Frustrated with the cost of everyday necessities, Carter Tice, a 20-year-old tree landscaper in Milwaukee, voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because he promised economic relief — but Mr. Tice has not yet seen any improvement.
In Phoenix, Jared Cassell, a 25-year-old server and restaurant manager, voted for Mr. Trump because of his opposition to abortion but has been horrified by immigration raids and regrets his decision.
And Owen Cheyne, 21, from rural Klamath Falls, Ore., who listens to podcasts from influencers who supported Mr. Trump in 2024 — like Joe Rogan and Theo Von — has been disappointed by the president’s much-heralded tariff policy.
“He said it would get bad because of tariffs, and he said it would get better,” Mr. Cheyne said. “We’re still waiting.”
Propelled by economic anxiety, young men lurched to the right in the 2024 election — a 15-percent swing from 2020 — and helped Mr. Trump win the White House, setting off a round of soul-searching among Democratic politicians and strategists who were dismayed that this once-reliable demographic had fallen away.
A year and a half later, some Gen Z men say they are disillusioned by Mr. Trump’s second term. A variety of surveys have shown that young voters are veering sharply away from Mr. Trump since the last presidential election, and recent New York Times/Siena College polls found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating with young men fell by about 10 percentage points in the past few months.
At the same time, despite efforts from Democratic politicians to reach young men by diving into “bro culture” after the 2024 election, many young men said Democrats had not yet landed on a compelling message that resonated with them.
In interviews with two dozen young men in Wisconsin, Maine, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Illinois and Washington, D.C., many said their disaffection reached far beyond politics. They said they felt daunted by an unforgiving job market, pessimistic about matters as personal as their romantic prospects and broadly unsure of where they fit in society.
Neither party, they said, was speaking to their concerns.
Since Mr. Trump’s victory, Democrats have begun to focus in earnest on bringing young men back into the fold, raising the alarm over various indicators that they are floundering: Men are graduating from college at declining rates and are 10 percentage points less likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than women; their median hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower today among the working class than it was 50 years ago; and they account for about 70 percent of what are called “deaths of despair” — deaths from suicide or overdose.
Still, with a midterm election this fall and another presidential contest steadily approaching, many young men said their political allegiance remained entirely up for grabs.
Vincent McKibben, 25, a computer hardware engineer in Austin, Texas, grew up in a liberal family but enjoys the irreverent banter offered by right-leaning voices like Mr. Rogan. Recently, however, he has started to worry that the heterodox “manosphere” preys on buzzy culture war issues to attract attention, rather than offering substantive solutions.
But that has not left him entirely enthusiastic about Democrats. He said that the clinical, policy-driven voices on the left felt “very academic” and lacked a masculine charisma that people could latch onto.
“Both parties kind of get it wrong,” Mr. McKibben said.
Mr. Cassell in Phoenix, a onetime Republican who is now nonpartisan, said he felt “completely lost politically.”
“If you asked, ‘Who’s a political figure you like?’ I don’t know that I can think of one,” he said. “It feels like nobody really cares about me.”
Diving Into Culture Wars
Democrats realize they need to confront the challenges young men are facing.
Prominent right-wing voices, such as Tucker Carlson, Vice President JD Vance and Charlie Kirk, who was killed last fall, have done a better job at speaking to these woes, some Democrats acknowledge. They have convinced Gen Z men that they are welcome among conservatives, in part by offering a masculine blueprint of how they should live that includes nostalgic and traditional visions of family and marriage.
Shauna Daly, the managing director of the Speaking with American Men project, one of many left-wing efforts to understand this cohort, said Republicans had woven anxieties over employment, home-buying and marriage into one “aspirational version of the future.”
“The connection between those things is some sense that the world that was attainable to older generations, particularly to their grandfathers and their fathers, is not attainable to these young men,” Ms. Daly said.
She said Democrats needed to challenge the appeal of “turning back the clock” while also putting forth an alternative vision.
In interviews, young men indicated just how tricky that might prove to be. Many were deeply skeptical of the Democratic brand and viewed the left as unwelcoming.
Some, for instance, said a traditional family dynamic, with a man as the breadwinner for his wife and children, would give them purpose — an aspiration of masculinity they said they believed the left discourages.
