September 20, 2024
Source: Counterpunch
It may be the most under-reported story of the entire 2024 presidential race; the ever-widening gender divide among young voters identified as Gen-Z (18-29 year olds). The Harris campaign is touting its appeal to young voters and pointing to high levels of enthusiasm and voter registration levels among youth as evidence of its mounting edge over Donald Trump this November.
But the campaign is also concealing a disturbing reality: young male voters are increasingly tilting toward Trump, keeping the former president highly competitive and posing a growing threat to Harris in the swing states.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Trump is spending heavily on niche messaging to Gen-Z males, one of the reasons he’s narrowing the gap with Harris – and in some polls, now leading her. How wide is the chasm between Gen Z men and women? It’s enormous. In fact there’s an astonishing 50-point spread between these two groups on key policy issues like cutting taxes and cracking down on illegal immigration – and unless the margin is reduced, a high Gen-Z turn out could end up handing the race to Trump.
This trend is recent – but not entirely new. Since 2016, according to the survey firm APData, a growing percentage of young males have been registering as Republicans In fact, about 47% of Gen Z men now identify as GOP, compared to just 33% eight years ago. Many of these young men became drawn to Trump during his first term in office, but as more youth have come of voting age, the tilt towards the GOP – and to Trump – has become even more pronounced, APData research shows.
For Gen Z women, the trend is completely reversed. Especially since the Dobbs decision, and even more so with the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as the Democratic party standard-bearer, younger women have flocked to the Democrats in ever-increasing numbers.
Pollsters say the two groups’ vastly different life experiences – and gnawing anxieties over the future – are driving their ever widening partisan divide. In polls, Gen Z men say they are especially concerned about their mounting student debt and their dwindling job, income and homeownership prospects – which they largely blame on the Biden-Harris regime. They also cite illegal immigration as a top concern, again blaming the current administration. Gen Z women, by contrast, say they’re far more afraid of threats to their reproductive rights – which they blame on Trump – and see Harris as a vital protector of those rights and as a positive role model and inspiration to women.
Don’t young women also fear for their economic future? They do, but men and women aren’t necessarily facing the same challenges. Women’s position in the labor market has actually become considerably stronger in recent years, while that of young men has weakened, according to labor force data. This is especially true for young non-college educated males, whose position has fallen the greatest, creating a groundswell of resentment and anger that Trump has successfully exploited.
By contrast, women make up 60% of all new college graduates and their position in the labor market has reached record heights – 87% are now gainfully employed. These women, mostly unmarried, are flocking to Harris in large numbers now, while married women with children tend to support Trump and the GOP.
The gender divide is also sharp on the issue that Biden and Harris have placed at the core of their youth campaign outreach: student loan debt forgiveness. Gen-Z women still account for two-thirds of all student loans and favor debt forgiveness by a whopping 45 points, according to polls conducted by the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, Gen Z males are more evenly divided on this issue. But the economic policy divide actually runs much deeper, the Journal found. Young males favor extending Trump’s corporate and individual tax cuts by 23 points, while young females oppose them by 20 points – an astounding 43 point divide.
Researchers say that Gen-Z men aren’t necessarily as conservative as they might seem. Instead, they view their GOP registration as a badge of defiance and a protest against what they perceive as growing “discrimination” against men in the society at large. Many view the rise of the #MeToo movement – which has catalyzed a massive female leftward trend – as a broadside against masculinity and an attempt to stigmatize all men as toxic and dangerous – and they’re rebelling, by signaling support for Trump even though they don’t necessarily buy into the entire MAGA doctrine
To be sure, in the current Trump-Harris face-off, there’s a sharp gender divide among all voters, not just youth. Trump is now up by high double-digits among men while Harris leads among women with somewhat smaller double digit margins. The country hasn’t witnessed a pronounced gender gap like this one for years. And it may get even larger as the race continues to unfold.
