The Male Vote: The Dems’ “Fatal Miscalculation” and What Trump Got Right

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Gender was always going to play a vital role in the U.S. election. And while black women turned out in force for Democrats in last week’s election, the Harris campaign had perhaps mistakenly banked on all women doing so. Our next guest believes Democrats missed a huge opportunity to fight for young male votes. Richard Reeves is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan now to discuss why Gen Z men swung Trump- wards in record numbers.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us. You have been talking about the changing pressures on boys and men in America for a number of years now, and it really played out during this election for people in a surprising way. Men supported Former President Trump by a 13-point margin. That’s up from eight in 2020. But throughout the demographics, especially young men, seem to tilt so much more for the president. How did you see this coming?

RICHARD REEVES, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR BOYS AND MEN: We did see it coming, Hari. We saw in the polling in the run up to the election that men and especially young men were moving very strongly into the Republican camp. What we didn’t expect was that actually the young women would also move away from their levels of support. And so, the gender gap actually didn’t change very much. But the reason for that is because while young men moved to the right, so did young women. Now, of course, the gender gap remained. But any story about this election has to take into account the fact that the move wasn’t just among men. The real danger here is that — particularly because we had a female candidate on the Democrat side and such a sort of performative masculinity on the Republican side, that the move of men and especially young men will be falsely attributed to sexism or a backlash or misogyny. And I think this is much more a story of neglect than of sexism for the problems that many men feel they have in employment and education just really weren’t being talked about reflected on the Democrat side. And whilst I don’t want to overstate the policy substance that was on the Republican side, it’s certainly true that many young men felt more welcomed, more seen, more heard on the Republican side, and sometimes politics boils down to who likes me, who likes the stuff I like, that cultural element of the election. I think just — you know, the Republicans put out a welcome mat for men, especially young men. They also met young men where they were. I mean, literally, in the case of the Joe Rogan podcast and other podcasts, but also just met them in terms of saying to them, reflecting that we get it, the you’re struggling right now. Where that leads in terms of policy is another matter.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about that well, that welcome mat idea, right? I mean, where the president went was somewhat uncharted territory in terms of presidential campaigning. He stopped by a lot of podcasts and he talked to influencers, so to speak, who were kind of in the spheres where young men are today, whether it’s on Twitch channels, watching video games or playing video games or, you know, kind of political rallies on campuses.

REEVES: Yes, that’s a communications shift that I think we need really need to catch up with, especially if the goal is to reach young men. If the goal is to reach young men, especially you have to go where young men are, and that is on these podcasts, these very long form, informal freewheeling podcasts, you saw three hours with President Trump on Joe Rogan, three hours with J. D. Vance, that’s just a completely different world in terms of election strategy and communication strategy. And I think the Democrats didn’t follow that strategy, but that’s not just because — like they — it’s not that they didn’t know there were numbers there, it’s not that they didn’t know that’s where young men were, it is because the Democrats believe that they didn’t need the votes of young men because they were going to get sufficient votes among young women and women generally. So, the reason that the Democrats didn’t win the battle for young men’s votes is because they didn’t fight for them. They didn’t really contest for them. There was no strong policy outreach. There was no communication strategy. And so, they essentially ceded that ground thinking that it’s ground they didn’t need. That turns out to have been a fatal miscalculation.

SREENIVASAN: You know, what were the struggles that the right was able to tap into? To — what were the things — what were the issues animating men and young men that President-Elect Trump seemed to hear, care about, or in some way connect with?

