Welcome to the 2026 midterms, a months-long contest to prove who is the manliest man. Oh, and to win control of the House and Senate.
You’ve seen the highlight reel: Abdul El-Sayed repeatedly calling his opponent a “beta.” James Talarico firing back against GOP attacks that he is “too low-T for Texas.” A sweaty Beau Bayh, running for Indiana secretary of state, pumping weights in a campaign ad — one of many candidates flaunting their physical strength to break through with voters.
Democrats are desperate to prove they’ve learned their lesson after men propelled Republicans to victory in 2024. They agree they need to talk to men again. But the chaotic midterm elections show they have very different ideas about how to do it.
Gone are the days in which traditional masculinity for Democrats was toxic. Now, it seems more like a campaign credential. The party is determined to shake off the reputation it has accrued among some voters for being woke and weak.
Meanwhile, the Republican model of masculinity that Democrats are responding to has been on full display. Sweaty, bloody men traded punches this summer in an eight-sided cage on the White House’s South Lawn. Vice President JD Vance implied Talarico is gay and creepy. President Donald Trump chimed in on the physiques of his frontline Republicans. (Apologies, Ken Paxton. Congratulations, Jon Husted.)
MAGA masculinity, a blend of entertainment and domination that Trump and his wing of the Republican Party have been offering up to American men for more than a decade, appears as influential as ever.
Sam Forstag thinks Democrats are overcomplicating things.
At a brewery this summer in downtown Bozeman, Montana, hours after the labor union convention that had brought him to town, the congressional candidate threw his hands up.
Forstag, a former smoke jumper — an elite firefighter who parachutes into wildfires — said he isn’t a fan of overly curated, consultant-calculated appeals to men.
“If you have to make a 45-minute slide deck on how to talk to normal people,” he said, “then you’ve lost the f—ing thread.”
It was warm out, so Forstag had taken off his thrifted, Carhartt-style jacket. He was wearing one of the two pairs of jeans he switches between, a satirical graphic tee and the brown leather logger boots that are almost always on his feet. He took a sip of a draft beer on the table in front of him.
Forstag is trying to flip Montana’s 1st Congressional District blue. If he wins the Republican-leaning area, he will be the first Democrat that Montana has elected to the House since 1994 — the year he was born.
As a political candidate, he believes talking about basic, material issues is the way to win men’s support — to focus on the economy, not culture wars.
But his own campaign ads and social media lean heavily on his manly image. They show Forstag using a chainsaw to cut down a tree, lighting a cigar and slinging an ax over his shoulder.
“Smoke jumpers have a saying,” he says in one video, hauling a backpack over his shoulder. “When you’re 16 hours into a shift, ask for a stronger back, not a lighter load.”
Even those who reject the masculinity contest end up competing in it.
Democrats are walking a delicate line: taking notes from Trump’s appeal to men while staying in good graces with a base in which women are the majority. The question is how much, if at all, to adopt what has worked for the right.
As much as Forstag wants to talk about the economy and not the masculinity contest unfolding in these midterms, the 32-year-old acknowledged there are bigger questions at hand.
“This is a conversation we got to have as a country, right?” Forstag said. “What does it actually mean to be a man?”
He knows it’s sophomoric. He’s fluent anyway.
This summer, El-Sayed was stepping into hostile territory. So the Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan made a peace offering.
“I just want to start where we agree,” he told conservative Fox News host Jesse Watters. “We both played football and lacrosse.”
As the two men sparred, El-Sayed, spotted another opportunity to tap into a language he knew his ideological rival would understand.
“Can we all agree that Mike Rogers is a beta?”
El-Sayed’s decision to invoke his opponent’s masculinity — on Fox News, on social media and in interviews — was no accident.
But, but, but: El-Sayed wouldn’t normally use the word “beta,” he told The Washington Post in a recent interview. (The man is a 41-year-old progressive Democrat and father who dances to Taylor Swift in the living room with his two daughters.)