But the gap among younger men and women is far wider, polls show, suggesting that the two genders may soon inhabit entirely different policy universes with ever-deepening divisions in party registration and political ideology. The longer-term political consequences could be severe, pollsters say regardless of which candidate wins in November.
But Harris and Trump aren’t doing anything to reduce the gender gap – in fact, the two campaigns are accentuating it. Harris, for example, is single mindedly targeting young unmarried – and sexually vulnerable – women on college campuses with messaging that depicts Trump’s partnership with his youthful running mate J.D. Vance as a cross-generational “bromance” exclusive to toxic female-bashing men. Vance’s own past statements referring to unmarried women as “cat ladies” less deserving of the voting rights and benefits accorded to married women have also damaged his standing. Some of these attacks are fair game, but depictions of the happily married VP as a college-age sexual deviant and “weirdo” who can’t be trusted around women – based on smears and innuendo alone – have further torpedoed Vance’s favorability rating – but in the process, may also be alienating Gen Z men, setting the stage for backlash.
How has the Trump campaign responded? By targeting their own outreach and messaging exclusively at young men – with the same determination and not-so-subtle gender bias. Trump has made a number of highly-publicized appearances at sports fighting events frequented primarily by young men, including men of color. He’s also invited prominent rap music singers Lil Uzi Vert known for their amped-up masculine lyrics to perform at his rallies while publicly embracing popular macho celebrities like professional wrestler Logan Paul. And Trump’s burgeoning alliance with RFK Jr., who extols his own ageless athleticism and bravado on YouTube and Tik Tok videos and whose anti-vaccine views tend to find favor with men, is deliberately calculated to attract larger numbers of Gen Z males to his campaign.
There are growing signs that the youth gender gap is not just wide but beginning to favor Trump – by a lot. The very latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last week, found that an overwhelming 67% of Gen Z women plan to vote for Kamala Harris, while just 29% say they’ll back Donald Trump. By contrast, among young men, a clear majority – 53% – plan to vote for Trump, while 40% say they’ll support Harris. That’s an astonishing – and unprecedented – 51-percentage-point gender gap, pollsters report.
The Harris campaign isn’t completely oblivious to the gender gap but seems to be making some potentially costly assumptions while largely ignoring it. One is that young women generally vote in higher numbers than younger men – and the same is likely to be true of Gen Z. Therefore, the emphasis is on driving up female voter turnout, emphasizing reproductive rights and threats to women generally in the hopes of simply overshadowing young male support for Trump. The campaign is also trying to tout Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff and her VP running mate Tim Walz as positive male role models. A number of female columnists have been enlisted to write profiles extolling both men’s gender virtues – counterposing them to Trump’s well-documented boorish and sexist behavior.
But there’s little evidence that this approach is deflecting growing male support for Trump across all age groups, but especially youth. In July, Harris led Trump among all Gen Z voters by 22 points; by August, her lead had fallen to 14; in the latest Times/ Siena poll, her margin had shrunk to just 8 points. If current trends hold, Trump may well regain the parity with Gen Z voters that he enjoyed when Biden was still the Democratic standard-bearer – a potential disaster.
With so little time left in the race, it’s incumbent upon Harris to get out of denial and squarely address its gender gap with young male voters. Openly acknowledge the perceptions and concerns of young men – and make the case for why Democratic policies offer a better solution than Trump’s. Young men do have their own legitimate perceptions and aspirations in the world and these aren’t just shaped by gender power dynamics – much less women’s perception of them. This is a longer term problem for Democrats and speaks to how they plan to address divisive culture war issues moving forward. Some swing states, including Georgia and North Carolina, do have entrenched conservative White male cultures. Youth in these settings aren’t necessarily as socialized or even exposed to the more enlightened gender and race cultures one one finds in Blue states and their cosmopolitan cities. Likewise, young Hispanic men in states like Nevada and especially Arizona, which like Georgia, barely flipped Blue in 2020, are still steeped in traditional values. especially on abortion and LGBTQ issues.
