MAGA Squandered Young Men's Trust; Making Them Stay Democrats Is The Hard Part

We’ve come a long way since the post-2024 freakout. When Donald Trump won a second term, Democrats quickly gave in to fear of permanent realignment, and durable Republican political and cultural dominance, driven by young men—as if the election had been a choosing moment for them, for all time, and they’d chosen chauvinism.

The swing back has been head-spinning. Trump’s support among young men has collapsed. Survey data provides some clues about what caused these voters to sour on him, but for the most part we’re left to draw hypotheses with common sense.

Most obviously: Trump’s presidency has been a failure. Whatever about him appealed to young men—or made him less unappealing than Kamala Harris—proved illusory. The policy appeals were lies; the cultural ones didn’t pay for gas and groceries, and in any case they came with more baggage than they were worth.

Harris and her aides aides cite the influence of the Tate brothers as a critical factor in her defeat; casual misogyny apparently sold well as a fad, and helped sour young men on progressive feminism. But there’s no way to join a mass movement of “masculinists” without aligning yourself with thieves and rapists.

Young men, some surely oblivious, joined a movement and party of blamers and whiners—a political formation that covered up the Epstein files, where men who abuse their wives and partners are shielded from consequences.

The contrast between the parties on this score has thus grown stark. In the span of just a few weeks, Democrats evicted two leading candidates for important offices (California governor and Maine senator) from their party over credible accusations of predatory behavior toward women. Meanwhile, it is essentially a capital crime in Republican politics to even acknowledge that Trump himself is a predator. That, in turn, makes it impossible for Republicans to uphold any standards at all, lest they be applied to Trump. Republicans and the overwhelming majority of conservative elites continue to hang together with Congressman Max Miller, who has been credibly accused of physically abusing multiple women—including his ex-wife, who happens to the daughter of Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. (After laying low for weeks, Moreno finally called on Miller to resign.)

The ur-hypothesis, then, is that a large subset of young men were willing to try Republicans on for size, and Republicans squandered their trust. It’s a compelling theory. But it’s conspicuously a theory about the right wing discrediting itself. Nobody fools themselves into believing the broad left somehow won young men back, let alone that progressives and Democrats have grappled rigorously with the question of how to do that.

In this insightful episode of the New Republic’s Daily Blast podcast, Greg Sargent and Moira Donegan assess these developments methodically—starting with why the 2024 election turned out the way it did, through the clumsy ways Democrats responded, to the crumbling of the second Trump coalition. But a big question mark still hangs over the matter of what Democrats should do that might actually generate higher sustained levels of young-male support.

As Donegan notes, “You see people from the left, right, and center of the Democratic Party all trying to make the party a little more masculine, trying to recruit more manly men, trying to court male voters. But there is this sort of over-identification, I think, with the Republicans’ theory of the case.” Trump lost these voters, she notes, because “they’re not actually being elevated in their own status by this hyper-masculine style in governance.”

But the episode ends without a positive prescription. Sargent asks, “What would you like to hear Democrats saying to young men that will kind of create a sense that they represent a better vision of masculinity than the one Donald Trump has tried to foist on the country?” And it goes unanswered.

Share Off Message

For the purposes of the next election or two, t