seismic wakeup call, and the Democratic Party’s autopsy needs to be ruthless. 

It’s still too early for anyone — let alone a guy like me — to offer any definitive cause of death and, in any case, there is no one cause of death. This was almost certainly death by a thousand cuts. Libs took the support of young voters, women and racial minorities for granted. Online misinformation kept low information voters from properly understanding their ballot box choices. Squishy Republicans weren’t as moved by the Cheney endorsement as Harris thought they’d be. Muslim voters felt betrayed by Harris’ endorsement of the genocide in Gaza. Working class voters are sick of watching the wealthy horde profits and gouge prices while the rest of us struggle. A virulent strain of racism and misogyny poisoned Harris in the minds of many voters from the get-go. Democrats have struggled for visibility in the media ecosystems where many low information voters form their political opinions. Biden ran for reelection after implying that he’d govern as a one-term President, and his late dropout hamstrung the Harris campaign’s quest to find a unifying campaign message. All of these things seem at least kinda true and I’m sure there are lots more points besides. (I thought Ezra Klein’s short breakdown here was really good.)

But a lot of the early focus has centered on young men. Almost every demographic swung towards Trump on Tuesday, so you can’t lay this whole thing exclusively at the feet of young men. But young men saw the most pronounced shift, 47 percent of 18-29 year olds voted for Trump. 47 percent! I come from a generation that saw voting for a Republican — any Republican, let alone Trump — as inherently cringe and uncool. But as my generation ages into being inherently cringe and uncool, it seems like the worm has turned and voting conservative is no longer the social kryptonite it was for millennials in their twenties. Maybe all that talk about Republicans being the new punk rock wasn’t totally wrong.¹

Since I know a little about being a man, I just have a few thoughts. And since I’ve been thinking about these things for a while, I don’t feel totally reactionary writing them out here now. 

A lot of people will look at young men’s wild swings towards Trump and decide that young men are simply too misogynistic and/or racist to vote for Kamala Harris. And, sure. That is probably true for a lot of voters. But those were guys who were never going to vote for a Democrat anyway. So what explains this huge and apparently recent shift?