But it doesn’t help Democrats or the Harris campaign when they simply attack vestiges of racism or sexism in American politics, and blame them for resistance to Harris’ candidacy. One Harris campaign director said young men are becoming “drunk on misogyny,” an exaggerated broad-brush claim that glosses over real sources of legitimate disagreements in gender attitudes and leaves young men – and men generally – stigmatized and simply beyond reach, politically. For a campaign that needs every vote it can still get, such dismissiveness can become a self-fulfilling – and self-defeating – prophecy.
Trump has already exploited the Gen Z gender gap to make massive inroads with disaffected young men – and these efforts will continue over the next two months. The former president is in the process of expanding his digital ad campaigns on YouTube and Tik Tok, as well as Twitch and Kick, where a large number of highly conservative male influencers hold sway. Trump credits his 18-year old son Barron with first introducing him to the power of online vehicles to reach disaffected young men, including young Black influencers like Solomon Brent who hosts a YouTube channel that broadcasts daily to millions. Computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, who also enjoys a large audience of mostly younger men, says he’s planning to host an episode with Trump in October. Adin Ross, a controversial broadcaster known for his extreme right-wing views, has already hosted one show with Trump, and plans several more before election day.
There’s no room for error here. Young voters are now the fastest growing voter group in America today – with 41 million eligible voters overall. From a record-breaking 39% turnout in 2016, their numbers ballooned even higher – to roughly 50% in 2020 – a factor that helped deliver the presidency to Biden. But there’s a danger that an even higher turn out in 2024 won’t actually favor the Democrats, not in the margins needed to defeat Trump.
“We’re all in this together,” Harris says – and rightly so. But where does that leave young men who feel, rightly or wrongly, that America is prepared to leave them behind? Harris already has young women firmly behind her – and they’re not about to abandon her now. Finding creative ways to pivot back to men, especially young men, with more explicit and balanced gender messaging is essential to prevent further hemorrhaging of her support among all Gen Z voters that could well prove catastrophic in November.
Stewart Lawrence is a long-time Washington, DC-based policy consultant.
It may be the most under-reported story of the entire 2024 presidential race; the ever-widening gender divide among young voters identified as Gen-Z (18-29 year olds). The Harris campaign is touting its appeal to young voters and pointing to high levels of enthusiasm and voter registration levels among youth as evidence of its mounting edge over Donald Trump this November.
But the campaign is also concealing a disturbing reality: young male voters are increasingly tilting toward Trump, keeping the former president highly competitive and posing a growing threat to Harris in the swing states.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Trump is spending heavily on niche messaging to Gen-Z males, one of the reasons he’s narrowing the gap with Harris – and in some polls, now leading her. How wide is the chasm between Gen Z men and women? It’s enormous. In fact there’s an astonishing 50-point spread between these two groups on key policy issues like cutting taxes and cracking down on illegal immigration – and unless the margin is reduced, a high Gen-Z turn out could end up handing the race to Trump.
This trend is recent – but not entirely new. Since 2016, according to the survey firm APData, a growing percentage of young males have been registering as Republicans In fact, about 47% of Gen Z men now identify as GOP, compared to just 33% eight years ago. Many of these young men became drawn to Trump during his first term in office, but as more youth have come of voting age, the tilt towards the GOP – and to Trump – has become even more pronounced, APData research shows.
For Gen Z women, the trend is completely reversed. Especially since the Dobbs decision, and even more so with the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as the Democratic party standard-bearer, younger women have flocked to the Democrats in ever-increasing numbers.
Pollsters say the two groups’ vastly different life experiences – and gnawing anxieties over the future – are driving their ever widening partisan divide. In polls, Gen Z men say they are especially concerned about their mounting student debt and their dwindling job, income and homeownership prospects – which they largely blame on the Biden-Harris regime. They also cite illegal immigration as a top concern, again blaming the current administration. Gen Z women, by contrast, say they’re far more afraid of threats to their reproductive rights – which they blame on Trump – and see Harris as a vital protector of those rights and as a positive role model and inspiration to women.
