Winning the hearts and minds of young men has been at the center of politics over the past year. Republicans sought to cement President Donald Trump’s gains, while Democrats, fearing they could lose an increasingly disaffected segment of the electorate for a generation, launched a series of initiatives to prevent that.
Ahead of next year’s midterms, some Democrats say the momentum is shifting. High-profile Democrats running in last month’s elections — Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Zohran Mamdani in New York City — improved on the party’s poor performance among young men one year before. Some 2028 Democratic presidential contenders launched policy initiatives aimed at men and boys. And in Trump’s first year in office, many young men say they feel a continued economic and social malaise, cutting into his support with that key group.
“I never want to hear again that the Democratic Party has a problem with young men,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told reporters after the November elections.
While some Democrats are taking an early victory lap, members of both parties say the fight is far from over.
“There’s some bed-wetting going on amongst some folks who are like, ‘Well, Trump’s numbers have slipped with all these groups that he won big with last year,’” said a senior Republican strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the matter. “That’s just shortsighted. ... The Republican ecosystem is just a little bit stronger in this space.”
In addition, multiple Democrats said that while they’ve been encouraged by the progress the party has made, there remains a level of discomfort among some party leaders in speaking to those issues.
At last month’s Symposium on Young American Men, a conference put on by The Lafayette Company, a conservative communications firm, to discuss crises facing the demographic, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said some in the party still have a fear of being “canceled” for homing in on the subject.
“It’s OK to reach out to men,” Gallego said. “Talk to men. Talk about men being men.”
Republicans, meanwhile, plan to hammer Democrats ahead of the midterms as out of touch with the concerns of young men while projecting improved economic standing for them in the new year, pointing to tax provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” including some about tipped wages.
The senior Republican strategist said the midterms will be decided by voters’ attitudes on Trump and the economy, predicting sentiment will improve as Trump’s agenda fully sets in.
“There’s a lot of folks who feel that they are not where they should be, they’re falling behind,” this person said. “There’s a general unsettlement. Young men are especially there when you look at job prospects, AI, there’s uncertainty in general. And you add in the fact that you can’t buy a house, you can’t find a girlfriend. ... A lot of folks look to Trump for solutions.”
The fight could define several critical midterm races, with Democrats hoping to build on their 2025 gains while Republicans still work to figure out how to get inconsistent voters to turn out without the president at the top of the ticket.
A senior GOP Senate aide said that “to the extent” Republicans are pondering how to get disaffected young men back to the polls next fall, “they’re just hoping Trump does it” for them.
While it’s difficult to measure how Trump’s standing among young men has ebbed, this month’s Yale Youth Poll found his gains with young voters last year have largely been wiped out this year. The survey found that just 34% of voters ages 18 to 22 approved of Trump, in addition to 32% of voters ages 23 to 29. Last year, Trump won 42% of those under 30, a traditionally left-wing electorate that shifted substantially rightward from 2020.
Economic sentiment appeared to be the biggest factor in the shift. Mamdani, Spanberger and Sherrill all focused on affordability in their campaigns and not only improved among young men over 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris but were also able to win over 7% to 9% of Trump voters in their elections, per NBC News exit polls.
Youth unemployment — for those ages 16 to 24 — was at 10.8% in July, rising year over year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate in November for U.S. residents ages 20 to 24 hit 8.3% in November, BLS data showed, down from 9.2% in September but still the highest since 2021. And this spring’s Harvard Youth Poll found that roughly 4 in 10 of those under 30 were “barely getting by” financially.
Christian G., 25, an independent from Clifton, New Jersey, said it was continued disappointment with the economy that had him voting for Sherrill after having backed Trump.
“I feel like I expected certain things to be improved or certain things to become more affordable, and it did the exact opposite,” he said in a recent focus group observed by NBC News and produced by Syracuse University and the research firms Engagious and Sago, adding: “I would say for me it is kind of a testament to how, I guess, trust was lost over the year. Whereas I voted for him back in ’24, now, a year later, I’m feeling let down. I wanted to be a little more logical in my approach and vote for someone who I thought would benefit me more.”
