On a random Tuesday in February, a conservative provocateur and talk radio host made a bold proclamation about the state of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump had won over young men, and nearly a majority of young voters overall in November, because “Democrats, for men, are pussies.”

“There are no masculine men in the Democrat Party right now,” Clay Travis, the Trump-supporting sports and politics commentator, said while speaking on a panel hosted at the University of Chicago. “Who’s the most masculine Democrat right now in America? Mayor Pete?”

His audience gasped in response. The moderator intervened. And so began a week of debate and commentary about the relationship — or lack thereof — between the Trump-era Democratic Party and the Gen Z men who abandoned them last year.

In hindsight, all the signs were there that the 2024 election would feature a yawning gender gap between Trump-curious men, and more liberal women. What polls predicted came true: a shift of Gen Z voters toward Republicans, driven by young men voting for Trump. Since then, plenty of postmortems have tried to wrestle with just what went wrong with the Democratic pitch. Still, the question remains: Will this dynamic linger? And if so, how worried should Democrats be?

A month into the second Trump presidency, the alarm bells are still ringing. While the president’s honeymoon is fading, he remains quite popular with the youngest cohort of men.

As Democrats attempt to redefine themselves ahead of next year’s midterm elections, they’ll need to accurately diagnose why young men have jumped ship in large numbers.

In reviewing the data and talking to experts, three main explanations emerge.

First, there’s the structural: the effects and aftermath of the Covid pandemic and economic pressures that explain the shift of young men to the right.

Then, there are Trump-specific dynamics, related to his persona, his campaign and media strategy last year, and his ability to define himself independently of the two-party, liberal-conservative spectrum.

And finally, there are cultural, education, and gender dynamics that explain the divide — which Democrats have driven, and can still fix.

But if Democrats are to make any progress, their first step must be rooting out denial: When it comes to young men, the party has a real problem.

What the Democrats’ young male problem looks like

The Gen Z gender gap isn’t easy to map out, so it’s helpful to look at a few factors — vote choice, political ideology, partisan identification, and favorability ratings — to try to figure out what’s going on.

The first, vote choice, is the easiest, but also bluntest, tool to use. Using estimates from AP VoteCast surveys, in 2024, young men backed Trump by a 14-point margin; young women backed Harris by a 17-point margin. Trump’s share of the young male vote increased from 41 percent in 2020 to 56 percent in 2024 per AP VoteCast data by CIRCLE at Tufts University. And it’s young white and Latino men who shifted most dramatically to the right, by 22 points and 38 points respectively.

Partisan identification shows some of this change too. Over the last 20 years, it’s young men who have been more likely to identify as Republicans, according to Gallup polling data. The share of young women, aged 18-29, who identify as or lean toward Democrats has remained steady since about 2003, while the share of young men who identify with Republicans has steadily grown since 2015.

Puzzlingly, the change in partisan leaning has not been accompanied by a corresponding self-reported change in young men’s political ideology. They have not been calling themselves more “conservative” over that same timeline. Instead, it’s young women who have gotten much more liberal over the last two decades, while the share of men who call themselves conservative has remained steady. According to Gallup polling, women 18 to 29 who call themselves liberal are now at the highest level they’ve been since 1999, a trend that picked up during the second Obama term and the first Trump presidency. A plurality of young men, meanwhile, have called themselves moderate over the last 20 years, with shares of young conservatives and young liberals also remaining steady.

What this all suggests is two opposite shifts: Young women are identifying as more liberal, but not necessarily more Democratic. Young men, meanwhile, are identifying as more Republican, but not more conservative. It’s a point that Daniel........

© Vox