Democrats Still Don’t Know How To Reach Men

And still really don’t want to, if the DNC elections are any indication.

We all have that one relative who used Christmas and birthdays to sadistically push presents we didn’t want but that they felt we somehow needed. You know who I’m talking about.

For me, it was my Dad. Calendars, books I didn’t want to read (that he knew I didn’t want to read), dress socks, toiletries, more calendars, and more books I didn’t want to read. He knew he was doing it too. It’s not like he was just misfiring. He’d sit there in smirking anticipation of how little I was going to like whatever he’d gotten me, and the more disappointed I was by whatever I opened, the more he enjoyed himself. Something about his constitution wouldn’t allow him to just buy the damn thing he knew I wanted. Everything had to be a lesson. A lecture almost.

The DNC appears to be taking a similar approach in voter outreach to the groups that gave them the collective middle finger in the November elections. It’s left me with…some questions.

The committee was in an admittedly tricky spot last weekend when they elected their new slate of leaders to face the second, turbo-charged administration of President Donald Trump. They got their asses kicked up and down the field in November and they know it. They just don’t know why. Or what they can do about it. Which turns out to be limiting.

Here’s incoming DNC chair Ken Martin attempting to diagnose the party’s malaise:

"The reality is, what we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened last election cycle. We know that we lost ground with Latino voters, we know we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don't know the how and why yet."

Hmmmm. Let’s play a game. It’s called “What’s Missing?” Read Martin’s statement again and see if you can’t spot some omissions. Off the top of my head, I can notice a few.

It might, for example, behoove the new Dem leadership to wonder why the party lost a full 10 points of support from black voters in 2024. Since black voters are absolutely essential to the Democrats’ coalition, we cannot win elections without them, and they’re deserting the party by double digits…I dunno. Maybe the new DNC chair could bring himself to act like he’s noticed?

But there’s a bigger elephant in the room. Martin listed four groups Dems need to get back into the fold: Latinos, women, young voters, and the working class. A few things are weird and annoying about this. First, why did he put women on the list at all? Yes, technically, Trump narrowed the gender gap in this election. But he did so barely. Joe Biden won women voters 55/43 and Harris won 53/46. The expression “bigger fish to fry” comes to mind here.

Harris was a weak candidate, who underperformed relative to Biden with pretty much everyone. That women were included in that framing by a factor of a few points doesn’t seem especially relevant or surprising given the overall climate.

And in the rest of his assessment, Martin isn’t telling the full story either. Perhaps because he doesn’t know it (unlikely), or because he finds it too uncomfortable to bring up in a room packed with the Democratic party faithful (likely). Democrats aren’t just tanking with Latinos, young’uns, and the working class, they’re tanking specifically, and brutally, with men in those groups. And if this recent gathering is any indication, Democrats have no plan whatsoever to course correct.

In fairness to Dem bigwigs, most voters, left-leaning or otherwise, don’t really care or even know who gets party leadership roles. Most probably don’t know who the last DNC chair was and don’t know anything about the new guy. That’s fine. Party functionaries don’t need to have rockstar public profiles. But Democrats being Democrats, these contests do tend to be games of identity bingo, with each demographic group in the coalition getting to unwrap their own little Vice Chair as a present. You can see the whole gift table here.

The grow-ups in the room got Ken Martin, who is, well…a grown up. And that’s about all there is to say about Ken Martin. He’s been around a long time, he knows everyone, he knows fundraising, he knows how the party works, and he’ll be a steady hand to steer the ship. Martin is notable in that he’s the first DNC chair in years who isn’t either a woman or a person of color. In that regard, he’s not just there for the grown ups, he’s there to pacify Democrats worried that the party may have become a bit too addicted to staffing by diversity (although…picking a white guy because he’s a white guy is also a form of staffing by diversity…just saying).

