Rosie Gray, a former reporter for BuzzFeed News and the Atlantic, is the author of the forthcoming book “Here Are the Young Men.”
President Donald Trump won young male voters by considerable margins in 2024, and since then has continued trying to appeal to their tastes and resentments. But as pollsters have warned for months, the midterm results indicate that young men have already abandoned the president’s party. The shift reflects an overall misjudgment: Trump and the Republicans overestimated this demographic’s ideological commitment to culture war issues, and underestimated its alienation.
When Trump won over half of male voters between 18 and 29 in 2024 after losing this cohort in 2020, it seemed to be the result of a clever media strategy that emphasized masculinity. Trump sat for interviews with “manosphere” podcasters such as Joe Rogan and male Gen Z content creators. He joined TikTok. He attended Ultimate Fighting Championship events. As a running mate, Trump chose a then-39-year-old JD Vance. The moves seemed to pay off. On that election night, UFC president Dana White took the stage at Trump’s victory party and thanked “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan” for Trump’s win.
Once he was in office, the gestures continued: Trump hosted a UFC event at the White House and Vance urged the Conservative Political Action Conference audience in 2025 to not “allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive.” MAGA media figures emphasized male grievances against supposed feminist excesses. Federal agencies posted memes and referenced “looksmaxxing” slang on their social media accounts. But these were no more than gestures, and young men weren’t placated for long.
It turned out that reversing “woke” culture and reclaiming traditional masculinity weren’t enough for a demographic that was struggling to stay afloat in a difficult economy and strongly opposed Trump’s unpopular war with Iran. Not enough, anyway, to get them to the polls for the GOP a second time. Exit polling indicates that about 65 percent of young male voters voted for Democrats. Trump won young White men by a commanding 28 points in 2024; this election, they favored Democrats by 20 points, according to exit polls. It’s not clear how much of this shift is attributable to young men staying home, rather than changing their vote. But in any case, they didn’t stick with Republicans.
What Republicans failed to realize is that this is a group that is increasingly checked out from institutional politics, full stop. Trump presented himself as a lifeline for young men while they struggled to navigate a challenging job market amid changing social mores and gender roles. Two years later, jobs in male-dominated industries have continued to dry up, and men continue to lag behind women in educational attainment. Young men have been clear about what they’d like to see from politicians, consistently telling pollsters that their top concerns are economic. They’re worried about inflation, housing costs and employment.
If a turning point where Trump definitively lost his touch among young men can be identified, it appears to be the Iran war. Influential voices among right-wing Gen Z males broke with Trump over the war. White nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, who was already growing disillusioned with the administration, became so disgusted with the president that he encouraged his followers to vote for Democrats this cycle. Young men are far from the only Americans to disapprove of the war, but it holds special pertinence for them. The implementation of automatic military draft registration for men under 26, slated for December, is a reminder of the particular sacrifice they could be called to make.
And they are increasingly exhausted with the constant barrage of politics. This apathy is reflected in media content aimed at men. Some of the media figures who were a part of Trump’s male-focused communication strategy in 2024 have either backed away or turned on him. Rogan has been a frequent critic of the Iran war. The streamer Adin Ross, who interviewed Trump in 2024 and gave him a Cybertruck and a Rolex, said last year that he regrets ever getting involved in politics. Other popular Gen Z influencers disdain politics overall as a useless distraction.
None of this means that the cultural issues that 2024 brought to light aren’t important. Regressive ideas about dating and gender roles, for example, have become a major theme in Gen Z discourse. There is clearly a widespread sense of disillusionment among young men that should not be ignored, whether or not it translates to electoral politics. And Democrats would be too hasty to conclude, based on this election, that they’ve recaptured young men, whose support seems to be soft in either direction. But what is evident from these results is that, while it might result in a standing ovation outside the UFC cage, masculinity politics isn’t enough for a long-term electoral strategy.
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