Democrats Have A Problem With Men

No, not the other way around.

I started this piece a few weeks ago. Then, some things happened… 

If you know me in real life, you know what they were. If you don’t, I won’t be cryptic: my house flooded (Northern Thailand, not North Carolina), my family had to evacuate, we lost a lot of our stuff, we lost (then found!) our pets, and it’s been a wild ride of trying to put our lives back together. In the time since the proverbial ink dried on my first draft of this, the Harris/Trump race has moved in a very uncomfortable direction for Democrats. Rather than attempt to right the ship, much of the Dem commentariat has skipped ahead to the blame and angry recriminations stage. And they seem to have settled on a scapegoat.

As Trump has pulled even or ahead in most of the important swing states, Democrats are casting about furiously for a culprit. Why is their likable, joyful candidate faltering against an historically unpopular convicted felon whose last presidential term ended in insurrection? Whose fault is this? Because it can’t be Kamala Harris’s, surely. Nor can it be the Democratic Party’s. The side of the angels does not so err, so some devilry must be afoot. 

The truth though, is that win or lose, Democrats are staring down the barrel of astonishing demographic shifts in their coalition. Understanding them - and ideally, learning to correct them - is vital to the party’s future. Sadly, there is little sign that understanding or correcting are items on the to-do list. Or that they’ll be added anytime soon.  

The Harris Camp

Harris’s campaign has made a series of unfortunate missteps, while Trump’s campaign has been looking unusually well-oiled. Pennsylvania Democrats are crowing openly about poor campaign leadership in the electoral vote-rich state. There are reports (kind of dubious sourcing, so won’t share links) of Harris blowing up at her campaign chief after being (very, very badly) advised to skip the Al Smith Dinner. If true, and in fairness to Harris, this actually was terrible advice. The rationale was that attending the dinner - which will be known to fans of The West Wing as a massive gala supporting Catholic charities - might have upset members of the LGBT community.

Um..

Members of the LGBT community are both very small in number, and not generally regarded as up for grabs in this election. Indeed - and we’ll return to this theme - they’re one of the only groups of voters that Dems mostly don’t have to worry about right now. Skipping an important event to avoid upsetting them would be sort of like Trump skipping one to avoid upsetting fans of Duck Dynasty. I think they’ll stick with the team… In lieu of attending, Harris recorded a poorly-received video message which allowed Trump to take the stage and scorch her for staying home.

On their own, none of these things are big deals. They’re little tempests in little teapots. But we’re in the home stretch. Really, we’ve been in the home stretch since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket. She had, and has, zero margin for error. 

The Trump Camp

Meanwhile, Trump is running hot. Sorry friends, but if you don’t recognize his recent McDonald’s visit as the potentially game-changing media coup that it was, you probably need to diversify your media consumption. And yes, I am aware that it was staged. Of course it was. A former President of the United States does not just rock up to a fast food joint, roll his sleeves up, and start rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi. It was a carefully choreographed stunt. And that couldn’t possibly matter less. Trump looked cool, relaxed, and friendly, and that could honestly be all it takes. 

I’ll never forget this: shortly after Barack Obama fended off Mitt Romney, a documentary about the Romneys hit Netflix. I watched about 5 seconds of the trailer and thought, “if this had dropped a week before the election, Romney probably would’ve won.” Seeing him as a normal, kindly family man at rest, and not as the stiff patrician he played on TV completely changed my view of the man. When a negative image of a candidate hardens (too rigid, too aloof, too mean), and they manage to puncture it, it can be extremely powerful. Do not underestimate how many people’s attitude toward voting for Trump may have been relaxed by watching him sling those French fries and “surprise” people at the drive through. He wasn’t the angry, rambling neo-fascist we’ve come to know on the campaign trail. He was much closer to the funny, magnetic celebrity we got to know in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately for Kamala Harris (and yeah..for the Republic), folks kinda liked that guy.  