You can actually find a picture of Ken Martin in the dictionary, right next to the entry for ‘middle-aged white guy from Minnesota.’ Not incidentally, his key rival, Ben Wikler, is also in the dictionary, under ‘middle-aged white guy from Wisconsin.’ This is not an accident, and is a result of the same calculus that produced a short list of running mates for Kamala Harris comprised most seriously of middle aged white guys. Depending on your sensibilities, this is either a welcome return to normalcy or an unfortunate quashing of diverse voices. Whichever it is though, none of these guys code as working class (in the way that, say, John Fetterman does - not that Fetterman is remotely perfect) and none of them are young.

So we’re still missing some ingredients. Let’s move onto the Vice Chair slate and see whether the spice blend here might add some flavor to the chalky, whitebread leadership we have at the top.

Latino voters got to unwrap Artie Blanco, a longtime organizer and labor activist with experience recruiting Latino voters for the Democratic party. So far so good. Blanco knows her business, and won’t require any on-the-job training. LBGT Democrats got two VCs, as did black Democrats, with one VC, Malcolm Kenyatta, ticking both boxes. Women got half the slots, which is required by the rules. And for the Big Money people, Chris Korge is staying on as Treasurer. Korge is a longtime fundraiser and professional Shady Rich Dude (he was accused of bribery, though never charged, by the former, once-incarcerated mayor of Miami, Alex Daoud). Like the top dogs, Korge is neither young nor is he a salt-of-the-earth type.

So. Blacks, Latinos, gays, women…who’s missing? Oh that’s right, young men! Guys with no fixed political home, limited interest in party politics, and the group that swung the election to Donald Trump. What gift did they get to unwrap? Who gets to be their token Vice Chair?

Put your hands together for…David Hogg?

Now look. I have no problem with this kid. He was one of the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting, one of the deadliest in American history, and has since impressively leveraged that piece of his history to become a high profile gun control activist and notable up-and-comer in professional Dem circles. Good for him. For real, I harbor no ill will.

But my generally favorable opinion of Hogg aside, he was not the right pick for Vice Chair this time. And his ascension is a crystal clear signal that the Democratic infrastructure still fundamentally doesn’t understand why they’re underperforming with guys Hogg’s age, or how they can hope to reach the voters they’re losing.

Hogg is a desk calendar on Christmas morning. He’s charcoal gray socks. He’s the book of early 20th century poetry your dad got you instead of the fucking Hardy Boys book you fucking asked him for.

Hogg is exactly the kind of kid professional Democrats think other kids his age should idolize, mostly because they idolize him. He’s the gift the young guys needed, and to the folks who picked him, it’s unimportant whether he’s the gift any of them wanted.

The Democratic party’s engine is an elite, coastally-educated class of activist keyboard warriors and HR marms for whom somebody like David Hogg is an absolute dreamboat. He’s who they want their own kids to either marry or, ideally, become. And he has, by their reckoning, an unimpeachable personal narrative because he possesses the one thing contemporary libs value above all else: experience being personally victimized by the very evil he’s fighting.

But none of these factors amount to his having been a good pick, and I will now offer three reasons why this is so.

First though, I want to identify a favored explanation that I do not find compelling. I want to address an anti-Hogg talking point that I think doesn’t explain why his elevation isn’t ideal. That being: he’s just too liberal. Too far to the left. I see the logic, but this isn’t the problem.

Yes, Hogg is very progressive, and espouses some positions - “abolish ICE!” - that are popular with online activists and basically nobody else. But I don’t think that's the liability it used to be. Having a coalition that includes people who believe unpopular, dead-in-the-water things isn’t a problem unless the party hands total control of the message to them (as we just saw happen with the Democrats’ 10-year bout of identity fever). We don’t need to purge the party of lefty types, we just need to be able to say no to them when they’re tugging us in unpopular directions.

Actually, a true embrace of left-wing economic populism might end up being a winner. We won’t know until we try it, of course, but Bernie Sanders was a crotchety dinosaur who was regarded as mostly a joke by party leadership. Then he almost won the Democratic nomination. Twice. By bringing in voters no Democrat before or since has been able to energize. So I don’t put a lot of stock in takes by centrist scolds like Jon Chait who think the party just needs to go back to straddling the middle and not bothering anyone.