It’s not what many Democratic leaders figured when they entered the year trying to tackle Republicans’ advantage among young men — an edge they believed was due to the “manosphere,” a universe of apolitical to explicitly right-wing podcasters and streamers who embraced Trump in last year’s election. Some Democrats urged party leaders to break into that space, while others were willing to spend millions to fund their own male-friendly content platform.
Thinking about the project to essentially create a left-wing Joe Rogan, Virginia state Del. Josh Thomas, a Democrat who spoke at last month’s Symposium on Young American Men, laughed.
“I’m laughing because it ain’t that hard if you’re being yourself,” he said, adding: “And so I don’t know if it’s a good use of donor funds to try and re-create a new ecosystem or shoehorn people into an existing ecosystem. But we have ... very earnest and sincere Democratic leaders who are men who can speak authentically about what it means to be a man at an earlier time and also what it means to be a man today.”
One Democratic man who found success in such spaces was Mamdani, who won young men by roughly 40 points over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month. He has made a series of high-profile podcast appearances this year, including on “Flagrant,” a prominent comedy program Trump appeared on last year, and “The Adam Friedland Show.”
In an interview, Mamdani said he was struck by how many New Yorkers he engaged with came across him only through his appearances on shows like “Flagrant.” He said a critical lesson for Democrats “is to stop treating young people and young men with the condescension that we often see and hear in our politics.”
“What I found time and time again is that affordability was not something that needed any translation in young people’s lives, that this was something that was the difference between whether or not they could move out of their parents’ apartment and live on their own or not,” said Mamdani, the 34-year-old avowed democratic socialist. “There’s oftentimes even this attempt at trying to speak to young people, especially young men, slowly, through the prism of friends or memes, when you can, in fact, speak directly to them and to their problems.”
Mamdani also connected issues around the cost of living with male loneliness and alienation.
“Part of this story that we are telling is that the crisis of cost has also denied so many people the engagement with their own city and the sense of themselves as being someone who does more than just exist between work and home,” he said.
Mamdani, whose campaign held high-profile free events, including a soccer tournament and a scavenger hunt, said he’s thinking of how to spur more free or low-cost events in the city that young people can take part in. Elsewhere, Democrats across the spectrum are coming forth with ideas to address an array of male-centric issues. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore recently announced an initiative to hire more male teachers, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said Democrats had “walked away” from men’s and boys’ issues, signed executive orders this year to address male suicide and launch a “California Men’s Service Challenge.”
In an interview, Thomas noted that he authored legislation to create Virginia’s first governor’s advisory board on boys’ and men’s issues.
“I think men have seen ... there’s been a different focus in the Democratic Party that maybe didn’t exist in October of last year,” he said.
Yet voters often feel differently about state and local elections than they do about national ones. Alex Lieberman of Brooklyn, New York, said that even though he backed Mamdani in November, he would vote for Trump for a third time if he could. (Without Trump on the ballot, Lieberman said, he would back whoever the more populist option is.)
“I think he has fulfilled his campaign promises,” Lieberman, who is in his 20s and said he was inspired to vote for Mamdani in part because of his focus on affordability and small-business issues, said of Trump. “And I think that everything that people are not happy with, I just don’t, frankly, understand, because it was exactly what it was like in the first term.”
In office, Trump hasn’t made such explicit appeals to young men, though allies have said his agenda — particularly on the economy, diversity and immigration — has them in mind. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told NBC News at the Symposium on Young American Men that Trump has sought to bolster the standing of young men, “but I haven’t heard him speak specifically ... about young men much, other than celebrating excellence and achievement, celebrating hard work.”
Lankford said he has heard the conversation around issues affecting young men shift over the past year, saying he no longer hears much, if any, discussion of “toxic masculinity,” a concept that conservatives have criticized for years as part of broader left-wing excess. Similarly, the right has taken sharper aim this year at diversity initiatives, claiming they hamper the prospects of younger white men.
To maintain their strength with young men, a longtime pro-Trump operative said, Republicans will capitalize on diversity policies they feel a future Democratic presidential nominee will embrace.
“I don’t think we’ve lost them,” this person said of young men. “I still think our party will be the one that has a more appealing vision. Will they turn out in the midterms for random Republicans? Maybe not. Were they turning out for the midterms before? No. Really, what we’re talking about is will they be there in ’28.”