Dylan Pfaffenbach, 21, a Republican student leader at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis., pointed to an NBC poll he read about last year, which found that “having children” and “being married” were among the most important definitions of success for young men who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.
In the same poll, both outcomes ranked near the bottom of the list of priorities among young people, especially young women, who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“There’s no positivity toward marriage that I see, a lot, from the left-leaning view,” Mr. Pfaffenbach said.
Erin Esser, 21, a friend of Mr. Pfaffenbach who led a progressive group at Carroll before graduating this month, said she worried that far-right influencers like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes had led some young men to “find a scapegoat” for their troubles with finding a job, purchasing a home and starting a family — blaming women, minority groups or immigrants.
“A lot of people are feeling alone and sad, and I feel bad,” Ms. Esser said. But “it’s looking into the past when that’s not the reality we’re living in anymore,” she said.
A ‘Really Swingy’ Group
Some Democrats acknowledge that they do not have easy solutions to the cultural dilemmas that have drawn young men to the right.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California suggested that Democrats had been “timid” on male issues. The party, he said in an interview, needed to preach an affirmative vision of manliness that appreciated the desire to be a caregiver or protector of a family.
“Those are not things that men should feel ashamed about,” Mr. Newsom said.
Still, many Democrats said they were confident that most young men were more open to liberal views than the latest conventional wisdom suggested.
Arianna Jones, the executive director of NextGen America, a liberal group, said her organization conducted informal text conversations, called Pulse Check, with 35,000 voters on college campuses in recent weeks, asking about the issues that mattered most to young people. Cultural or gender issues did not make the cut.
Instead, they found that the Gen Z voters they surveyed cared most about corruption and perceived authoritarianism by Mr. Trump, as well as the economy. Behind that, the war with Iran was a major concern, Ms. Jones said — respondents were concerned about gas prices and felt that Mr. Trump had abandoned his promise to avoid foreign entanglements. (Even Mr. Rogan and Mr. Von have criticized the president over the war.)
Many surveys also suggest that Gen Z men have progressive views on issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a left-leaning research institute, said he was exasperated with people assuming that all young men had suddenly become fervent Trump supporters or Andrew Tate-style misogynists.
“Maybe,” Mr. Reeves said, “they’re actually really swingy and up for grabs.”
‘Sense of Hopelessness’
In their quest to win back young men, Democrats have conducted listening sessions, polled focus groups and even aired provocative anti-Republican advertisements that borrow from the shock value tactics of “manosphere” influencers.
More tangibly, they have run a host of congressional candidates with blue-collar credentials — including a smokejumper in Montana, an ironworker in Ohio and a farmer in North Carolina — who combine liberal pitches about affordability with a self-reliant attitude that young men say is appealing.
Foremost among that group is Graham Platner, a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. Late last year, at a town hall event in Biddeford, several young men said that Mr. Platner, a Marine veteran who owns an oyster farming business, offered a masculine model for life that was rare on the left.
“He’s a rugged guy — a rural, oyster farmer guy — that still has human decency,” said CJ McDonald, 20, who uses they/them pronouns.
Above all, Democrats said they needed to focus on the root of Gen Z men’s anxieties: economic insecurity.
Jobs that have traditionally been filled by men, like manufacturing, are declining, while “care economy” roles historically dominated by women, like nursing and teaching, are projected to grow by 1.6 million by 2033.
A group of prominent politicians — some seen as 2028 presidential contenders — have zeroed in on potential solutions, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, and Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican.
Foremost among this group seem to be two Democratic governors, Mr. Newsom and Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, who have launched initiatives in their states aiming to incentivize more men to become schoolteachers as well as to address mental health problems and increase job opportunities that do not require a college degree.
“We’re looking at so many of our young men and boys not like they’re a problem that has to be solved,” Mr. Moore said in an interview, but as “an asset that has to be unearthed.”
Mr. Newsom has mused publicly about young men’s dating struggles, and played Fortnite with a Twitch streamer last year in an effort to understand the demographic. At a Sacramento symposium in March, he said he had begun tracking such issues after discovering that his young son had been following right-leaning influencers online.
He said he continued to hear from young men who expressed “this sense of hopelessness, that both parties have abandoned them.”
They felt that Mr. Trump hadn’t “delivered on the promotion and promise in any meaningful and substantive way,” Mr. Newsom said. “But at the same time, not feeling like our party is offering a substitute.”
