Much of the analysis of the 2024 election focused on Democratic losses among working-class minorities, especially Hispanic and Black voters. But the dominant theme of the contest was, in fact, the broader shift of men of all races and ethnicities to the Republican Party.
If men had supported Kamala Harris at the same level as women, Harris would have won the popular vote and possibly the Electoral College. Donald Trump beat her by 2.28 million votes, in an election that saw the male vote for the Democratic presidential nominee fall by 3.54 million from 2020 to 2024 and the female vote fall by just over 844,000.
The Democratic Party lost ground in the 2024 election among almost all demographic groups — white people, Black people, Latinos, the young, rural and exurban voters, but all the defections had one thing in common: Democratic losses were significantly greater among men than women.
These developments are well documented in two extensive election analyses by organizations that offer some of the best demographic studies of voting patterns: “What Happened in 2024” by Catalist, a liberal voter study firm and “Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition” by Pew Research.
Catalist found that in 2024 Harris, the second woman to run for president as the Democratic nominee, received just one percent less in support than Joe Biden did in 2020 from white women, while Harris’s backing from white men fell by four percentage points. Among Black voters, Harris saw a 1-point drop among women, and an 8-point decline among Black men; among Latinos, Harris lost 7 points among women, 12 points among men.
Catalist summarized its findings on the differences between the partisan shifts of men and women:
The partisan gender gap remains high and grew in 2024. Women have long been more likely to support Democrats than men do. The gender gap in partisan preferences increased in 2024: women continued to support Harris (55 percent support) at roughly the same levels that they supported Biden in 2020 (56 percent). But men moved toward Trump in 2024, from 48 percent support for Biden in 2020 to 42 percent support for Harris in 2024.
The most severe declines in Democratic voting, according to Catalist, “were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support for Democrats, from 2020 to 2024 among young Black men dropped from 85 percent to 75 percent and support among young Latino men dropped from 63 percent to 47 percent.”
Unless the trends described in the two reports are reversed, the Democratic Party’s future looks, well, bleak.
Instead of the near parity between the two parties that has characterized presidential elections from 2000 to 2020, the default advantage is shifting to the Republican Party. All things being equal, it is more likely to be the winner.
As significant, the Democratic Party, the party of diversity and minority representation during the Obama years, faces the prospect of becoming increasingly white just as whites are declining as a share of the population.
This process has already begun: From 2016 to 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, the white share of Democratic presidential voters grew from 60 to 64 percent, after decades of white decline as the share of Black, Hispanic and other minorities has grown steadily in both the electorate as whole and as a share of Democratic voters.
In contrast, the share of voters for Trump who are white has fallen from 88 percent in 2016 to 78 percent in 2024.
While increasing numbers of voters have become disenchanted with Trump, their discontent has not translated into substantial improvement in the negative ratings of the Democratic Party among men.
In a Jan. 29 Quinnipiac Poll, early in Trump’s second term, voters were asked whether they viewed the Democratic Party favorably or unfavorably. Men were unfavorable by 67-22. Five months later, the Marquette Law School Poll conducted June 13-19 asked the same question and the share of men with unfavorable views of the Democrats rose one point to 68 percent, while the favorable share rose modestly to 29 percent.
Margaret Talev, director of the Syracuse University Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship, who has been conducting studies of how different constituencies voted in the 2024 election, replied by email to my inquiries.
Voters, Talev argued,
want to belong. If you want someone’s vote, you should ask for it. When it came to men, Trump did. He celebrated hypermasculinity, and his message to men of all races and ethnicities was essentially, “Democrats don’t understand you or want to help you, but I do and I will.” Harris and Trump won’t be on the ballot again, but the trouble for Democrats is that the effect seems to have lasted beyond the election.
Some liberals are clearly worried about these trends.
Richard Reeves, the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, writing by email, was explicit in his critique of the Democratic Party. I asked him why more men than women shifted to voting for Trump in 2024.
“Because,” Reeves replied, “the Democrats effectively ran as the Women’s Party.”
To back up his claim, Reeves cited a March 2024 article in The Hill by Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, “This Is Not James Carville’s 1992 Democratic Party.”
In the article, Greenberg asserted:
The Democratic Party is the women’s party. Sixty percent of self-identified Democrats are women. The base of the Democratic Party, its most loyal voters, are women of color. Ninety-two percent of Black women, 65 percent of Latinas and 69 percent of AAPI women voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
Democrats and progressive institutions, Reeves argued,
have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen not as having problems but as being the problem.
The language of “toxic masculinity,” “patriarchy,” and “mansplaining” from the political left has not been greatly appealing to men who are struggling to find their feet in the economy. Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise. As Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, writes, “No one wants to be a part of a movement that ignores or even denigrates them.”
