IIn the months leading up to Election Day, pollsters focused on a particular demographic: young people. This group, often elusive in political data, showed a marked tilt toward Donald Trump and signs of a shift away from the progressive views of young women.
Traditionally a policy geek, Richard Reeves has become an unexpected media mainstay this election cycle, sought after by those seeking to decipher the concerns and motivations of Gen Z male voters. Reeves is the president of the American Association for Boys and Men, which he founded in 2023 to create research-based approaches to improve men’s education, mental health, work and family lives. Many of the institute’s policy proposals are outlined in Reeves’ 2022 book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Strugging, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
Before the election, Reeves told the Guardian he was critical of the Democratic Party’s inability to talk directly to men about its policy platform. He pointed to declining educational outcomes due to fewer men graduating from college and worsening standardized test scores. He also spoke about the group’s worsening mental health, loneliness and suicide crisis, and Democrats’ lack of appetite to directly address them. Now that Trump has won significant support from American men and declared victory, he says he can understand why so many chose to vote Republican.
The day after the election, I spoke with Reeves to get his take on the results and what he uncovered about this misunderstood voting bloc.
Post-election exit polls are notoriously inaccurate. But based on early data, do you think young people played a big role in this election?
I guess we’ll have to wait and see before quoting specific numbers, but I think we can say that gender certainly played a big role in this election, but not as much as we expected. It was.
If you ever had a ticket to talk to a man, for the love of God, it was this
It was expected that there would be a break for Trump among men overall, and a break for Kamala Harris among women overall. However, only half of this actually happened. Trump outperformed among young men, while Harris underperformed among young women. That’s a surprise. Initially, it was expected that the election would be about women and women’s issues, but I think it ended up being an election about men. My former colleague Elaine Kamarck, now at the Brookings Institution, told NPR that abortion was not as big of an issue as people thought. It’s not that women don’t care about it. It wasn’t that noticeable.
When we spoke a few months ago, you made a point about the way the Democratic Party speaks to men and women. The Democratic Party seems to have gone in the opposite direction – they have shown that they are indeed the party of women.
correct. And not only do I think it was a gamble that didn’t pay off, I think it was an unnecessary gamble. This was an opportunity. The Harris-Waltz campaign may have been heavily biased toward male-oriented policy issues and presentations. When a woman is at the top, no one thinks she is a secret misogynist. Thanks to Walz, we have the first public school teacher to run for high office, and that teacher is also a coach. So, for the love of God, if there was ever a ticket to talking to men, this was it.
They could have gone into it with some pretty substantial ideas. Use zip instead. Even my progressive feminist friends looked at the DNC and said, “Is there anything in there for men?” The RNC, on the other hand, was a carnival of masculinity. Republicans then put a welcome mat for men and said, “We get you, we’re cool that you’re a man, we like men, Democrats hate you.” They think you’re the problem.
Without a proper Democratic response to that, I think Harris would have simply conceded.
So do you think it was inevitable that Harris would actively lose the youth vote?
I don’t think you can get votes unless you fight for them. And Democrats didn’t fight too hard to win the youth vote. But they could have said: “There are a lot of progressive young women who are concerned about the mental health of their boyfriends and siblings. There are so many women out there.”
Democrats have withdrawn from the discussion about men.
Instead, at their last gasp, they began telling the men: Or maybe the reason you don’t vote for us is because you’re secretly a little sexist? ” The attempt to shame, guilt-trip, and scare men into voting Democratic failed spectacularly.
In the end, Democrats did not perform well enough among women to offset the gains Republicans made among men. It turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.
Republicans, on the other hand, successfully stoked the anger. There was an advertisement telling men: “You did everything right in life, went to college, got a job, and now Democrats and women are trying to hold you back.”
The zero-sum framework surrounding this issue is a major problem for both sides. On the Democratic side, it led to political failure. They withdrew from discussions about men. Because their zero-sum framework meant that they could not address boys’ and men’s issues and still be taken seriously as a women’s party.
