In the months leading up to Election Day, pollsters have focused their attention on one demographic group: young people. This group, often elusive in political manifestos, was showing signs of a marked shift toward Donald Trump and away from the progressive views of young women.
Traditionally a political pundit, Richard Reeves has become an unlikely media mainstay this election cycle, sought out by those trying to decipher the interests and motivations of these Gen Z male voters. Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he started in 2023 to create curricula Research-based to improve education, mental health, work and family life for men. Many of the Institute’s policy proposals are outlined in Reeves’ 2022 book Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Struggles, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
Before the election, Reeves told The Guardian that he was critical of Democrats’ inability to talk directly to men about their political platform. He pointed to poor educational outcomes with fewer men graduating from college and deteriorating standardized test scores. He also spoke about the decline in mental health, loneliness and suicide crises among this group and the unwillingness of Democrats to address them directly. Now, with Trump claiming victory with overwhelming support from American men, he says he understands why so many people chose to vote Republican.
The day after the election, I spoke with Reeves to hear his take on the results and what they reveal about this misunderstood voting bloc.
Post-election polls are notoriously inaccurate. But do you think, based on the preliminary data, that young people played a major role in these elections?
I think we need to wait and see before giving specific numbers, but I think it’s fair to say that gender played a big role in this election, just not in the way we expected.
If you’re ever going to have a ticket that can speak to men, for the love of God, it’s this one
The expectation was that we would see this disconnect toward Trump among men in general, and we would see a disconnect toward Kamala Harris among women in general. But it seems that only half of that has actually been achieved. Trump overperformed among young men, but Harris underperformed among young women. This is a surprise. I think that an election that was initially expected to be about women and women’s issues turned out to be an election about men. My former colleague Elaine Kamark, who is now at the Brookings Institution, was saying on NPR that abortion is not as big an issue as people think. It’s not that women didn’t care about him. It didn’t stand out.
When we spoke a few months ago, I raised the issue of ways Democrats can talk to men and women. Democrats seem to have gone in the opposite direction, actually presenting themselves as the party of women.
correct. Not only do I think this was a gamble that didn’t pay off, I think it was an unnecessary gamble. This was an opportunity. The Harris-Walls campaign would have leaned heavily on a pro-male agenda and policy presentation. When you have a woman at the top of the list, no one thinks she’s a misogynist. With Walz, you have the first public school teacher to run for high office, who is also a coach. I mean, if you’re ever going to have a ticket that can speak to men, for the love of God, it’s this one.
They could have gone out there with some substantive ideas. Instead, zip. Even my progressive feminist friends were watching the Democratic National Convention and saying, “Is there going to be anything for men?” Whereas the RNC was a carnival of masculinity. The Republicans put a welcome mat there for men and said, “We can see you, we’re glad you’re men, we love men, and the Democrats hate you, and they think you’re the problem.”
And in the absence of a proper Democratic response to that, I think Harris has just conceded ground.
So, don’t you think it was inevitable that Harris would lose the youth vote?
I think you won’t win votes if you don’t fight for them. Democrats have not fought hard for 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 boyfriend or brother. There are a lot of progressive women who wanted a party that supported their reproductive rights and did a better job of educating their children.”
Democrats have distanced themselves from the debate over men
Instead, in the last breath, they started telling men, “Well, if you care about the women in your life, you should vote for us. Or maybe the reason you’re not voting for us is because you’re a bit sexist? Trying to shame, guilt, or intimidate men into getting them to The vote for the Democrats was amazingly successful.
In the end, Democrats did not do well enough among women to offset the gains Republicans made among men. That turned out to be a huge miscalculation.
Meanwhile, Republicans have done a good job of stoking discontent. And they had an ad that said to men, “You did everything right in life, you went to college, you got a job, and now the Democrats and women want to hold you back.”
Zero-sum framing around the issue has been a huge problem on both sides. On the Democratic side, this led to political failure. They distanced themselves from the debate about men, because their zero-sum framework meant they were unable to address the issues of boys and men, and they were still taken seriously as a party for women.
