Collin Mertz, a 23-year-old farmer in North Dakota, believes American men like himself have been targeted by liberals in the push for diversity.
Collin Mertz, a 23-year-old farmer in North Dakota, believes American men like himself have been targeted by liberals in the push for diversity.
“It would seem the white male is the enemy of the left,” said Mertz, who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and plans to do so again in November.
“It would seem the white male is the enemy of the left,” said Mertz, who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and plans to do so again in November.
Lauren Starrett, a 28-year-old engineer in Cincinnati, feels a personal threat from conservatives seeking to scale back access to abortion and other rights.
“It’s kind of terrifying, really,” said Starrett, who backs Vice President Kamala Harris.
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.
Trump, 78, now facing a 59-year-old female opponent, has long tailored much of his campaign to appeal to younger men with shows of virility.
Tough talk
Days after an attempted assassination, the former president headlined the Republican National Convention, which featured an onstage appearance by celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan.
“I’ve been in the ring with some of the biggest, some of the baddest dudes on the planet, Hogan told the cheering crowd. “Trump is the toughest of them all.”
Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White introduced Trump ahead of his nomination acceptance speech. Kid Rock performed his song “American Bad Ass.”
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.’’
Mertz, the North Dakota farmer, said he was more excited to vote for Trump than even a few weeks ago, in part because of the way the former president handled the assassination attempt, captured in photos of Trump after the shooting.
“The American flag is in the background, and there’s blood on his face,” Mertz said, “I mean, it just looks pretty badass.”
Following Trump’s decision to tap Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio) as his running mate, a 2021 video of Vance resurfaced online in which he appeared to dismiss Harris and other Democrats who don’t have biological children as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”
The video went viral, showing a wide gap between the candidates about the status of women and further galvanizing support for Harris, according to her supporters.
Harris, the expected Democratic nominee, is pressing her party’s argument that the wave of new state abortion restrictions strip 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.
Speaking from his tractor as he planted soybeans one recent day, Mertz said he paid the tuition for his associate degree in agronomy and doesn’t like the idea of the government forgiving the loans of others.
In recent years, women coming into adulthood lived through events many saw as an affront: Trump’s crude remarks about women aired during the 2016 campaign, the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court amid sexual-assault allegations against him, and the high court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,” said Maggie Kelso, a 30-year-old resident of Sharpsville, Pa. “If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
Kelso said she feels a mix of optimism about Harris’ candidacy and fears that a Black, woman of South-Asian descent will fail to break the status quo—eight years after Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.
“If Americans re-elect Trump, it would say that this country would rather be afraid of change, afraid of taking a step forward,” said Kelso, a horseback-riding instructor and children’s entertainer.
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.
Falling behind
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 few of him, Journal surveys found.
Vincent Lester, a 19-year-old landscaper in northeast Ohio, said liberals have failed young men like him by imposing what he called purity tests that alienate people with differing views. “A lot of young men are leaning toward the right,” said Lester. He has no plans for college and lives with his grandparents, in part, he said, because he can’t afford his own place.
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.
“Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline,” said Lester, who kickboxes in his spare time.
In February, Trump showed up at a sneaker convention in Philadelphia, where he hawked his own brand of $399 “Never Surrender’’ high-tops. In June, he strode into an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New Jersey.
On Trump’s TikTok account recently, the former president posted a mock face-off with Logan Paul, the widely followed social-media-personality-turned-boxer.
This week, Trump played a round of golf with U.S. Open champion and social-media star Bryson DeChambeau. A YouTube video of their match racked up close to seven million views within three days and became the No. 1 trending video on the platform.
‘Made me think’
Many young people said their political views hardened years before they could vote.
“Even back in 2016, when I was a 12-year-old trying to make sense of my place in the world and one of the candidates for president was making crude remarks toward women about their body parts—even at that age I felt it wasn’t right,” Isabelle Ems, a 19-year-old rising junior at Pennsylvania State University, said of Trump.
Harrison Wells, 22, said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction by teachers and students to Trump’s victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students.
“People were crying, upset,” he said. “Everyone was hysterical.”
The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park, Calif., which organized lectures about the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrated transgender visibility.
“I felt as though there was a narrative and certain school of thought that was being pushed on us aggressively,” said Wells. “That was what made me think and start learning more about politics.”
He led a chapter of a conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, at the University of Wisconsin and voted for Trump in 2020. He sides with the former president on the economy, taxes and immigration.
Journal polling found that young men are open to Trump policy proposals that young women reject. That includes Trump’s idea to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Ems, the Penn State student, cited widely viewed TikTok videos showing women being asked if they would rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. Most women picked the bear, reasoning that a man might be more dangerous.
Ems wasn’t sure which she would pick—though the bear, she said, could well be the safer bet.
Sources: Wall Street Journal survey of 500 voters under age 30, conducted Feb. 21–28, 2024; margin of error: +/- 6.1 pct. points for young women and 6.3 points for young men (abortion always/mostly legal; student loans); Wall Street Journal survey of 250 registered voters under age 30, conducted Feb. 21–28, 2024: margin of error: +/- 8.7 pct pts for young women and 8.9 pts for young men. (tax cut; gender identity; Obamacare; climate; immigration proposals)
Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com and Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com