I’m not going to turn this into an I-told-you-so piece about why it would’ve been better to test our top talent against each other in a mini-primary or convention floor fight, rather than anoint an unpopular VP with vague policy convictions and a track record of poor campaign performance. I could do that. Sometime soon, I will do that. But right now, I won’t. What I want to talk about instead is why Dems aren’t doing better than they are. His burger flipping aside, Trump is still enormously unpopular. A woman as charismatic as Kamala Harris ought to be wiping the floor with him. So why isn’t she? Why, if anything, are things looking like they’re heading in the other direction?  

Demographic Devastation

At least part of the explanation is the Democrats’ significant decline in popularity among many of their traditional voting blocs. The numbers here are so shocking, and the result of such a recent shift in opinion, that they can be kind of hard to believe. 

Per Gallup:

• The Democratic Party's wide lead over Republicans in Black Americans’ party preferences has shrunk by nearly 20 points over the past three years. [emphasis mine]

• Democrats' leads among Hispanic adults and adults aged 18 to 29 have slid nearly as much, resulting in Democrats' holding only a modest edge among both groups.

• Whereas Democrats were at parity with Republicans among men as recently as 2009, and among non-college-educated adults as recently as 2019, they are now in the red with both groups.

That’s…really bad.

Throughout my lifetime, and the few decades preceding it, Democrats enjoyed such an immense advantage with nonwhite voters, it was hard to countenance any other reality. A Republican strategist who suggested a play to triangulate the black vote would’ve been laughed out of the room 10 years ago. Now, it’s an explicit strategy of the Trump campaign, and it’s one that’s paying considerable dividends. 

The Latino vote was never quite so firmly in the tank for the Democrats, but the blue team still had a clear advantage. The great Democratic dream was that as the country, especially the southern and western states, became less white and more Latino, voting trends favoring Democrats would overwhelm the more demographically narrow Republicans. Texas would turn blue, the electoral college would fall under a permanent Dem lock, and the Republicans would never see the inside of the Oval Office again. This isn’t bearing out. More Latinos in every cycle are finding a more comfortable home with the GOP, so while the population trends are playing out largely as anticipated, it isn’t having the expected electoral impact.

The Democratic advantage with working class, non college educated whites has been waning since the midwest deindustrialized, and the “steel belt” became the “rust belt.” Women, particularly since Roe v. Wade, have always been more reliably Democratic than men, but by the time Barack Obama was elected, things were more or less even on that score. Now, they’re lopsided again, with the GOP taking the lion’s share of dudes in every cycle. 

So to sum up: blacks (especially young, black men), Latinos (again, men in this group are more skeptical of Dems than women), working class white men, young people, young men, and men in general are all turning away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans. Even if this isn’t enough of a shift to propel Donald Trump to a second term, the trendlines are sufficiently worrying that we might want to spend some time exploring the cause of the bleeding. Maybe see if we can find a tourniquet or something?

And did anyone notice a theme in that last paragraph? A through-line, so to speak? I hope so, because I was rubbing your nose pretty hard in it: Democrats have a problem with men. And if they don’t want to lose this election, and many more after it, they need to start taking it seriously. 

And man, are they not.

Of Boys and Men

Over the weekend, the following posts, and several more like them, hit X (formerly Twitter) and migrated from there to the rest of social media:

Charlotte Clymer’s response there to the OP, while critical, was mild relative to the tonnage of hate being spewed at him. Helwig and others who dared to posit that the abject misery in which many of their young brothers now live could be part of the reason so many of them are turning to extreme politics and rage-filled internet communities, were inundated with mockery and derision. Apparently, the suggestion that an alienated voting bloc, midway through a mass exodus from the party, could be returned to the fold if treated by thought leaders as something other than pond scum, is too ridiculous for serious contemplation. Go ahead and follow the link if you want a flavor of the responses. 

