In the run-up to the US election, one trend caught the imagination of the media more than anything: the apparent rightward drift of young American men. “Will gender divide the American election?” the Financial Times asked on Tuesday. At the end of October the US outlet Vox outlined “the massive gender gap” that could decide the race, while New York Magazine wondered at the same time how this became the “gender gap election”.
The consensus across pollsters seems to be broadly two-pronged: abortion shot up the roster as an electoral question in the wake of the reversal of Roe v Wade; and the US would reflect trends more general to the West, as women lean increasingly left and men stay centre or look rightward. The suspicion was that women would vote for Kamala Harris in droves while young men would be the kingmakers for Donald Trump.
The actual data tells a more complicated story than this crude assessment. Harris did worse among women than Biden did in 2020; and one key factor for Trump was Gen X men (while the feted “black male vote” that Trump was supposed to win never really materialised).
Nevertheless, both camps were alive to the sexual politics guiding this contest for the White House. Trump’s media campaign seemed particularly aimed at young men. In July, he appeared on a podcast with the influencer Logan Paul (this now has 6.7 million views on YouTube); more recently he sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours (nearly 46 million views on YouTube). The conversations on both are meandering, discursive and strange: from immigration to Iraq to Kim Jong-un to the existence of aliens. But the strategy is obvious: this is where to find the disaffected, low-propensity young male audience and feed them Trumpism.
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Harris went the other way with her appearance on Call Her Daddy – a women’s issues podcast second in popularity in the US only to Joe Rogan’s. Edison Research reckons about one quarter of her audience are Republican women, one half Democrat, with a sizeable chunk of the entire demographic living in the key electoral areas for Harris (the south and the midwest). Both Trump and Harris used alternative media to energise their extant base and to access a new one. It paid greater dividends this time round for Trump.
We have heard a lot about how generational divides used to define politics. We still see this, of course – there was plenty of intergenerational mudslinging over Covid policy (the young are too reckless; the old are so selfish). It is a constant dynamic when we talk about the hostile property market: rent is too high; boomers bought their houses so cheaply; the social contract between young and old has broken down. And then, of course, there has always been the gulf between parents and their children when it comes to questions of culture (look at the youth and their naively modern sexual mores).
But a new front has opened. The split may not be as simple as the media predicted but, nevertheless, gender politics captured the race and campaign strategies in a serious way. It’s easy to understand how this happened. The widening “chasm” is generating a lot of noise, not solely confined to the US. Earlier this year, the Economist looked at polling data from a slew of western countries and found young men were more conservative than young women, and more so now than two decades before.
One of the many progressive shibboleths that has been disproved in recent years is the idea that each generation bends more liberal than the last. The march to the end of history would be long but it is inexorable, so the argument went. And the final destination is a progressive utopia where the conservatism of our forebears has been laundered from society, as each new cohort of young people came along bearing increasingly modern values. The data emerging from Europe, and Trump’s decision to target young men, makes this assumption look rather premature.
The right has been smart at mobilising very modern masculine anxieties. A new type of gendered language has crept in this decade: the arrival of the phrase “toxic masculinity” and the accompanying reprobation of young men and their very being. Out of this emerges a cohort of society who feel disenfranchised by the culture and unrepresented in a modern political landscape.
Young men may not have won him the election but the Democrats should be worried nonetheless. Trump knows how to speak to them. Even back in June 2016, when Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, he struck a rhetorical gold mine. “Her campaign slogan is ‘I’m with her’,” he reminded the audience. “You know what my response to that is?” he went on, “I’m with you.”
If we are going to interrogate where this huge gap between men and women on the political spectrum came from then perhaps this overture is a salient place to start. Trump shouldn’t be winning with this group of people, especially the youngest among them; but until liberals adapt their language – to reflect that young men have their discontents too – he will continue to have their ear.