So what is the doctor doing hierarchizing manhood based on the long-debunked myth of the alpha wolf? El-Sayed said he’s playing the game.
“For people who are out there thinking about who’s the alpha and who’s the beta — it’s just such a sophomoric way of thinking about the world,” he said to The Post, after repeatedly calling Republicans betas. “But that’s the world that they created.”
(Rogers’s response to El-Sayed’s attacks on social media: “Nothing screams ‘alpha’ quite like a 41-year-old desperately reminding everyone he was popular in high school.”)
While El-Sayed has been on the offensive in Michigan, Talarico has been playing defense in Texas against a Republican strategy to paint him as insufficiently masculine. Trump called him a vegan (he is not), Paxton aired the “low-T” ads and called him weak, and Vance has repeatedly taunted him.
Talarico decried the nicknames and insults. “People are tired of politics as professional wrestling,” he told Jimmy Kimmel last month. “These old guys lathered up in their fake tans throwing … corny nicknames at each other.”
His response on the campaign trail has been to recount repeatedly a story about his adoptive father, who mowed the lawn every Saturday and then, unasked, mowed the widow’s next door.
“My dad never talked about it. He just did it, because that’s what a man does,” Talarico said, adding that “real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.”
El-Sayed said his main goal in that dustup with Rogers was to show that Republicans are not really the strong men they claim to be.
“You can be strong and masculine and comfortable in your masculinity, and also … empower people, uplift people, seek self-discipline and self-control in the way that you behave,” he said. “I think that needs to be modeled, but it also means you got to explicitly call out the other version.”
In the weeks after talking with The Post, El-Sayed would suggest Vance’s beard was glued onto his face and that Vance is “juiced up” on testosterone injections. And he’d tell Trump not to “wuss out” on visiting Michigan.
El-Sayed’s bet is that the taunts resonate in a country that valorizes strong men.
“Here’s the thing about it,” he said. “Jesse Watters understood exactly what I’m saying.”
A war of aesthetics
There is a look these men are going for.
Start with a fitted shirt — chances are, a white button-down. Step into leather boots or maybe some sneakers. For rural candidates, add in a work jacket. You get extra credit for a beard, deep voice and visible forearms.
In early September, Bayh, running for Indiana secretary of state, chalked up more than a million views on a video from the gym. Dripping sweat, Bayh, 30, punctuated his promises to voters with the slam of a medicine ball.
“Sometimes you have to have visuals that pull people in,” Bayh said of his testosterone-fueled ad. It let him signal discipline and strength and highlighted his military credentials.
Aesthetics can amplify a candidate’s message, as long as their message has substance, said David Hogg, a progressive organizer who backed Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
“If [Democrats] can work out more and convince people that trans people are not the reason why their lives are terrible, or that women are not the reason why their lives are terrible — and what that takes is Jon Ossoff having … huge biceps — so be it,” Hogg said.
For those rolling their eyes at all the muscle talk, here is the harsh reality: Almost nobody in America dislikes a manly man.
In a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in July, only 5 percent of Americans said they had a mostly negative view of “men who are manly or masculine.”
But when asked what the Democratic Party thinks of manly men, 27 percent — five times as many — said the party views them negatively. (By comparison, 47 percent said the Republican Party views manly men positively.)
In other words, Democrats have acquired a reputation for snubbing masculine men. And it’s a demographic that matters: Two-thirds of American men in the survey rated themselves very or extremely masculine.
For decades, researchers have found society treats manhood differently than womanhood. Womanhood arrives. But manhood is earned. And it can be revoked — with the loss of a job, a fight, a failure of nerve.
Psychologists call the phenomenon “precarious manhood.” And its practical effect is that men who find their standing questioned often try to restore it — quickly, visibly and often far out of proportion to whatever called it into question.
Rehearsing for 2028
Gavin Newsom was among the first and loudest Democrats to say, after 2024, that his party had failed men.