Here’s another:

Follow the links, read the comments, take a break, then come back to this…

Broken Records

We’ll circle back to the menfolk, because the conversation about them is an important one. But this phenomenon isn’t limited to the guys. It’s hard to know exactly what’s happening in the Democratic tent, mostly owing to the fact that these changes are all so recent. The departure of the aforementioned groups away from the Dems seems to have gone into full steam around the time of Joe Biden’s challenge to Donald Trump. That’s a bit odd, frankly. 

It’s not obvious why Trump would hold a lot of appeal for folks in these groups. And while Biden was far from a perfect president, he accomplished a lot. Certainly, if you were a Democrat before Joe Biden took the top job, it’s not at all clear to me why you wouldn’t still be now. 

Admittedly, there have been some weird moments. But Joe Biden hasn’t screwed up enough with any of these voting blocs to warrant such a stark shift, and we might at least consider whether Biden himself has had little to do with it. That yes, it happened on his watch, but for reasons outside his control. Or that it would have happened no matter who was in office. I think there’s a good case to be made for that.

One thing that all of these groups have in common is that the messaging Democrats use to reach them is quite dated. We’re singing from a very old songsheet when our political and thought leaders address black, Latino, working class, young, and male voters, and it could simply be the case that we’re overdue for an update. You wouldn’t expect to be able to gather a bunch of Taylor Swift fans, play them some Captain & Tennille, and get them all to convert. Tastes and sensibilities evolve in all walks of life. Why should political communication be any different? 

The problem takes a slightly different form with each of these groups, but it can probably all be traced back to the same problem: Democratic leaders are too old. Joe Biden is 81, Nancy Pelosi is 84, and Chuck Schumer is 73. The House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, is uncommonly fresh at just 54, but then the Minority Whip is Katherine Clark who’s 61. Incidentally, 61 is just one year past Tim Walz, who is 60, and he’s just one year older than 59-year-old Kamala Harris. These are not young guns.

I don’t think there’s anything ageist in pointing out that political leaders - like, really, anyone - tend to get stuck in their ways, and tend to fall back on strategies that succeeded for them in the past. Perhaps the Democratic power elite can be forgiven for thinking that black voters must always want to hear about civil rights and how Democrats are going to rescue them from racism; that Latino voters must want to hear about immigration, immigration, and more immigration; that kids are in the tank already; that men are toxic write-offs who don’t need or deserve any messaging of their own; and that the white working class will be satisfied with a pizza party, and should be damn thankful, since the Republicans don’t even offer free coffee.    

As stated, this reluctance to change gears started to cause real problems around the time Joe Biden and Donald Trump were fighting over the White House. But around that time, several other cultural winds had begun to blow, and if we consider that Uncle Joe may not bear all of the blame for this mess, we might also take a look at what these winds knocked over. 

2020 saw the summer of Covid, of George Floyd, of Black Lives Matter, of cancellation, and of pressure-cooker, stuck-at-home, online rage-politicking. Two years before that was #metoo, which came on the heels of an accelerating border crisis, with “kids in cages” and “migrant caravans” competing for top narrative billing in the news cycle. Meanwhile, the country never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crash, nobody under 30 could afford a home (and still can’t), and an inflation spike meant that even a steady job wasn’t a sure ticket to a comfortable life anymore. 

These conditions led to different problems - one in each diminishing Dem voting block - but they all fit neatly under the same umbrella of hubris, condescension, and an inability to change with the times. Let’s look at each. 

Black Voters

Democrats became the clear home for black voters after LBJ delivered on civil rights. That’s pretty understandable. When one side thinks it should be okay for you to live under codified racial discrimination and the other side doesn’t, that’s an easy choice. But civil rights was 60 years ago. That means that if you were old enough then to really be aware of the changes, and old enough to remember what life was like before them, you’re probably pushing 80 now, or past it. 

The younger generations of black voters - and this is precisely who Team Trump is targeting - may not feel like they still “owe” Democrats their gratitude for something that happened when color TVs were just being invented. And hey, since they definitely, 100% do not still owe Democrats for this, good for them! “Oh you poor dears” was probably never going to be an eternally resonant political message, and we might only be seeing the tip of this particular iceberg.

