Yesterday, I flagged Derek Thompson‘s Atlantic essay “What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?” but didn’t get around to reading it. This morning, I see that WSJ’s Aaron Zitner and Andrew Restuccia published a report overnight declaring “America’s New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women.” I study war for a living and yet somehow missed one going on right here at home.
The WSJ essay is chock-full of anecdotes, including an opener pitting a male farmer against a female engineer which I found decidedly unhelpful. But the data in the report are useful:
The forces of American culture and politics are pushing men and women under age 30 into opposing camps, creating a new fault line in the electorate and adding an unexpected wild card into the 2024 presidential election.
Voters under 30 have been a pillar of the Democratic coalition since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. That pillar is showing cracks, with young men defecting from the party.
Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for president after backing Biden and Democratic lawmakers in 2020.
Women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They are also far more likely to call themselves liberal than two decades ago.
Before President Biden ended his candidacy this month, Trump was winning support from a majority of men under age 30, according to a merger of Wall Street Journal polls in February and July. If that holds until Election Day, Republicans would win young men for the first time in more than two decades, voter exit polls show.
Young men backed Trump over Biden by 14 points in the merged Journal polls this year, a substantial swing from 2020. In that election, they supported Biden by 15 points, according to AP VoteCast, a voter survey. Young women in the Journal surveys backed Biden by 30 points and Democratic control of Congress by 34 points, essentially unchanged from 2020.
The gender gap extends to opposing views of abortion, student-loan forgiveness and other issues affecting the lives of young adults.
The question now is whether Harris, the expected Democratic nominee, will recapture the support of young men or push more of them away. Harris’s candidacy removes Biden’s age, 81, as a voter concern and instead spotlights social, economic and policy issues driving young men and women apart.
This is followed by more anecdote but also noting that Trump and the GOP writ large are successfully pushing a “tough guy” image, one that was bolstered by Trump’s defiance in the face of an assassin’s bullet and played up at the Republican National Convention.
The testosterone-fueled lineup, coming on the heels of Trump’s fist-pumping response to bullets flying past him, “positions Trump as an anti-hero that millions of young men—specifically, young, first-time voters—connect with and even aspire to,’’ said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard Youth Poll. “It’s something they see everywhere they consume information, whether it’s in the gamer community, TikTok, Instagram.’’
The replacement of Joe Biden, a feeble octogenarian, with Harris, a woman 20 years Trump’s junior, changes the dynamics of the race in ways that are not yet clear.
Harris, the expected Democratic nominee, is pressing her party’s argument that the wave of new state abortion restrictions strips fundamental rights from women. The protection of reproductive rights is a far more salient issue for women than for men, Journal polls found.
The gender divisions reflect the increasingly different experiences of American women and men in their 20s, as well as the influence of campaign messages from candidates and parties.
Women now make up a record 60% of college students and carry 66% of all student-loan debt, research shows. They support the Biden administration’s push to forgive student loans more than young men do, Journal polling finds.
We used to call this a “gender gap” rather than a “war.” But it does seem more pronounced now.
Polling last week by the Journal found Harris leading Trump among young voters by about 10 percentage points, less support than Biden drew from the group in 2020. The sample size was too small to measure how voter preferences differ by gender among those under 30.
Some men say they have lost economic, cultural and political influence to women amid the focus on equity and diversity. Others expressed resentment over feminist and progressive attitudes on college campuses, in the entertainment industry and at many workplaces.
In certain U.S. cities, young women are outpacing young men in median annual income and are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. A larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with young women in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, while fewer young men are reaching that milestone compared with four decades ago.
The Democratic push for diversity is making them more likely to vote for Republicans, some men said. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of men—and 33% of men who backed Trump—believed the advancement of women has come at their expense.
Many young men feel abandoned by Democrats, saying Republican politicians are the ones making direct appeals to them, according to interviews with dozens of men under 30.
The Biden administration has focused on political appeals to women, people of color and other Democratic constituencies. Harris called for affordable child care and paid parental leave in her first campaign speeches, policies less likely to appeal to single young men.
Biden successfully pressed for trillions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure construction, semiconductor manufacturing and other sectors that traditionally employ men. Yet young men maintain an overwhelmingly negative view of him, Journal surveys found.
[…]
The shift toward Trump includes Black and Latino men. Young Black men had backed Biden over Trump by about 70 percentage points in 2020, and Latino men backed Biden by more than 40 points, according to AP VoteCast.
