Democrats’ struggles with men: It’s the misogyny, stupid.

In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, there has been a lot of handwringing about Democrats’ struggles with men. Vice President Kamala Harris lost men badly, securing 42 percent of male voters compared to 48 percent who had voted for former President Joe Biden in 2020.

The biggest shift came from younger men, with only 46 percent supporting Harris whereas 56 percent had voted for Biden. This decline was not just concentrated among white men but was also evident among Black and Hispanic young men.

Harris’ struggles with men were evident during the campaign. The “bro vote,” courted by Trump and MAGA everywhere from podcasts to mixed martial arts fights, consumed a tremendous amount of ink in the final months of the election. Democrats like James Carville sounded the alarm that the party was too feminine and needed to focus on beer, hamburgers and football. The Harris campaign engaged in ultimately fruitless negotiations to appear on Joe Rogan’s show. Tim Walz recently said that he was picked as a Harris’s running mate to “code talk to white guys watching football.”

But given the campaign that Trump ran against Harris, it shouldn’t be any surprise that she suffered with male voters. Trump’s misogyny was front and center, in the language that he used talking about Harris (e.g., “retarded”) and other Black women (e.g., “low IQ”); in JD Vance’s invocation of childless cat ladies; in Trump’s claim that he wanted to “protect” women; in his attacks on journalist and author E. Jean Carroll; and more. Of course, Trump deployed these same strategies against Hillary Clinton in 2016 but had a greater reach in 2024 by deliberately targeting the “manosphere.”  

Younger men are a ready-made audience for this content. Young men overwhelmingly consume online content from YouTube, X and Instagram, which are populated with misogynistic right-wing influencers like Rogan, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson. These shows are filled with content blaming feminists and women for all that ails young men, pushing traditional roles for women and some, like Andrew Tate, promote violence against women.

Political scientists have shown in election after election that activating voters’ chauvinistic attitudes impacts voting behavior. Voters who hold conservative views about women’s role in society, the family and the workplace (sometimes called “hostile sexism”) were more much likely to vote for Trump and Republicans even after taking partisanship into account. Globally, right wing and authoritarian movements rely on misogyny to draw in supporters and undermine liberal institutions.

Rather than acknowledge the central role misogyny played in electing Trump, pundits blame Democrats for not understanding men because they are too reliant on and focused on women. Richard Reeves did just this in a recent article by Tom Edsall in the New York Times: “When [Edsall] asked him why more men than women shifted to voting for Trump in 2024,” Reeves responded, “Because the Democrats effectively ran as the Women’s Party.”

It’s not just that the party is too female: it is that the women in the party are too mean to men. Reeves claims that since the “political left” use words like toxic masculinity, patriarchy and mansplaining, they cannot appeal to “men who are struggling to find their feet in the economy.”

Others have suggested that the movements of the 1960s, which successfully fought for rights for women, minorities and the lesbian, gay and transgender community, created a backlash that Democrats have not sufficiently reckoned with. In other words, Democrats are to blame for men’s resentments about women getting rights and upending traditional gender roles.

This is not to say that all men or even men who voted for Trump are misogynists. Feeling that things were better economically under the first Trump administration convinced many men to support Trump in 2024. The new Speaking with American Men report argues persuasively that many young men are struggling financially and are socially isolated. Trying to find their way in a system that doesn’t work for them, many supported Trump because they thought he could change the system.

They may soon change their views about Trump’s ability to make things better — in the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, 59 percent of young men disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

It is fair to criticize the Democratic Party for not having a good answer to very real challenges of living in our society for young men and the many other voters, including women, who felt the same way. But the solution cannot be to blame women for gaining rights or to kick the base of the Democratic Party — women voters — to the curb.

Anna Greenberg Ph.D. is a senior partner at the Democratic polling firm GQR.