In her Nov. 8, 2024 post-election analysis, “To Elect a Woman President, We Need Men,” Saujani argues:
We can’t rally our girlfriends to the polls every four years and expect to win — it’s a losing strategy to ignore half the electorate. If we’re serious about defending women’s opportunities in this country, then we’re going to have to do the last thing in the world we ever expected to do: start talking about men’s opportunities.
The reality, Saujani writes, “is that we can’t build the democracy we need to achieve any of that without men. And right now, we’re shutting them down and pushing them away.”
Polling by PRRI (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute) found that the percentage of men who believe “society has become too soft and feminine” rose slightly from 50 percent in 2016 to 52 percent in 2024 among men and from 34 to 38 percent among women. Republican men and women drove the shift.
Public Opinion Strategies, which conducts polling for NBC, provided The Times with data showing that from 2016 to 2024, party identification among men aged 18-to-49 shifted from plus 3 points Democratic, 39-36, to plus 10 points Republican, 44-34. Party identification among men 50 and older shifted from plus 10 points Republican (46-36) in 2016 to plus 22 points Republican (53-31) in 2024.
In contrast, women 18-49 remained firmly Democratic, 53-29 in 2016 and 54-29 in 2024.
One of the intriguing characteristics of the partisan gender gap, especially among young voters, is that it is driven as much or more by psychological and emotional issues than it is by disagreement over policy.
Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is director of the Survey Center on American Life, wrote by email:
There is not much evidence that young men are becoming more conservative, at least as it is measured in self-reported ideology questions. On plenty of issues, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and the role of government, young men are still to the left of the American public overall.
Rather, Cox argued,
Part of what’s happened is that more young men have come to believe that the Democratic Party has abandoned traditional economic concerns and transformed into a vehicle for advancing the cultural priorities of elite constituencies.
They don’t see the Democratic Party as representing their interests or concerns. The abortion issue is a prime example. Most men believe abortion should be legal in at least some instances, but few say it is a priority for them.
In a May 2024 essay, “Have the Democrats Given Up on Men?” Cox wrote:
An electoral strategy focused mostly if not exclusively on the challenges women face entails significant risk. A new poll conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics tracked a substantial slide in Democratic identity among young men. In the latest poll, the partisan attachments of young men are split — roughly as many identify as Republican (29 percent) as Democrat (32 percent). This is an extraordinary turnabout. Five years earlier, IOP polling found that young men were more than twice as likely to identify as Democratic as Republican (42 percent vs. 20 percent).
Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, argued that the partisan divisions between men and women are changing in ways that threaten the future of the Democratic Party.
“The gender gap,” Kessler wrote by email,
has been a longtime fixture in elections, but in the past it was seen as an advantage for Democrats. It is a disadvantage now. In the past, Democrats typically scored well enough with women on social issues like abortion and kitchen table issues like child care to offset narrow losses with men. Women make up a larger share of the electorate, typically 52 to 53 percent, which gave Democrats an added bump.
But Democrats’ advantages with women have stalled and support among men has declined, particularly non-college educated men of all races. This is an untenable formula for Democrats and it is why Harris won 18 of the 20 states (including D.C.) that had the highest levels of college degree attainment but only 2 states among the bottom 31 in college degree attainment.
Kessler was particularly critical of Democratic campaign rhetoric:
There is no doubt the social issues that Democrats champion and the language they use to advocate for them are driving enough men away to lose elections. The language we use is haughty and elitist. People feel they need to walk on eggshells to discuss topics fraught with nuance. Men are considered privileged and advantaged.
We recently conducted focus groups with non-college educated men and they confirmed Democrats’ deep hole with men. They saw Republicans as the party that respected men and Democrats as the party that criticized them. The term “toxic masculinity” was something a Democrat would say and not a Republican. They felt wokeism and cancel culture was aimed at them.
Said one participant: “I think being a masculine leader, is like, outlawed in the Democratic Party right now.” Many were sympathetic enough on the cultural issues like transgender rights but felt that nothing was good enough for Democrats and that was all we cared about.
Democrats, Kessler contended,
have had a longstanding trust gap on economic issues, seen by voters in our 2024 polling as favoring handouts over hard work. We are not seen as the party of aspiration and success. In this past election, however, voters in our 2025 focus groups couldn’t even discern what our economic positions were because they were overshadowed by the culture debate.
They noted how much harder it is to make a living today and that it was better to be a woman than a man when looking for a job. It wasn’t that they opposed what Democrats were offering on the economy more that they had no idea what Democrats stood for. They believed Democrats cared more about social issues than the economy.
Kessler’s point touches on another more subtle source of difficulty Democrats face in trying to win the support of men: Over the past decade, many liberal and progressive women, especially young women, have developed an outlook on the world that some men find discomfiting.