The answer to the party’s struggles with men, he said in an interview with The Post, is for Democrats to show that they — not Republicans — will actually help men. In July 2025, he signed an executive order, later calling it his “man-genda,” aimed at reducing isolation, unemployment and suicide among men and boys.
Newsom, who has said he is considering running for president in 2028, said his party has to do more visibly to change its anti-male reputation. For him, that has meant doing interviews with manosphere influencers, podcasting on the plight of the modern man, and blasting Trump with all-caps insult-laden posts that would look at home on Truth Social.
It also means saying things his base may not want to hear. Overuse of the term “toxic masculinity” during the #MeToo movement caused men to “recoil,” he said.
He said the thing it describes is real, though. “Our dear supreme leader Trump himself is a manifestation of that toxicity,” Newsom said.
Wes Moore, also a likely presidential candidate in 2028, is taking another approach.
Like Newsom, he has launched initiatives aiming to support men and boys. But Moore is betting on an inspirational model of masculinity. He wants to pull men out of the manosphere instead of wading in it.
On a recent Thursday evening, the first Black man to be elected governor of Maryland stood in a Baltimore church while a line of boys and young men waited to meet him. He had just come from an event down the hall celebrating a mentorship program for them. Now, as each boy stepped up, Moore dapped him up and pulled him close.
“Young kings!” he greeted them. “I’m really proud of y’all, man.” He pointed to the T-shirts they wore with the program’s logo. “Those shirts mean something. It’s like your jersey, like your armor. It means you’re part of a bigger team.”
Moore, who played wide receiver at Johns Hopkins University, frequently turns to the vocabulary of sports in his outreach to men. His social media feeds feature him dropping into football practice at the University of Maryland, whacking baseballs in a batting cage and working the sidelines at games.
“I just think that if you actually care about the future of your society, you should care that half of it does not feel seen,” Moore told The Post.
His bet is that what men really want isn’t vengeance for lost status but to be needed. MAGA offers men an enemy. Moore says he wants to offer them a job.
Ask the men
Members of one of Montana’s labor unions had spent the day in Bozeman debating which candidates to endorse. Now, they were out in the parking lot unwinding over beer, barbecue and cornhole — mostly White, mostly middle-aged, mostly male.
Derek Hitt had driven in from Missoula. A former carpenter, he now works for the Montana AFL-CIO and said he was speaking for himself, not the union.
He leans left. But in the past decade, he said he has voted for a Democrat for president only once.
Trump’s appeal to men, Hitt said, came partly through the WWE. A lot of the guys he knows grew up watching it. “That was like our soap opera,” he said.
The muscle-flexing posts work on younger men especially, he said, because they care about being masculine and fit.
“You think that’s what’s going to land you a girlfriend,” Hitt said.
In the spring, Hitt had wanted Graham Platner — a dirt road Democrat who would fight for the working class — to run for president. Platner exited the Senate race in Maine after a woman accused him of sexual assault. Now Hitt is watching El-Sayed.
“He is actually turning the mirror back on them and showing them the ugly that they have,” he said.
“These guys say they’re macho, but they won’t stand on their principles,” he added.
Many men grow up on video games and movies that valorize the lone hero who saves the day — strength used for someone else. That, Hitt said, is what men actually want: to be of service.
Democrats “tapping into the ability to be that hero is what’s going to bring them back,” he said, “the men that have been disenfranchised.”
What it costs
A few blocks away, at the brewery, Sam Forstag — the smoke jumper trying to flip a Republican district — considered what it takes to be that hero — the one who stands his ground, whom people turn to.
Sitting with a reporter as he nursed a beer in his hand, Forstag mentioned that a few years ago one of his fire crew members died in an off-duty accident.
After the tragedy, his team sat down and took turns sharing how they were doing. Each was brief. Reserved. Then it was Forstag’s turn, and he started to cry.
Every person who spoke after him broke down, too.
Recounting the memory to The Post, his blue eyes became glassy. His voice cracked. He paused, stared at the table, sipped his beer and took a breath.
“I swear, I’ve told the story without crying before,” he said, with a strained laugh.
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