Journal polls found support for Biden shrank this year before the president withdrew from the race, leaving him with a narrow lead, as small as in the single digits, among nonwhite men.
Young white men have leaned Republican in the past and showed signs of shifting in greater numbers to the GOP this year.
Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.
Other men say they are drawn to the so-called manosphere, a loose collection of male influencers who espouse macho, “anti-woke” views. The hyper-masculinity of the right, many of them said, is at the core of its appeal, not policies or party politics.
This is a phenomenon we’ve discussed many times over the years. The shifting social and economic landscape has removed men from a dominant position in society and the household to one where they are, at best, equals and, quite often, at a distinct disadvantage. Physical strength has been devalued while patience and interpersonal skills are at a premium. Boys do less well in school, which demands sitting for long periods and being quiet, than girls and, for decades now, this has translated to more young women than young men going on to college and graduate or professional school. And, since successful women almost never have interest in pairing with men who are less successful, this leads to rejection, resentment, and rage.
Thompson adds additional insights. He begins similarly to the WSJ duo:
The United States is politically polarized along several lines, including race, geography, and education. Heading into a general election that will once again offer voters a choice between a Democratic woman and a Republican man, gender may seem like the clearest split of all. But surveys, polls, and political scientists are torn on how dramatically men and women are divided, or what their division actually means for American politics. The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.
By several measures, men and women in America are indeed drifting apart. For most of the past 50 years, they held surprisingly similar views on abortion, for example. Then, in the past decade, the pro-choice position surged among women. In 1995, women were just 1 percentage point more likely to say they were pro-choice than men. Today women are 14 points more likely to say they’re pro-choice—the highest margin on record.
In 1999, women ages 18 to 29 were five percentage points more likely than men to say they were “very liberal.” In 2023, the gap expanded to 15 percentage points. While young women are clearly moving left, some evidence suggests that young men are drifting right. From 2017 to 2024, the share of men under 30 who said the U.S. has gone “too far” promoting gender equality more than doubled, according to data shared by Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Gallup data show that young men are now leaning toward the Republican Party more than at any other point this century.
But then shifts to this:
Arguably, men and women aren’t rapidly diverging in their politics at all, as my colleague Rose Horowitch reported. At the ballot box, the gender gap is about the same as it’s long been. Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” Horowitch wrote.
One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender polarization, with women breaking hard for Kamala Harris and men voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Another possibility is that these surveys are a little misleading, and gender polarization has already peaked, in which case this is much ado about nothing.
A third possibility interests me the most. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, says the gender gap is real; it’s just not what many people think it is. “The parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself,” he told me.
As alluded to above, this is my take as well.
If that sounds a bit academic, try a thought experiment to make it more concrete. Imagine that you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100 American voters you cannot see. Your job is to accurately guess how many of the folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two questions: “Are you a man?” or “Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today?” The first question is about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes, or how society treats men and women. According to Sides, the second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That’s because the parties aren’t remotely united by gender, Sides says. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America.
The fable above plays out in survey data, too. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.
To Sides, the conclusion is obvious: The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself. It’s not “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” It’s “Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus.”
Which seems obvious once stated. While the “war” metaphor remains overwrought, we don’t have a “gender war” in the sense of a struggle between men and women we have one in the sense of a fight over gender.
Political language today is so coded by gender that it’s easy to identify blind quotes by party. If you hear a politician complain that the opposing party is dominated “by a bunch of childless cat ladies,” well, it’s obviously a Republican speaking. (That would be J. D. Vance in an interview a few years ago with Tucker Carlson.) If you hear a politician accuse the opposing party of becoming a “He-Man woman-hater’s club,” well, it’s obviously a Democrat talking. (In this case, the Democrat is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz describing the GOP presidential ticket and this month’s Republican National Convention.)
But there’s a difference between distinct gender rhetoric and a coherent vision of womanliness or manliness. For its part, the GOP plays host to several visions of masculinity, awkwardly mushed together. Trump is a thrice-married Lothario who combines the showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel with the wounded rage of a country-club rejectee. The result is a potent mix of cosmetic macho bluster and marrow-deep elite resentment. For the purpose of containing this multitude in a phrase, let’s call it “alpha-victim masculinity.”
As Thompson’s colleague Tom Nichols observes in his recent essay “The Great Manliness Flip-Flop,” this is cosplay masculinity.