Don’t young women also fear for their economic future? They do, but men and women aren’t necessarily facing the same challenges. Women’s position in the labor market has actually become considerably stronger in recent years, while that of young men has weakened, according to labor force data. This is especially true for young non-college educated males, whose position has fallen the greatest, creating a groundswell of resentment and anger that Trump has successfully exploited.
By contrast, women make up 60% of all new college graduates and their position in the labor market has reached record heights – 87% are now gainfully employed. These women, mostly unmarried, are flocking to Harris in large numbers now, while married women with children tend to support Trump and the GOP.
The gender divide is also sharp on the issue that Biden and Harris have placed at the core of their youth campaign outreach: student loan debt forgiveness. Gen-Z women still account for two-thirds of all student loans and favor debt forgiveness by a whopping 45 points, according to polls conducted by the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, Gen Z males are more evenly divided on this issue. But the economic policy divide actually runs much deeper, the Journal found. Young males favor extending Trump’s corporate and individual tax cuts by 23 points, while young females oppose them by 20 points – an astounding 43 point divide.
Researchers say that Gen-Z men aren’t necessarily as conservative as they might seem. Instead, they view their GOP registration as a badge of defiance and a protest against what they perceive as growing “discrimination” against men in the society at large. Many view the rise of the #MeToo movement – which has catalyzed a massive female leftward trend – as a broadside against masculinity and an attempt to stigmatize all men as toxic and dangerous – and they’re rebelling, by signaling support for Trump even though they don’t necessarily buy into the entire MAGA doctrine
To be sure, in the current Trump-Harris face-off, there’s a sharp gender divide among all voters, not just youth. Trump is now up by high double-digits among men while Harris leads among women with somewhat smaller double digit margins. The country hasn’t witnessed a pronounced gender gap like this one for years. And it may get even larger as the race continues to unfold.
But the gap among younger men and women is far wider, polls show, suggesting that the two genders may soon inhabit entirely different policy universes with ever-deepening divisions in party registration and political ideology. The longer-term political consequences could be severe, pollsters say regardless of which candidate wins in November.
But Harris and Trump aren’t doing anything to reduce the gender gap – in fact, the two campaigns are accentuating it. Harris, for example, is single mindedly targeting young unmarried – and sexually vulnerable – women on college campuses with messaging that depicts Trump’s partnership with his youthful running mate J.D. Vance as a cross-generational “bromance” exclusive to toxic female-bashing men. Vance’s own past statements referring to unmarried women as “cat ladies” less deserving of the voting rights and benefits accorded to married women have also damaged his standing. Some of these attacks are fair game, but depictions of the happily married VP as a college-age sexual deviant and “weirdo” who can’t be trusted around women – based on smears and innuendo alone – have further torpedoed Vance’s favorability rating – but in the process, may also be alienating Gen Z men, setting the stage for backlash.
How has the Trump campaign responded? By targeting their own outreach and messaging exclusively at young men – with the same determination and not-so-subtle gender bias. Trump has made a number of highly-publicized appearances at sports fighting events frequented primarily by young men, including men of color. He’s also invited prominent rap music singers Lil Uzi Vert known for their amped-up masculine lyrics to perform at his rallies while publicly embracing popular macho celebrities like professional wrestler Logan Paul. And Trump’s burgeoning alliance with RFK Jr., who extols his own ageless athleticism and bravado on YouTube and Tik Tok videos and whose anti-vaccine views tend to find favor with men, is deliberately calculated to attract larger numbers of Gen Z males to his campaign.
There are growing signs that the youth gender gap is not just wide but beginning to favor Trump – by a lot. The very latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last week, found that an overwhelming 67% of Gen Z women plan to vote for Kamala Harris, while just 29% say they’ll back Donald Trump. By contrast, among young men, a clear majority – 53% – plan to vote for Trump, while 40% say they’ll support Harris. That’s an astonishing – and unprecedented – 51-percentage-point gender gap, pollsters report.