Instead, I think the problems with Hogg are:

1. He’s a lightning rod

2. His signature issue isn’t a winner with the groups he needs to sway

3. He’s played out

One at a time now:

The Right Hates This Guy

David Hogg is what you might call an untouchable. Or at least, that’s how his patrons view him. Liberals have a long history of running this play, and the fact that it rarely (if ever) works never seems to dissuade them from trying it again.

Hogg’s effectiveness is supposed to stem from the fact that his detractors can’t criticize him without looking like ghouls: “You’re going to tell a kid - a kid - who survived a traumatic brush with gun violence that he’s wrong about gun control? What kind of monster are you???”

Similar examples of this play being run were the elevation of the 9/11 widows, gold star parents, and climate activist Greta Thunberg. The strategy is effective to a point. It does indeed bait some on the right to issue ugly attacks which does indeed energize some voters on the left.

But voters who are already on the left aren’t the voters we need to be energizing right now, and they’re not the voters David Hogg was ostensibly tapped to reach. Whatever energy Dems get from elevating these folks and watching the right treat them indelicately, the right gets twice that energy from raging out at them. Conservatives hate it when we do this. Rather than walk on eggshells, a more common approach these days is for them to say, ‘fuck it, we don’t care,’ and just let the hate flow freely.

David Hogg is despised by the right. Much more than he’s loved by the left. It used to be a reasonable bet that young voters were mostly left-leaning, and that the name of the game was just getting them off their butts and to the polls. If that paradigm is the correct one, David Hogg is a great pick. Here’s a fresh, nice-looking kid who’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes in, and might get other kids his age - naturally, most of whom will be latent lefties - to rise up and take hold of their futures. The trouble is, there’s no reason to think that paradigm is still useful, and every reason to think it isn’t.

The voters we lost in this past election are voters who (obviously) are not repulsed by right wing sensibilities. We didn’t lose because the kids stayed home. We lost because they voted for the other guy! Even the ones that openly hated the other guy!

From NBC:

“First-time voters broke for Trump, 54%-45%. That was a huge reversal from four years ago, when new voters strongly favored Biden, 64%-32%.

So-called double haters — voters who said they had unfavorable views of both candidates — heavily supported Trump over Harris, 55%-32%. That was a repeat of Trump’s strength among those voters four years ago, when he beat Biden in the group by 52%-35%, as well as four years before that, when it helped power his first presidential win.”

These are not conditions under which you deploy your poll-tested activists to sing their same songs. Their target listeners are already covering their ears.

Gun Control Isn’t A Silver Bullet, So To Speak…

Another problem: Democrats keep misspeaking when they talk about the youth vote. Ken Martin did it right there in the quote I copied above. The problem isn’t that young people are turning away from Democrats, it’s that young men are.

Hogg is primarily a gun control activist. And it’s well-documented that young people are, on the whole, much more sympathetic to proposed gun control measures than are older voters. But despite Democratic activists and message leaders latching onto that narrative with both claws, it only tells a partial story. Can you guess what it leaves out?

Probably, by this point, you can:

“The Hamilton Youth and Guns Poll revealed a substantial gender gap in gun attitudes among high school students. Strong majorities of both males and females support key gun control and gun safety proposals. But females are 27 percent more likely than males to favor "stricter" gun laws in general; 21 percent more likely to support all four basic gun control proposals; 11 percent more likely to support all three gun safety measures; and, judging from their expressed willingness to participate in pro-gun control activities, 22 percent more likely to become activists.”

If we flatten “youth vote” to mean just “anyone under 25,” then sure, let’s put the gun control kid front and center. But if it’s really just men we’re trying to reach - and it damn well should be, since young woman are still mostly on the train - then it may not be such a good idea to center an issue to which the guys have little apparent connection.

