In 2016, Donald Trump won the White House on the backs of a forgotten group of Americans: the working class. In 2024, another group of forgotten Americans could help send Donald Trump back to the Oval Office: young men.
The last three polls by The New York Times/Siena found Trump ahead of Kamala Harris by an average of 58% to 37% among young men. Even the best polling for Harris shows a burgeoning gap between young men and young women. In the most recent polling of young Americans by Harvard/IOP, young men prefer Harris by a rate of 53% to 36%. At the same time, young women are backing Harris at a rate of 70% to 23%, a 47-point difference. In 2020, young men and young women voted for Donald Trump at about the same rate. How did this happen? How did the generation of boys told not to take the subway alone and coddled with fidget spinners, participation trophies, and nut-free classrooms end up donning MAGA hats? Perhaps the boys are not okay.
America has too many young and disenchanted men who believe they have no true future. Boys are approximately 2.5 times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than girls. Men commit suicide at roughly four times the rate women do. Boys are five times more likely than girls to spend time in juvenile detention. Boys are less likely to finish high school than girls in all 50 states in the union. Only 3 in 10 high school valedictorians are boys. One in seven men report that they have no close friends. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Young men comprise only 44% of college students, and college degrees correlate to higher income levels. The result—non-college-educated men are being left behind. The blue-collar, union jobs that once existed for non-college-educated men have dissipated. In the past two decades, five million manufacturing jobs have disappeared, an industry dominated by men. The chances today of finding a good factory job where a single salary could be enough to raise a family may be as low as the chances that the prince who emailed you will actually wire you $1 million.
We have built what New York University Professor Scott Galloway calls a pyramid system of young men based on their financial success. 71% of women say it is “very important” for their spouse to financially support them. However, with more women attending college than men, it is close to impossible for many non-college-educated men to find a spouse.
According to Scott Galloway, if there are “50 men on Tinder. 50 women. 46 of the women show all of their attention to just 4 men, leaving 46 men pursuing just 4 women.”
I can hear readers yelling, “Tinder is not real life.” No, Tinder is not real life, but real life shows these numbers to be true as well. Polling by Pew shows that 64% of college-educated adults are married, but just 48% of non-college-educated adults are married. More men aged 18-34 live with their parents than with a significant other. No woman wants to have their spouse (often unfairly) judged as a loser without a good job who sits on the couch eating Cheetos and playing video games all day. So, these young men get left behind. None of the challenges young men are facing should be seen as a criticism of the recent success that young women have seen. That is a good thing, and it should be celebrated. Yet, we must also recognize a significant portion of the population appears to be struggling.
What happens when the boys are not okay? They try to find a masculine figure. Often, they find the wrong figure, such as Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who runs a $147 a month “Hustler’s University”—as real a university as Theranos was a real healthcare technology company. In the case of the 2024 presidential election, the masculine figure that young men are looking to is Donald Trump.
In 2016, in what ultimately turned out to be a successful attempt to win working-class voters, Trump campaigned endlessly where they lived, the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In 2024, Trump is campaigning where the young men go, podcasts: The Joe Rogan Experience, Impaulsive with Logan Paul, and The Lex Fridman Podcast. During an appearance on the “Six Feet Under” podcast hosted by The Undertaker, a former professional wrestler, Trump bragged that he “turned down ‘60 Minutes’” to be on the show. Trump has earned endorsements from the Nelk Boys, a group of YouTube pranksters popular among young men, and Dave Portnoy, the founder of the sports and pop culture company Barstool Sports. He has garnered more than 12 million followers on Gen Z’s favorite platform, TikTok (probably hoping that these same voters forget he tried to ban it). Trump may be pushing 80, but he comes off as one of the boys to many young men. Or, as Columbia Professor John McWhorter described him, he’s the “towel-snapping camp counselor.”
However, Trump’s appeal to young men goes further than surface-level connections. He is a modern John Wayne figure—a masculine protector—to them. During the 1960s and 1970s, Wayne emerged as the savior figure who would take on an American society that had become unpatriotic and effeminate. To many young men, Trump is similarly viewed as the ultimate triumph of rugged individualism and manliness. Go to one of his rallies, and you will probably see a flag featuring a jacked version of Trump holding a machine gun in the spirit of Rambo.
He has a bombastic celebrity personality; recently he described himself as “the greatest of all time, maybe greater even than Elvis”—a quote that left us all with “Suspicious Minds.” He objects to woke-ness and political correctness. He speaks about his political opponents like a school yard bully, with little, crazy, and crooked being his favorite monikers. The fact that he can survive an assassination only adds to his allure. For these young men, Trump is the savior. He is one of the bros, but as a candidate, he also hears their concerns and will blow up the broken system to make it work for them again.
“Men of all ages and races will be voting strongly for President Trump…. The alpha male movement is expanding rapidly and will not allow our country to be destroyed by the feminist pro-soy left,” Nick Adams, a surrogate for the Trump campaign, said.
Much of Trump’s masculinity comes off as a concoction of Animal House, Pit Viper sunglasses, and ZYN nicotine pouches. Alternatively, Democrats have tried to lean into their own version of masculinity built on service, respect, and honesty. A version of masculinity that is preferable, in my view. Tim Walz has been masquerading as the manly man for the past month. He has gone pheasant hunting, sported a flannel jacket, and jogged in Central Park. Next week, I hear he is planning to try to wrestle a grizzly bear. But the polling suggests these efforts may be too little too late to win the votes of many young men. In the closing days of this race, if the Democratic ticket wants to win, they need to define themselves and their policies for young men—not just be the anti-Trump candidate.
Blake Fox is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at bfox@wesleyan.edu