Latino Voters

The picture is very similar for Latinos, who also, importantly, make up a much larger share of the US population now than they did when Democrats first started courting their vote. In 1965, the US was 4% Latino. By 2015, the number was 18%, and it’s even higher now. During this period of growth, the assumption was that the Republican Party, by being so openly xenophobic in their anti-immigration rhetoric, would never be a serious consideration for Latino Americans. All Democrats had to do was talk all immigration, all the time, bait Republicans into showing their ugly asses, and these voters, in ever-increasing numbers, would reward them. 

But undocumented Latinos - the ones for whom you might expect immigration issues to be of the most salience - are a pretty small share of the overall Latino population; only about 10-13%. Also, they don’t vote! Of the Latinos who can and do vote, many are third, or even fourth generation Americans by now. Why should they want to hear, day in/day out, about the plight of people who, in some cases, are trying to take shortcuts that they themselves didn’t take? Sure, some can be expected to empathize with members of their same national or ethnic group, and many do. But identity politicking doesn’t always work the way Good White People - its chief drivers - think it should.

There’s another issue here, which is the nexus of culture and religion. American Latinos are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. For decades, Republicans have been trying to make inroads by playing up the notion of spiritual kinship, and shared social conservatism between Catholics and Evangelicals. Could it be that this fusion is finally beginning to harden? That Latinos now feel so securely woven into the American fabric that they care more about shared ideology than shared identity? If so, that’s probably a good thing overall. Identity-based voting is an extremely difficult principle to defend. Try it sometime. 

Young Voters

For young people, I think the situation is pretty easy to explain. Sometime, around 10 years ago, Democrats went from being the cool party to being the hall monitor party. Kids are instinctively rebellious, and it’s unsurprising that many would gravitate less toward a message of “watch what you say - don’t even joke about that” and more toward one of “idgaf, say whatever if you want, even if it’s offensive to the internet people.” Republicans used to get killed with the youth vote because they were seen as stuffy and dull. That mantle has shifted. Conservatives, happily unburdened by the speech codes and elite manners popular on the left, have become the free-thinking, free-wheeling renegades. They’re the Greasers, and we’re the Socs. They’re John Bender, and we’re Principal Vernon. How many 18-year-olds want to vote for Principal Vernon? 

Class

This one’s also pretty easy. Democrats are losing the working class because, again, about 10 years ago, Democrats stopped giving a shit about the working class and stopped talking about issues that actually made their lives better. 

The early Obama years saw an intense focus on health care, economic stimulus, Wall Street reform, and consumer protection. Somewhere along the way, after significant progress was made on all those fronts - not to mention significant progress on social issues, such as the legalization of cannabis and gay marriage - things changed. Democrats became possessed of the idea that actually, the most important priority of the left should be organizing everyone into dubious identity hierarchies and interminably obsessing over who had more power and privilege than who else. This new schema of priorities - call it “woke,” call it social justice warriorism, call it PC, call it whatever you want - sucked up a lot of the progressive movement’s oxygen, and left little remaining to push for needed economic changes that might have enjoyed a broader appeal.

I’ve made no secret of my distaste for leftist identity obsession, so maybe this just seems like a hammer finding nails everywhere it looks. But I think it’s hard to overlook the timing here. When did Democrats start hemorrhaging all this support? When identity politics hit its zenith and Democrats, by harnessing it to elect Joe Biden, took institutional ownership of it. 

It was a needlessly tragic turn. If we’d really wanted to do identity politics the right way, we should have stuck to an economic message. We know that health care, the social safety net, infrastructural decline - all of the OG Democratic priorities - are issues that, if fixed, would have a disproportionately positive impact on marginalized groups. We know this because it is those groups who disproportionately suffer when we get these things wrong.