The Republican zero-sum framework, on the other hand, was, “You’re struggling, and we know who’s to blame.” We have people to point to: women and Democrats. The reason it’s a politically successful sentiment is because their problems are real and have been ignored for so long that they can actually turn into grievances, and then that grievance can be weaponized. .
So Republicans thrived on the idea that women’s success came at the expense of men.
In reality, it’s not zero-sum. Just because women are thriving doesn’t mean men are struggling. But it was allowed to become a more effective political strategy, if for no other reason. What men heard from the right was, “You have a problem, and we don’t have a solution.” What they hear from the left is, “You guys don’t have the problem, you guys have the problem.” And it’s not really surprising to me that between those two options, more men chose the Republican Party.
The Republican Party also appears to have succeeded in neutralizing President Trump among young people.
One of the ways they did that was through new media and podcasts. Trump went on a bizarre rant (on The Joe Rogan Experience), and you can tell he gets it. Sure, he has some weird views on things, but he never came across as a hateful person. The Democrats’ arguments about how bad Trump is didn’t resonate with the men who just watched Trump do the podcast.
[Journalist and podcaster]Ezra Klein talks about Trump’s lack of inhibition and how it’s both his strength and weakness. I think for quite a few men, just injecting a little bit of humor, a little bit of sarcasm, just making it a little less serious, lowering the stakes a little bit, all of that helped humanize him.
Why didn’t Harris go to Logan? Why wouldn’t she? It’s literally the biggest platform in the world. She would have seemed real and human. That’s not to say it changed the outcome of the election, but it’s a sign of the Democratic Party’s attitude.
Your institute has many policy proposals for the improvement of boys and men. What do you think about the chances of moving these forward in the context of a Republican president and a Republican Senate?
If you conclude that it’s because the Democratic Party had a female candidate, that would be the wrong conclusion. empirically
Well, I think Trump needs to contribute for men now because men have contributed for Trump. The question is: Will the CDC actually take male suicide rates seriously and recognize the gender differences in suicide?
A very strange question for you is what will happen to the White House Gender Policy Council? Now, I may be one of the few people asking that question today, but I have criticized the Gender Policy Council for being one-sided. It’s easy to imagine that Trump and his allies would abolish it as a kind of woke relic of the Biden-Harris era. What I want them to do is to re-examine gender issues so that they can be considered from both sides.
What about more specific policies? What do you expect from Mr. Trump?
One of the big questions is whether Mr. Trump actually gets serious about apprenticeships, but to be fair, he did a little in his first term. Passing the Apprenticeship Bill and redirecting some of the money currently being spent on elite higher education to apprenticeships, trade schools and trade schools would be great for boys and men alike.
What should Democrats learn from this?
The danger is that they are simply saying that all these men have become sexists, seduced by misogyny. The danger is that Democrats believe they need to step up their attacks on patriarchy and toxic masculinity. That would be disastrous.
Instead, they should show young men that they are aiming higher for themselves. Instead of endlessly debating student loan cancellation, an unpopular policy among men, we should be talking more about trade schools and manufacturing jobs. I hope they conclude that they need to win back men by explicitly marketing them, rather than recruiting them as allies to the women’s cause, but this will not be until they destroy It’s a political theory that has just been tested.
I think they, too, will come to the conclusion that they cannot run a female candidate for a long period of time.
I really, really, really hope they don’t draw that conclusion.
There’s a reason the General Social Survey stopped asking questions about women candidates in 2010. The approval rating is 96%, and even higher among young men. I think it’s possible that these men are secretly sexist and racist and won’t tell the pollsters, but that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and we I don’t know.
If you conclude that it’s because the Democratic Party had a female candidate, that would be the wrong conclusion. Empirically. It would insult the male voters they need, and it would probably hamper the careers of women politicians for a long time.
This interview has been condensed for clarity
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
