After fueling President Donald Trump’s return to the White House two years ago, male voters shifted course in the midterm elections and helped propel Democrats to wins nationwide.
Now the question is whether Democrats can keep men voting blue.
While men have long tilted Republican, Democrats made significant gains among male voters during Tuesday’s elections, which saw the party win control of Congress as well as some state legislatures and governor’s mansions.
The overall male vote favored Democrats this midterm cycle, 51 to 46 percent, according to the NORC voter poll. Two years ago, male voters favored Trump by 55 percent to 43 percent.
The precise reasons vary for why Democrats swayed more male voters, including the young men who backed Trump in 2024, according to observers and candidates. But figuring out whether it was an aberration or the start of a shift could have significant implications for future elections.
“Young men’s votes are up for grabs,” said Richard V. Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan research group.
Reeves said men are motivated by promises that could materially improve their lives, and Democrats need to deliver on those pledges to retain their votes.
“This is neither a fluke or a trend,” Reeves said of men shifting to Democrats this cycle. “Young men did not become Republicans in 2024 and they did not become Democrats in 2026. They are swing voters.”
Much attention was paid after the 2024 election to Trump’s support from Gen Z men in particular, following his appearances at sporting events and on podcasts popular with the demographic — a campaign strategy he credited to his youngest son, Barron.
But in the 2026 midterm elections, the GOP lost the support of men alongside a broader fracture within the world of podcasters and online influencers — many in or adjacent to the so-called “manosphere” — that rallied around Trump in 2024 and brought his message to their large, male followings.
Democrats were able to hone in on a potent mix of affordability and anti-war messaging, sometimes packaged in a new brand of liberal masculinity, to loosen the Republican Party’s grip on men.
Two-time Trump voter, Mustapha El-Jaroudi, 27, voted for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race.
“He says it how it is,” El-Jaroudi said, attributing to the Democrat a characteristic that supporters have long used to describe Trump.
El-Sayed gained notoriety during the midterm campaign for his adoption of a masculine, combative bravado that has become synonymous with the GOP during the Trump era.
He called his opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, a “beta” and challenged Vice President JD Vance to a weightlifting contest while taunting him about his ability to grow a beard.
Democrats made gains among different groups of men in the midterms. White men voted 52 percent to 46 percent for Republicans, but this represented an 8 percentage point drop in Trump’s 2024 vote share from the demographic.
Young voters under 30, both male and female, moved back toward Democrats by double digits in the House election, wiping out gains Republicans made with the group in 2024.
Across social media, a series of insurgent Democratic candidates flaunted their manly bona fides, offering a seeming counterpoint to their party’s reputation for snubbing men.
Sam Forstag, who will become the first Democrat sent to the House by Montana in 30 years, rode a motorcycle and swung an ax in a campaign ad. Colorado Representative-elect Manny Rutinel posted sweaty pull-up videos from the gym to social media. And the incoming secretary of state for Indiana, Beau Bayh, pumped weights in a campaign video.
For his part, El-Sayed, who was a high school football captain, told The Post he was playing the game that Republicans created, essentially making a bet masculine rhetoric would resonate with voters in a country that valorizes strong men.
While it was not a tactic universally adopted by insurgent Democrats, some Democratic National Committee officials believed the party needed to reach out to young men following their loss in the 2024 presidential election by deploying a more reactive and combative strategy.
As a result, ahead of the midterm elections, the official X account of Democrats shared an unfortunate image of the president, which looked like he was performing a lewd and submissive act, and told Trump adviser Stephen Miller to “shut up you ugly f—.” Miller was named White House chief of staff Friday.
“Republicans are not cool. They’re not,” Hasan Piker, an influential left-wing streamer, told The Post. “It’s no longer cool to be associated with the administration and all of its failures.”
Piker, who promoted El-Sayed, became the bogeyman of the GOP’s midterm campaign.
While Democrats’ image rebrand may have somewhat helped the swing of men away from the GOP, Piker said that the nation’s overall dissatisfaction with the cost of living and the Iran war was the main driving factor. A similar conclusion was reached by Vance in his own postmortem of GOP losses.
It was inevitable, Piker said, that the podcasters and influencers “at the mercy of trends,” who once helped shore up male support for Republicans, would “move on” from the administration once its policies become unpopular.
While some, like the YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul, appeared alongside Trump at midterm rallies, others distanced themselves.
Joe Rogan, whose podcast Trump appeared on in 2024, criticized the president’s relationship with the Israeli government, suggesting it was behind his decision to strike Iran. Comedian Theo Von, who attended Trump’s inauguration, has similarly criticized the president’s foreign policy platform.
“What farmer is this helping? What regular person is this helping? I just don’t know. I don’t understand,” Von said about the Iran war on his podcast, This Past Weekend, in April.
Von did not respond to request for an interview. Rogan could not be reached.
Likewise, some young male Trump voters, including El-Jaroudi, felt that military action in Iran, and continued support for Israeli action in the Middle East, betrayed the president’s “America First” campaign promise of “no new wars.” And they blamed this for rising prices domestically.
“Trump’s a con artist,” El-Jaroudi said. The voter’s top priority this midterm cycle was “keeping taxpayer money in the U.S. instead of overseas,” he said, adding that he liked El-Sayed’s focus on the same issues.
“The excitement that young men had to vote for President Trump in 2024 was palpable,” said CJ Pearson, a conservative influencer who spent the midterm campaign attempting to get fraternity brothers to turn out to the polls. “This time less so.”
Pearson believes the incoming Democrats’ brand of masculinity had little to do with support they gained from male voters.
“I don’t think anyone will say James Talarico is who you think of when you think of the alpha male in the room,” Pearson said of Texas’s senator-elect, who was on the receiving end of a Republican strategy to paint him as insufficiently masculine.
During his campaign, Talarico framed a good man in terms of selflessness and public service.
“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.”
Pearson said El-Sayed is a “sympathizer for the sentiments about men that have plagued the Democrat Party,” which he said included a narrative of masculinity being “toxic.”
“A few candidates posting workout videos won’t be enough to keep any gains with young male voters,” Pearson said.
However, to get them to turn out for the GOP again, “Republicans have to ensure that young men have a stake in the American Dream,” Pearson said.
“We need to not allow Democrats to co-opt the entire affordability issue because, when they do, we lose,” he said.
Reeves said that in 2024, Democrats embraced terms like “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining.”
“They sent the signal that men were the problem, then wondered why they didn’t vote for them,” he said.
Reeves said Democrats, if they deliver on promises to reduce the cost of living, can win male votes again. Young men “want policies that help them,” he said, pointing to issues like jobs, apprenticeships and help buying a house.
“But, mostly, they just want not to be told that they are the problem,” he said.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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