The Democrats’ failure to correctly identify the problem they’re facing right now is insanely self-destructive. There might be any number of young men willing to get behind sensible gun control measures, but a bunch of these dudes just voted Republican. I think it’s fair to say that even if a few of them might give a thumbs up to some Dem proposals, gun control isn’t a top flight issue for them. Our trying to lure them back under the tent with gun control is like trying to get a bunch of Mormons to come to your dinner party by bragging about how good the wine’s going to be.

If His Schtick Worked, It Would Be Working

It’s weird to accuse a 24-year-old of being past his prime, but that’s kind of true in David Hogg’s case. He’s been around since he was a teenager, his act is still mostly the same, and precisely because of how much Democrats wanted him to be their youth-whisperer, the guy has a massive public profile - one far bigger than any of the other new Vice Chairs, or even the new Chairman. He is not an unknown quantity.

Hogg has 1 million followers on X - no mean feat. And he’s a member of a class of party-approved-and-paid-for (probably) influencers whose messaging is so out of touch, even with the party’s rank-and-file, that the whole club has become a kind of running joke.

Example: most of these mouthpieces (though not Hogg, I don’t think) were invited to a White House party back in December, after which they all posted photos of themselves with Hunter Biden and crowed about what a great guy he was. Definitely, totally, 100% organic. No choreographed whitewash here at all. For sure these are all independent thinkers whose fawning adoration for Uncle Joe and his offspring have just happened to net them astronomical follower counts and clout within the party. Others in this bunch are Brooklyn Dad, JoJo from Jerz, Harry Sisson, Olivia Julianna, and many, many more.

There’s nothing I find especially offensive about any of these characters beyond the insult their existence deals to my intelligence. The pretense that they are anything other than bought-and-paid-for flunkies (paid for either with clout or with good, old-fashioned greenbacks) is actually comical in its wrongness. These accounts were super easy to spot during the election season, because the tone of their posts was always so discordant with wider Dem sentiment. It was not hard to work out which social media lefties were speaking from the heart and which were on the teat.

The pervasive attitude among Dems this past cycle was a kind of wary resignation to how fucked we all were. On X, we were the barstool drunks just trying to forget about the day, and occasionally complaining loudly to whoever would listen about the latest campaign misstep, or missed chance, or obvious lie about Biden’s fitness to helm the ticket.

And then you had these sprightly little nerd-babies, chirping incessantly about some White House announcement or another that nobody else was talking about and that wasn’t in the news.

So you’d get:

“Ugh, Biden’s looking old. How the hell did they let this guy run again?”

“This race is falling apart, and we have nobody waiting in the wings. We’re sunk.”

“Trump isn’t face planting the way we thought. This isn’t going well.”

And then:

“OMG, just look at the quarterly jobs report! Soooo uh-mazing! Thank God for President Joe Biden, the best president and greatest guy ever!”

It always felt like arriving carsick to summer camp and having some over-caffeinated counsellor bounce up and down in your face and try to make you put on a stupid hat and do the chicken dance. Just insufferable.

That’s David Hogg. He’s in that mold.

And while nebulous, this problem may be more damning of Hogg than anything else: he comes across as an inauthentic, professional class causehead. Yeah, he’s young. But he’s an agent of the Old Guard, and a damn obvious one at that. Most of the kids who voted Republican in November do not have 1 million X followers. They don’t have a piece of the DNC ad-buy, are not tapped to speak at conferences and roundtables and town halls all over the country, and they do not enjoy access to the people walking the actual corridors of power in Washington. David Hogg has about as much in common with them as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, or Joe Biden do, and they all know it.

If David Hogg is a capable party player, then by all means, let him play. But a famous insider is not going to be the guy to win back disaffected young men, and that’s more important right now then supporting the career of a young leader. Whatever potential he had to pull young voters over to the Dem side, it’s surely been expended by now. And his script has already been emphatically rejected by the very people he’s supposed to be able to get back for us.