REEVES: I think at some level it was incredibly basic. It was, we see you, we like you, we don’t hate you. The other side hate you. We are never — we’re never going to lecture you about toxic masculinity. We are never going to say that you are mansplaining. We’re simply going to say, we like you and we like the things you like. We’re also going to approach with a bit of a sense of humor around some of this stuff. We’re going to go to a UFC fight, et cetera. And none of that amounts to policy substance. That is not a policy to tackle the fact that the suicide rate among men under 30 has risen by more than 40 percent since 2010. That is not the policy strategy for dealing with the fact that we have bigger gaps, gender gaps on college campuses today than we did in the ’70s, but the other way around. That doesn’t affect the fact that working class men haven’t essentially had a pay rise for decades. And so, the substance is not there on the Republican side. The irony is that there’s more policy substance already on the Democrat side, the infrastructure bill, for example, mostly help working class men, Hispanic, black, and white working class men, but you couldn’t find a single Democrat who would have said that because they falsely assumed that talking about the things they were doing to help boys and men, acknowledging the very fact that there were problems for boys and men would undermine their appeal to women. That was a big mistake. It was zero-sum thinking, and as a result, they not only lost ground among men but among women. And so, the message to Democrats, I think, coming out of this election has to be don’t move too quickly to the explanation of sexism. Instead, consider hard that this is the effect of a long run neglect on a policy front of the issues of boys and men.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we’ve seen his support among men overall stay relatively steady of male voters. I mean, it inched up a little bit. And as I look at these numbers, you know, 60 percent of white male voters went with him this time versus 62 percent say in 2016. But what’s really fascinating when you start breaking down the support among men by race is what happened with both black male voters as well as Latino male voters. And then he went from 19 to 21 percent support in black male voters, which is better than last time, but from 36 to 55 percent. What accounts for that?

REEVES: Well, the first thing to say, of course, is that the overwhelming majority of people were not voting on the grounds of their gender or of their race. This was an election dominated by economic concerns. Nonetheless, the loss of support among black male voters, as you point out, but especially Hispanic male voters should I think be a sign that unless there’s a strong economic agenda that is crafted in a way that will appeal specifically to men, as well as to women, then the Democrats will continue to lose ground among those constituencies. So, this is a place where I think class and gender and race are all overlapping with each other. And what you’re seeing is a number of men, especially men, but Hispanic women, as you know, also swung really strongly towards Donald Trump, although remaining supportive of overall of Kamala Harris, which is that not only do you need an economic message and need to be talking about the economy, but you also need to be talking about that in a way that is particularly going to land with men. And so, to the extent that that there was a policy discussion on the Republican side around bringing — around manufacturing, some skepticism perhaps around higher education, some of that does seem to have landed with men particularly.

SREENIVASAN: I think there are quite a few people who are surprised that, I guess as a collective society, we used to hold the role of or the person who filled the role of president as a role model for the whole country, somebody we want representing us on the world stage. And in the case of young men and boys we saw a president — or we have a president-elect now who has been found liable of sexual assault, he’s been accused of that by several women in his life. And I wonder, how were men and young men able to set those things aside?

REEVES: Well, because — well, for one thing, as we said a moment earlier, the motivating factors for a lot of men were around the economy. And so, you heard a lot of focus groups, men would be saying, look, I don’t like him particularly, but I want the economy that he delivered for me. I like the idea of lower taxes. I like the idea of a job. I like the idea of manufacturing coming back. And so, it is perfectly possible that many of these men voted for Donald Trump, not because of some of the issues you just raised, but to some extent, despite them. And I think that’s a very, very difficult thing for people to get their head around, which is that people are able to hold in their thought contradictory ideas about a candidate, which is like, I don’t like certain aspects of this guy. But I think I’m going to be better off. And I think he’s — he sees me a little bit more than some of the other candidates do. But I do think that there’s a vacuum here, particularly on the center left around a willingness to just accept that there is a positive version of masculinity and the role of men. At some level, a lot of these young men, especially, they’re not sure what the message is to them about whether we like them, whether we need them and what their role in society is going to be. And whatever you think of the way in which the Republicans talk about the importance of men and the role of men and the signals that they had about being friendly to men, this — that’s going — the danger is that will be silence. And so, I worry a little bit that people say, well, how could men be attracted to that role model of masculinity when there wasn’t really an alternative being put in front of them? And so, that — again, it’s that sense — you even saw in the final stages of the campaign where young men in particular being urged to vote for the Democrats if they love the women in their lives, and that’s not good enough. It’s not to say that, of course, we don’t care about the other people in our lives but if you’re essentially asking men to vote for Democrats because the Democrats stand for women, that’s a pretty flawed political strategy again.

SREENIVASAN: What was the role of, I guess, Tim Walz as a potential role model for masculinity? And was that too late? Did that not land?