Back to the Men

We need to talk a lot more about the guys though. We need to have a lengthy, difficult conversation about the guys, because it’s the guys - in every one of these other identity categories - who are the ones getting off the big, blue train.    

A trend that shouldn’t be ignored here is that the version of gender roles inspired by feminist theory - men and women as equal partners, with behavioral and attitudinal differences being understood as socially constructed, rather than innately biological - has almost entirely pushed aside traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. According to polling data, this wave crested with Millennials, who showed broad support for feminist thinking, and rough parity in support for it between the sexes, then broke apart completely with Gen Z, in which young men have reached Boomer-esque levels of feminist skepticism and young women have reached unprecedented levels of feminist appreciation. 

This must not be overlooked or underestimated. Millennials largely accepted the notion that feminism was for men too, but Gen Z is having none of it. Gen Z men want little to do with feminists, and feminists want little to do with them. Why does this matter? Because whatever the cause, the shift mirrors the shift in party affiliation within these same age brackets. The men and boys of Gen Z aren’t just turning against feminism, they perceive feminism to be “a Democrat thing” - which it largely is - and they’re turning their backs on the ones pushing it. 

This is also a good time to note that women - especially younger, single ones - are more in thrall to both feminism and the Democratic Party than ever before. It is young women who are doing the heaviest lifting to beat back the red wave, and if Republicans can ever splinter them away from the blue team, the US will probably be a one (red) party state for the foreseeable future. 

Golly, then. Doesn’t this mean we should all drop to our knees and praise these single ladies for saving us from the GOP apocalypse? Not so fast. Single women may be helping us make up the numbers at the voting booth, but they’re also the ones pushing the ideology that’s making the party unappealing to the groups fleeing it. It’s sort of like a sports bar that becomes suddenly very popular with Yankees fans. It’s great that they’re coming now, but since they drove out the Sox fans who used to drink there, the numbers are kind of a wash. And if you spend as much time online as I do, I think you’d find it hard to conclude that rank bigotry isn’t playing a significant role in this. 

Like most good liberals, I long ago internalized the fact that “man-hater” was an unfair and inaccurate pejorative intended to discredit feminism and turn off possible male allies. The idea that feminism was actually a movement that hated men was a ridiculous lie. Feminism was for men too! In fact, it would save them! 

I implore you: go read the comments on that Feminist News post. I’d tell you to go find the OP on Twitter (X) and read the comments there, but the poster had to turn off his replies. But go find one of these discussions online. Read, study, digest, and then try to tell me that this isn’t a movement that hates men. Tell me this isn’t a movement whose most vocal adherents have no problem whatsoever with savage vitriol, demonization, and collective blame (for actually everything) among their rank and file, all aimed at men. 

And please, before you remind me, I do not need to be told that not all feminists hate men. I’m aware. A whole bunch that I know personally are either married to or parenting them. Doesn’t change what’s happening in the movement. So if you don’t appreciate me - a man - trash talking feminism, rather than complain about it, here’s my suggestion: go tell you pals to clean up their act. They’re giving you a bad name. And they’re screwing up.

Because when you take into account that feminism is a movement with a strong, uniform party affiliation, it’s unsurprising that these dudes are jumping ship from that party. It would be kind of weird if they weren’t. And of course, feminists instinctively understand this dynamic when it's applied to other people and groups. 

Left-leaning women are highly skeeved out by J.D. Vance, because J.D. Vance says highly skeevy things about women. Why would anyone expect men to behave differently when confronted with a group that caricatures them as lazy, misogynistic, gullible, basement-dwelling incels who can’t look after themselves, have to make everything about them, and are probably all just a few Joe Rogan podcasts away from raping somebody. 

Bear in mind, the actual advice here was political: “We’re losing this group of voters - maybe we should try to get them back somehow.” The response? *flamethrower noises*

[Many of] the foot soldiers of contemporary feminism - who, as we’ve discussed, are also the foot soldiers of the contemporary Democratic Party - would rather lose this election to Donald Trump than be nice to a man on the internet. They’d rather welcome an existential threat to American democracy than acknowledge that maybe being dickheads to half the population for the last 10 years has turned a few of them off. And that not all of those turned off are white. 