The Harris campaign isn’t completely oblivious to the gender gap but seems to be making some potentially costly assumptions while largely ignoring it. One is that young women generally vote in higher numbers than younger men – and the same is likely to be true of Gen Z. Therefore, the emphasis is on driving up female voter turnout, emphasizing reproductive rights and threats to women generally in the hopes of simply overshadowing young male support for Trump. The campaign is also trying to tout Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff and her VP running mate Tim Walz as positive male role models. A number of female columnists have been enlisted to write profiles extolling both men’s gender virtues – counterposing them to Trump’s well-documented boorish and sexist behavior.
But there’s little evidence that this approach is deflecting growing male support for Trump across all age groups, but especially youth. In July, Harris led Trump among all Gen Z voters by 22 points; by August, her lead had fallen to 14; in the latest Times/ Siena poll, her margin had shrunk to just 8 points. If current trends hold, Trump may well regain the parity with Gen Z voters that he enjoyed when Biden was still the Democratic standard-bearer – a potential disaster.
With so little time left in the race, it’s incumbent upon Harris to get out of denial and squarely address its gender gap with young male voters. Openly acknowledge the perceptions and concerns of young men – and make the case for why Democratic policies offer a better solution than Trump’s. Young men do have their own legitimate perceptions and aspirations in the world and these aren’t just shaped by gender power dynamics – much less women’s perception of them. This is a longer term problem for Democrats and speaks to how they plan to address divisive culture war issues moving forward. Some swing states, including Georgia and North Carolina, do have entrenched conservative White male cultures. Youth in these settings aren’t necessarily as socialized or even exposed to the more enlightened gender and race cultures one one finds in Blue states and their cosmopolitan cities. Likewise, young Hispanic men in states like Nevada and especially Arizona, which like Georgia, barely flipped Blue in 2020, are still steeped in traditional values. especially on abortion and LGBTQ issues.
But it doesn’t help Democrats or the Harris campaign when they simply attack vestiges of racism or sexism in American politics, and blame them for resistance to Harris’ candidacy. One Harris campaign director said young men are becoming “drunk on misogyny,” an exaggerated broad-brush claim that glosses over real sources of legitimate disagreements in gender attitudes and leaves young men – and men generally – stigmatized and simply beyond reach, politically. For a campaign that needs every vote it can still get, such dismissiveness can become a self-fulfilling – and self-defeating – prophecy.
Trump has already exploited the Gen Z gender gap to make massive inroads with disaffected young men – and these efforts will continue over the next two months. The former president is in the process of expanding his digital ad campaigns on YouTube and Tik Tok, as well as Twitch and Kick, where a large number of highly conservative male influencers hold sway. Trump credits his 18-year old son Barron with first introducing him to the power of online vehicles to reach disaffected young men, including young Black influencers like Solomon Brent who hosts a YouTube channel that broadcasts daily to millions. Computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, who also enjoys a large audience of mostly younger men, says he’s planning to host an episode with Trump in October. Adin Ross, a controversial broadcaster known for his extreme right-wing views, has already hosted one show with Trump, and plans several more before election day.
There’s no room for error here. Young voters are now the fastest growing voter group in America today – with 41 million eligible voters overall. From a record-breaking 39% turnout in 2016, their numbers ballooned even higher – to roughly 50% in 2020 – a factor that helped deliver the presidency to Biden. But there’s a danger that an even higher turn out in 2024 won’t actually favor the Democrats, not in the margins needed to defeat Trump.
“We’re all in this together,” Harris says – and rightly so. But where does that leave young men who feel, rightly or wrongly, that America is prepared to leave them behind? Harris already has young women firmly behind her – and they’re not about to abandon her now. Finding creative ways to pivot back to men, especially young men, with more explicit and balanced gender messaging is essential to prevent further hemorrhaging of her support among all Gen Z voters that could well prove catastrophic in November.
Stewart Lawrence is a long-time Washington, DC-based policy consultant.
No comments:
Post a Comment