America after World War II celebrated traditional masculinity. It venerated images of the strong, silent types in popular culture, characters who exuded confidence without being braggarts and who sent the message that being an honorable man meant doing your job, being good to your family, and keeping your feelings to yourself. Heroes in that postwar culture were cowboys, soldiers, cops, and other tough guys.
Republicans, in particular, admired the actors who played these role models, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who turned art into reality after he was shot: He apologized to his wife for forgetting to duck and kidded with his surgeons about whether they were all Republicans before they dug a bullet out of him.
After the 1960s, the GOP defined itself as a guardian of this stoic manliness in opposition to the putative femininity of Democratic men. (Remember, by this point, Democrats such as Reagan had already defected to the Republicans.) Democrats were guys who, in Republican eyes, looked like John Lennon, with ponytails and glasses and wrinkled linen shirts. To them, Democratic men weren’t men; they were boys who tore up their draft cards and cried and shouted and marched and shared their inner feelings—all of that icky stuff that real men don’t do.
These liberal men were ostensibly letting down their family and their country. This prospect was especially shameful during the Cold War against the Soviets, who were known to be virile, 10-foot-tall giants. (The Commies were so tough that they drank liquid nitrogen and smoked cigarettes made from plutonium.)
Most of this was pure hooey, of course. Anyone who grew up around the working class knew plenty of tough Democratic men; likewise, plenty of country-club Republicans never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass weighted down with cocktail onions. But when the educational divide between the right and the left grew larger, Republican men adhered even more strongly to old cultural stereotypes while Democratic men, more urbanized and educated, identified less and less with images of their fathers and grandfathers in the fields and factories.
In the age of Donald Trump, however, Republicans have become much of what they once claimed to see in Democrats. The reality is that elected Democratic leaders are now (to borrow from the title of a classic John Wayne movie) the quiet men, and Republicans have become full-on hysterics, screaming about voting machines and Hunter Biden and drag queens while trying to impeach Kamala Harris for … being female while on duty, or something.
[…]
As I have written, Trump is hands down America’s unmanliest president, despite the weird pseudo-macho culture that his fans have created around him—and despite his moment of defiance after a bullet grazed his ear. I give him all the credit in the world for those few minutes; I have no idea if I’d have that much presence of mind with a few gallons of adrenaline barreling through my veins. But true to form, he then wallowed in the assassination attempt like the narcissist he is, regaling the faithful at the Republican National Convention about how much human ears can bleed. As it turns out, one moment of brave fist-pumping could not overcome a lifetime of unmanly behavior.
[…]
I also know this: The real men are not the ones who have to keep crowing about manliness and putting down women. Real men serve their nation, their community, and their family, and unlike Trump and his elected Republican coterie, they do it without whining or demanding credit.
Regardless, Thompson continues,
If the GOP’s gender politics are fragmented by decorum and divorce, the glue tying the party together may be a nostalgia for social-dominance hierarchies and opposition to the cosmopolitan mores of the left. As the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle has written, the progressive movement originating with the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s has embraced a cultural politics that is “free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles” and that “rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated.” The watchword of progressive gender politics is not tradition but liberation, a full break from the pull of history. Tradition, which conservatives see as a guardrail, progressives see as a straitjacket.
Women make up a majority of the electorate, outvoting men by millions of ballots each election. So it might be strategic for Democrats to adopt a political language and policy platform that appeals disproportionately to female voters. The problem, as Richard Reeves, the author of the book Of Boys and Men, has told me, is that men vote, too. The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.
“The Democratic Party appears to have made a conscious choice not to make young men a political priority,” Cox told me, just as “the GOP under Trump seems unconcerned about the ways it may be alienating young women.” If American politics in 2024 is a gender war, it is not yet a conflict between the genders. Let’s hope it never gets to that. But it is a conflict between the parties over the role of gender, the meaning of gender, the definition of gender. And that, frankly, is strange enough.
In a more rational world, of course, such questions would be absurd. We shouldn’t have gender-based expectations and the very concepts of masculinity and feminity wouldn’t exist. We do not, however, live in anything remotely like that world.
We have fostered a large cohort of young males—I hesitate to call them men—who are failing at life and somehow blame women for it. This is likely not a problem with a political solution. And, certainly, if there is one, it sure as hell isn’t Donald Trump.