REEVES: Of course, everything was done pretty late. And so, that’s a broader question for the campaign. But I will say that I was extremely disappointed not to see better use being made of Tim Walz. And in particular of his biography. Tim Walz was the first career public school teacher to run for such high office. But not only that, a coach. And you had his own students coming out talking about this of service-oriented kind of masculinity that he had demonstrated. And if there was any candidate who could have plausibly set out a positive vision for the role of men in society for a campaign to increase the share of male teachers, to really tackle this mental health crisis we see playing out among young men, then it’s hard to think of a better CV, at least, than the one of Tim Walz. It was easy to imagine him giving powerful speeches, running really strong advertising campaigns directly targeted at young men with an empathetic, respectful policy-based message to those young men. None of that happened. So, I think among the many missed opportunities that we saw on the Democrat side of the campaign, the failure to send Tim Walz out backed by a strong policy agenda to win over the votes of young men will be one of them.

SREENIVASAN: Was there going to be a backlash in terms of how the Democrats were messaging this as an election about reproductive rights at the center, right, that would be the thing that animates women to the polls? You know, and near the end of the campaign, there was a focus on trying to get men engaged in that issue just as much. But I wonder what was the — you know, what were young men and boys hearing throughout the couple of months that Kamala Harris was campaigning on that issue?

REEVES: The evidence suggests that particularly young men have very similar views on abortion as young women. And that they — like young women, thought that the Democrats had the best position on abortion. The problem is that that issue wasn’t very salient for those young men. It wasn’t what they were voting on. And increasingly, it looks like that was true for a lot of women too. I mean, to have lost so much ground among young women is something that I think really complicates this story for the Democrats. And so, I — it was definitely not, in my view, a backlash. You will struggle to find any evidence that particularly among young men that they were somehow reacting against this idea that reproductive rights for women were threatening to them. I think that’s a myth that is — it might start to circulate on the left. It’s simply that abortion wasn’t such a big issue in this election, as the Democrats had hoped it would be. And it definitely wasn’t that big an issue for men and young men. And so, it’s not as if they have a very different view about this, it’s that — it’s just not as big an issue for them. And maybe you could argue, well, it should be, and that was kind of part of the Democrat last ditch attempt, was to get men to care more about that issue, but unfortunately, politics is much more about going to where voters are than telling voters that they’re in the wrong place and that they should come to you. And that’s a little bit of what happened here, was that men, in particular. young men, were being told, you should care about more about this issue, and therefore, vote for us, rather than asking them, well, what do you care about? And it turned out that abortion was much lower on the list.

SREENIVASAN: What are some of the data points that you point to that say, there is this crisis of men, young men, that is being unaddressed?

REEVES: None of the problems that actually face boys and men today are the result of deliberate anti-male policies. That’s an idea that’s taken hold, especially on the right. It’s not true. This is a story of neglect, of looking away. And the opportunity here is for a political message supported by policy, which is an and rather than an or message, it is, we are going to continue to work on women’s reproductive rights, the gender pay gap, the lack of representation of women in senior leadership, in STEM jobs, et cetera. And we are going to tackle the growing male suicide crisis and the struggles of boys in our education system and the difficulties that young men are having entering the labor market. If we can get past the or and towards an and, then there’s a, we have to rise together message. And again, the irony is that actually a female headed ticket may have more permission to do that than a male headed ticket. Like if Kamala Harris had come out very strongly saying, I have an agenda for men. Here’s my policy platform for men, including more vocational learning, including paternity leave for men, paid leave for men, including a push to get more male teachers, a coach for America program to reduce the decline in the share of boys in school, and here’s my agenda to help women too, that would have spoken to the mom who is terrified about, for example, her access to reproductive health care, but also really worried about her son in school, worried about our brother’s mental health. Because actually in the real world right now mothers, fathers are as worried about the men and the women and the boys and the girls in their lives just for different reasons. And so, we haven’t had it yet from either side, but there is space here for a politics and a policy platform that manages to do two things at once. And that manages to advocate for changes that would help boys and men without doing less for women and girls. Right now, it feels as if the choices between a Republican Party that in this messaging sometimes feels like it wants to turn back the clock on women and a Democrat Party that has turned its back on men. And somewhere between those two extremes, there is a constructive non zero-sum politics, which says, we rise together, and that means that we care as much about the young men who are falling behind as the young women who are struggling to rise.

SREENIVASAN: President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us again.

REEVES: Thanks, Hari.