In an lengthy, data-driven report published by the Manhattan Institute in April, “Mental-Health Trends and the ‘Great Awokening,’ ” Zach Goldberg, a research faculty member at Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics, found that
Females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.
Goldberg reports a growing sense among young liberal women of ineffectiveness, that there are debilitating forces outside of one’s control, reflected in the rising agreement with such statements as “the future often seems hopeless,” “I feel I am no good at anything,” “I feel my life is not very useful,” and disagreement with “I take a positive attitude toward myself” and “I feel I am a person of worth.”
This and other data, Goldberg writes,
show that girls and liberals tend to score significantly higher than boys and conservatives on personality traits associated with mental-health challenges, and significantly lower on those associated with psychological resilience and stability. In other words, some of the same traits that help explain the poorer mental-health outcomes of girls relative to boys may also be relevant to explaining the poorer mental-health outcomes of liberals relative to conservatives. In fact, this vulnerability in girls may be tied, at least in part, to their disproportionate alignment with liberal/left-wing ideological orientations.
In an email, Goldberg wrote that the Trump presidency has played a role in the acceleration of these trends, noting that “There’s pretty strong suggestive evidence that Trump contributed to increased anxiety and depression on the left, particularly among younger liberals and especially women.”
These trends, Goldberg continued,
have coincided with sharp increases in self-reported psychological distress among liberal young people, especially young women, and especially those most attuned to identity-related social issues. Many interpreted Trump’s presidency as a threat not just politically, but morally and existentially — almost a negation of assumed progress. That perception was reinforced by media coverage that emphasized systemic oppression, deteriorating institutions, and hopelessness about the future. Even now, liberal young people are much more likely than their conservative peers to believe that systemic barriers make success unlikely for people like them.
In this context, Goldberg argued,
Trump was a trigger, but he also operated within a feedback loop: his rhetoric spurred alarmist media coverage, which deepened a narrative of despair, especially among liberals predisposed to view the world through a structural lens. When that narrative became internalized, it likely had real psychological consequences.
Goldberg documents trends by gender and ideology on anxiety, depression, suicide rates, incidents of intentional self-injury, declines in self-esteem and life satisfaction and increases in loneliness to provide evidence that “ ‘psychologically vulnerable’ personality profiles tend to be more prevalent among girls and liberals and that such groups thus experience more negative effects from social-media use.”
Goldberg’s findings are similar to those reported by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.
What is the larger context of all this data and analysis?
Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Democratic Party gradually — and later more assertively — assumed the role of political proponent of a range of emerging rights-based movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s rights, abortion rights, gay and transgender rights, as well as broader causes such as racial and gender equality, and the evolving claims to personal autonomy associated with the sexual revolution.
Democratic leaders supported these insurgent movements as part of a broader commitment to protecting marginalized and disadvantaged groups. They positioned the party as a defender of those confronting systemic discrimination and social exclusion amid profound cultural and societal transformations. These transformations began to destabilize the established norms and conventions that had long provided many with a sense of social stability, predictability and trust in the fabric of American life.
While many liberals and Democratic Party adherents welcomed these shifts as advances in justice and equality, significant segments of the population — particularly those rooted in more conventional familial and cultural frameworks — viewed these changes with concern or opposition.
Democrats have often refused to recognize and deal with the costs that revolutionary change in the social order has produced. The failure to address these costs has given Republicans a series of wedge issues based on race, religion and sexual identity that have split the Democratic coalition in presidential elections, including in 2024.
These divisions have become embedded in what is now a deeply polarized electorate.
For more than 60 years, Republicans have capitalized on the conflicts provoked by the rights revolutions to exacerbate and profit from schisms in the Democratic coalition, while accelerating polarization.
With each passing election cycle, the signs of political dysfunction continue to mount.
On a thermometer rating produced by American National Election Studies, ranging from zero (freezing cold) to 100 (very warm), Democratic voters’ feelings for Republicans have fallen from 48.3 (virtually neutral) in 1980 to 20.6 (hostile) in 2020. Republican voters’ feelings for Democrats have similarly become increasingly negative, dropping over the same period from 47.4 to 17.8, according to A.N.E.S. data.
A June 23-25 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 76 percent of Americans say political polarization poses “a serious threat to democracy,” including 89 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 57 percent of Republicans. Seventy-three percent worry that “politically motivated violence” will become “a major problem in the United States.”
According to a 2023 Pew report, Americans believe, by 86 to 14, that “Republicans and Democrats are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.”
In this climate, the shift of male voters away from the Democratic Party underscores a broader truth. In periods of deep polarization, it is liberalism — the ideology of government activism and intervention — and not conservatism that bears the greater cost.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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