Democrats Have a Man Problem

Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30..

I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?

[Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost]

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”

For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.”

So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.”

Last fall, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.”

Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Or maybe sound bites are not the problem.

Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same.

Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair.  

“The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.”

The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker.

But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites.

For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.”

She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me.

“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.”

What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed.

“What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.

She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.”

Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.