I have written before about the terminal prognosis for the Democrats’ problem with men. This episode does nothing to sway me. They simply do not understand who they are trying to reach, how to reach them, or why their attempts at outreach aren’t already doing the trick. And if losing a second race to Donald Trump isn’t going to wake them up and send them looking for fresh perspectives, what the hell is?

Hogg isn’t the only problem, by the way. The DNC election event itself featured any number of other indicators that the needed course change will not be undertaken anytime soon. We were treated to tired “land acknowledgements;” noisy interruptions by protesters, followed (of course) by their coddling; impromptu spirituals in lieu of serious answers to questions; a public litmus test ensuring that no contender doubted that beautiful, perfect Kamala Harris was only robbed of her deserved victory due to misogyny and racism (rest assured, they all passed), and a protracted discussion of the ways in which DNC Vice Chair quotas regarding gender might be interpreted to account for non-binary individuals seeking those roles. Given the presumably enormous swath of voters who stayed home on election day over concerns that non-binary party Vice Chairs might be wrongly counted towards quota fulfillment, it’s a huge relief that this issue was given its due attention.

Ball-breaking aside, a consensus formed among high level Dems after the election that the party needed a “bro-whisperer.” Somebody to sell young men on the merits of liberalism and arrest the trend of their joining the ranks of the right. Somebody like…Joe Rogan! Yeah, that was it! The left needed its own Joe Rogan!

I feel obligated to point out here that the left had its own Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan.

What happened? How did Bernie-supporting, pot-smoking, tattoo-wearing Joe Rogan become a major Trump supporter and key figure of the political right? And how did he take his army of young, male listeners with him? That’s probably a topic for another post but it might have had something to do with, oh I dunno, the entire Democratic establishment telling him and everyone like him to go fuck themselves?

Young men, all things considered, are not that complicated. None of this is rocket science. Most of them just want back what they know men had before their moms and schoolteachers took it away. They want to fight, and tumble, and swear, and joke about boobs and farts, and have muscles, and smoke pot, and drink beer, and hunt, and joke about boobs and farts while they’re doing it. They want to be heroes, not followers. They want to stand up, not “take a seat.” Some of them want guns, some of them want cigars, some of them want video games, some of them want cute girls (or boys) and the ability to flirt with them. Some of them want to be able to say “r*tard” and “that’s g*y” without it triggering an inquisition - distasteful, I know, but there you have it. Some of them just want ESPN. And to not be bothered and perpetually judged.

Is it a little insane to determine party affiliation because of this stuff? Yeah, probably it is. And men can certainly be gross and unpleasant at times. But what young men did in this last election was no more insane than our telling them we didn’t want their help until they purified. That was suicidally nuts.

The prudes and hall monitors that took over the Democratic Party made it the most renegade, heavy metal, James Dean, badass, NavySEAL thing you could possibly do in this world to basically just act like a dumbass kid on the playground circa 1992.

Speaking as somebody who was one of those dumbass kids on the playground circa 1992, I can assure you, we were not worth trading the entire economic agenda of the left to stop. We were not that scary and not that dangerous. There was no reason to fold making us clean up our act into any political project, and there certainly wasn’t any reason to block our access to any political project until we cleaned up. The left clung to this, the right didn’t, and that was the ballgame in November.

Democrats can either paint young men as toxic, icky, incel losers or they can attract their votes. They really can’t do both. David Hogg’s elevation to Vice Chair of the party is an indication that they are not ready to seriously contend with this choice. If young men were listening to the David Hoggs of the world, they’d already be voting for the Democrats. It’s not like Hogg & co. have been in hiding. But young men are not listening to them, and yet Hogg was the only bone thrown their way this weekend. He’s all the party is ready to offer: a scheduled, supervised play date with the Good Kid.

I don’t know who the left’s next “bro-whisperer” is going to be. But I know pretty confidently who it won’t be, and that’s the guy they just picked to be it.