In a sense, this is natural. People would rather be just about anything than proved wrong. If Harris goes down to Trump, that sucks, but at least the narrative is intact; America - especially American men - are sexist and racist and awful and really, when you think about it, a woman of color never had a chance against this system. But that’s defeatist nonsense. 

Returning to an earlier theme, much of the problem here is our failure to update our thinking. The people leading this party, and training its foot soldiers, are all pretty old. They learned what they did about men and women at a time when the things they’re still saying about the sexes were largely true. Men really did used to run everything. Men did have all the privilege and power, they did outpace women on just about every societal metric, and they really were responsible for most of what was wrong with the world!

But while history is long, life is short. 

A 20-year-old man today was born in 2004 - two years after I graduated high school. That was 10 years after the Violence Against Women Act, 13 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (which made it easier for women to sue their employers for sex discrimination), 26 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and a full 34 years after Title IX. They were five-years-old when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became law, and when they were 10-years-old, women started outpacing men in earning higher education degrees; a trend that has not reversed, and that has seen an ever-widening gulf. 

They actually didn’t start the fire. In fact, the fire was mostly out by the time they started growing peach fuzz. And yet, we treat them like they were just caught holding an empty gas can and a plastic Bic.  

Are we really confused as to why these guys are turning to the likes of Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate; influential men who don’t just shriek at them to check a privilege they’ve never actually enjoyed? And by the way, not all those guys are as bad as their reputations with lefties would suggest. Yeah, Tate and Brand are both pretty horrible, and Peterson’s become kind of a troll. But Rogan’s a former Bernie voter who mostly just doesn’t like woke stuff. Peterson’s advice to men is pretty unobjectionable fare about taking responsibility for themselves. The only reason it all codes as right wing is because it doesn’t do what so much of lefty discourse on men does: treat masculinity as inherently problematic, and men as both victims and purveyors of a toxic system. 

Other discussions on social and traditional media have centered around the (very real) epidemic of male loneliness. The reaction from lefty/feminist types? “It’s their fault, their problem to solve, and it’s offensive to even suggest that liberals or women could help with this.” Coming from Democrats…that’s a pretty damn weird sentiment. “Make your bed, sleep in it,” is what I expect from Republicans, since it’s more or less their entire worldview. But, “tough shit, losers,” is something a liberal only says to someone they hate. Someone who exists in their imagination as an enemy. The thing about inviting people to become your enemies…sometimes, they accept the invitation. 

You could write a book about the relationship breakdown between men and liberal society. And about how boys and men are failed by a culture that, more often than not, treats them like they’re dysfunctional girls and women. Indeed, many, many have. Of course, since most of these writers also code as (or, in fact, are) conservative, I don’t expect many of my left wing friends to rush to reserve their books at the library. They should though. Every single one of the groups we’ve discussed in this piece - blacks, Latinos, the young, the working class, yes, even the LGBT - are all being pulled away from the Democrats by the men in their camps. All.

Look, this isn’t a post-mortem. Nobody’s candidacy is dead yet. There’s time for Kamala Harris and other Democrats to make some moves here. First, Harris should absolutely, 100% go on Joe Rogan’s podcast - which Trump is doing tomorrow - and do her damnedest to explain to the millions of men who tune in that she doesn’t think they’re a bunch of toxic assholes (by the way, she should do this even if she does think that). Floating in the bile, there were actually a handful of thoughtful comments on those posts above about what could represent effective types of male outreach. Somebody on the Harris campaign should probably read a few of them. 

It isn’t too late to win, and it isn’t too late to win back men. But to do that, we’re going to have to decide that we want to do that. That we want these guys back in the fold. Unfortunately, there is just not widespread agreement among Democrats on that point.