Red and blue Americans are locked in a hostile custody battle right now. But if they agree on anything, it’s that “the gender gap has never been wider,” as one piece in the New York Times just summarized. For both the Harris and Trump campaigns, that gap shapes the playbook. Electoral binaries like hawks vs. doves, flyover land vs. coasts, are out. The battle between the sexes, and which side leverages it best, will decide what happens next week.
Just how big is that divide? Consider a few snapshots from a Wall Street Journal essay published in July on survey results from five hundred people under thirty. Voters in their twenties, notes the piece, have been stalwart members of the left ever since the late 1980s—but that uniformity is no more. Young men now lean more rightward than young women, including on social issues. The survey’s men were almost 20 percentage points more likely to oppose abortion than the women. Asked whether children should choose their gender identity, few men said yes; the women were mixed. Young men were also more likely to favor building a border wall, extending Trump tax cuts, paying student debt, and repealing Obamacare.
Other insights can be gleaned by scanning Reddit, or by plugging into podcasts and shows by online “alpha males” like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, and similar voices. Candidates Trump and Vance have been hitting that circuit hard (both were most recently guests on Rogan’s podcast), and for good reason. From statistics to social media, the song that today’s young men sing among themselves sounds the same—and only the political right seems to be listening.
Identity politics? The bros are over it. Even back in 2020, in an interview with Barstool Sports, candidate Trump was channeling criticism of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the first to “take the knee” in 2016. Barstool Sports host Dave Portnoy was one of the first in the guy-o-sphere to grasp the synergy between enthusiasm for sports and contempt for political correctness. On another mostly male and heretical plane, the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, diverse thinkers on YouTube, X, and elsewhere find related fusion between repudiating identity politics and standing for freedom of expression. Imitators and admirers of both models abound.
Gender bending? Another hard sell. Transgender Dylan Mulvaney’s doomed appropriation in 2023 of Bud Light, a beloved blue-collar brand, might yet turn out to be the own goal that knocks the trans craze into history. In what other year have men in different parts of the country rejected free alcohol for the sake of principle, as they did over the attempt to trans their brew? Online and on-air, mancave criticism exploded. Paradigmatic was a conversation between Joe Rogan and rapper Ice Cube, in which Rogan called Mulvaney “mentally ill.” Said Ice of “this dumb decision,” “Are they trying to ruin Bud Light? Are they trying to take down some of our most iconic American brands?” The Bud Light debacle united bros as bros in one cause that their enlightened betters couldn’t shut down.
Pornography—about which one hears nothing from team progressive, apart from prim reminders about free speech—also figures into the gap. Some of today’s more popular male voices sound less Howard Stern than Fulton Sheen. Theo Von speaks openly and often about pornography's dangers, including in a podcast with media personality and addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky. Many other thriving, non-religious podcasts issued from men, to men, similarly condemn smut. When JD Vance says things like, “we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than the public goods, like marriage and family and happiness,” he’s blazing down an open zone before a go-for-it crowd. The same happens when he shares related forbidden wisdom, whether with the Nelk Boys or anyone else who’s listening: men and women are different, sterilizing kids is wrong, marriage and family are the way to go.
All of which confirms something that’s been obvious for years, if weirdly unobserved in the highest places. Today’s New Right, like today’s populism, is powered in large part by a search for male authority, direction, and amour propre—a triad visible to anyone who can spell “Jordan Peterson.” Vance, who acts on this insight with more passion than anyone else on the national stage, has achieved the kind of personal and professional successes those young men want. He gets fist-pumps for saying what no one in the blue zone seems even to believe: Vance wants other guys to have those things, too.
The point resonates. That’s why hectoring young men of color, as nannies-in-chief Barack and Michelle have lately attempted, won’t close the gap. As should be palpable in even the smallest heart, today’s young men don’t need another nanny—or another mommy. They need something that more and more of them are lacking at home and searching for in politics. Something that bad-boy Milo Yiannopoulos nailed years ago, when he called Trump “Daddy.”
The mystery isn’t that many of today’s young men are deserting the side that loathes them and fears them and sometimes longs to queer them. It’s that socially and economically superior players haven’t a clue anymore about what makes young men tick—whether it’s driving fast, failing to ask strangers for directions, treating Sunday football like church, or saving a subway car full of strangers from disaster. From Democratic politics to Hollywood, from prestige quads to the C-suite, those players haven’t only lost the script about young men. They’ve unlearned the alphabet of human nature.
There is something unique called male self-respect. It’s grounded in the belief that rules exist and retain their authority, from baseball to church to war, no matter how many times they’re broken. Forgetting that fact of nature renders progressivism and its fellow-travelers incapable of understanding a major chunk of the electorate. The real mystery in the political sex imbalance isn’t about boys and men, but girls and women. It’s why so many obediently keep trotting in the same lanes marked out for them since the 1960s, pelted with the same messages that have been making life miserable for decades now—men are bad; the future is feminine; career first, egg-freezing next; the best ending after falling for someone and making a baby together is to get rid of it.
For generations, a preposterous creation story has been passed around and imbibed, according to which the differences between men and women amount to minor anatomical variations. If that were true, the gender gap wouldn’t exist in the first place. Politics didn’t create this divide. But in the political quarterbacking to come, its real origins demand a closer, more empathetic look than they’ve yet gotten anywhere.
Mary Eberstadt is senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and author of several books including Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.
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