On the other hand, the Republicans’ zero-sum formulation was: You’re struggling and we know who’s to blame. We have someone to point to: women and Democrats. The reason this feels politically successful is because these men’s problems are real, and they’ve been neglected for so long, so they’ve actually turned into grievances, and then those grievances can be weaponized.
Richard Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Photograph: Martin Argels/The Guardian
So Republicans found success in the idea that women’s success came at the expense of men.
In fact, their sum is not zero. Men don’t struggle because women thrive. But in the absence of other reasons, it allowed it to become a more effective political strategy. What the men on the right heard was: You have problems, and we don’t have solutions. What they heard from the left was: You don’t have problems, you’re the problem. Between these two choices, it is not surprising to me that more men chose the Republican option.
Republicans also appear to have succeeded in detoxifying Trump among young people.
One way they did this was through new media and podcasts. on [The Joe Rogan Experience]Trump went on these weird rants but you just felt like Trump was figuring it out. Sure he had weird views on things, but he didn’t come across as a hateful character. The Democratic side’s claims about how terrible Trump is didn’t resonate with the guys who just watched him do this podcast.
[The journalist and podcaster] Ezra Klein talks about Trump’s freedom from restrictions and this represents his strength and weakness. I think for a fair number of guys, just injecting a little bit of humor, a little bit of sarcasm, taking some of the seriousness down, lowering the stakes, all of that helped humanize it.
Why didn’t Harris go to Rogan? Why don’t you do that? I mean, literally, the biggest platform in the world. She comes across as real and human. This does not mean that this would have changed the outcome of the election, but it is an indication of the Democratic position.
Your institute has a number of policy proposals to improve the conditions of boys and men. How do you feel about your chances of advancing those things in the context of a Republican presidency and a Republican Senate?
If Democrats conclude that this is because she is a female candidate, that would be a false conclusion. Experimentally
Well, I guess after the men offered their services to Trump, Trump now has to offer his services to the men. The question is: Well, will the CDC now take male suicide rates seriously and acknowledge the gender gap in suicide?
The very shaky question for you is, what will happen to the White House Gender Policy Council? Now, I may be one of the few people asking this question today, but I criticized the Gender Policy Council for being one-sided. You can easily imagine that Trump and his followers will scrap it as a kind of relic of the Biden-Harris era. What I hope they do is repurpose it so that it looks at gender issues both ways.
What about more realistic policies? Do you expect anything from Trump?
One big question is whether Trump will seriously work on apprenticeships, which, to be fair, he did quite a bit in his first term. Passing the Apprenticeships Bill, redirecting some of the money currently going to elite higher education to apprenticeships, trade schools, technical schools – all of this would be great for boys and men.
What do Democrats need to learn from this?
The danger is that they are just saying that all these men have become sexists, that they have been seduced by misogyny. The danger is that Democrats think they just need to double down on attacks on patriarchy and toxic masculinity. That would be disastrous.
Instead, they must show young people that they have an agenda for the street they live on. Instead of continuing to talk about canceling student debt, an unpopular policy among men, they should be talking more about trade schools and manufacturing jobs. I hope they conclude that they need to win back men by explicitly promoting them, rather than trying to recruit them as allies to the women’s cause, a political theory they have just tested and destroyed.
I suppose the conclusion they would also come to is that they can’t nominate a female candidate for a really long time?
I really, really, really hope they don’t come to that conclusion.
There’s a reason the General Social Survey stopped asking about female candidates in 2010: because she received 96% support, which is higher among young people. I suppose it’s possible that these men are secretly sexist or racist and won’t tell the pollsters, but that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and we can’t know.
If Democrats conclude that this is because she is a female candidate, that would be a false conclusion. Experimentally. It will insult male voters who need them, and it will hamper the careers of female politicians, perhaps for a long time.
This interview has been condensed for clarity
Read more about The Guardian’s coverage of the 2024 US elections
